Sketchbook Flashback: #1 Early portraiture studies.

At some point in Art School, we went through a rigorous portrait sketching phase. We are talking about drawing eight heads a day. Not attempting half-assed, representational high-art crap but portraits that looked like it resembled an actual human being. Below is a series I did in successive pages in a '98 book. (sketchbook will be referred to as 'book' from here on out.) These were done during a practice run. Actual submissions of this quality will fail to meet the mark and it simply meant you'll have to show up with 16 heads the next day. And that's only from Portraiture Class... 

No, I'm not showing off. I merely want you to catch a glimpse of the kinds of monsters I have for lecturers. Usual bedtime then: 4AM. I liked these because I found a way to coax interesting lines out of carpenter's pencils–they save shading time as well due to their broadness. Disclaimer: I do not have a scanner. Nope, no camera lights as well. So, the shady quality of the photos will have to do for now. But don't you think it adds a certain mystique to the portraits? 

Oh, it was hard to use real-life models for our sketches due to the following reasons. At eight heads a day, you'll run out of family and friends real fast. And most will not be willing to pose for you at 3AM in the morning. What? You think it was all Great Expectations like, in a sexually-charged starving artist/high society girl artistic moment in a chic apartment for me? The key phrase here is starving artist. Accent on the 'starve'. Sans girl in any shape or form, OK? So, we scout for willing, easy to work with talent in foreign magazine pages–their features are more defined and deep set, see? Helps with the highlights and shadows and believe me, Asian faces are impossible. 

Random good-looking girl.

Marion Jones 

Charlie Chaplin

Bald guy in a suit.

Emo, rocker dude.

Glen Rice, during his hey-days as a Charlotte Hornet.

Denzel Washington in character for the movie He Got Game.

Thank you, come again!