Portraits- Part 1
Alia Shawkat / Yao Cheng
Here is something to know- drawing people and studying figures were my primary focus in my early years with art. I absolutely loved this subject matter. I find faces to be so fascinating to capture. Like a photograph, I feel like I’ve caught a still moment in their life. I like to tell myself- if I can study a person’s face for long enough, then I will know something revealing about their life story…A face is wonderful in that way.
But I’ve put down my pencil in regards to portraits for many years. Almost 2 decades to be exact! (Until 2022, when I had an idea to write and illustrate a children’s book! Ok, this project is still very much in exploratory mode…I don’t know when it will be completed but I’m certain it will come to life at some point in my career.) Anyway, the idea of drawing people again after so long felt very daunting to me. It’s like being away from playing an instrument for too long, I knew I was going to be very rusty at it. But I didn’t want to be scared by it, I knew I had to give it a try. And who knows? It might be surprising to try it after years of painting watercolor!
I wasn’t confident enough with revisiting portraitures to jump right into color or add layers upon layers of complexity, as much as my creative brain wanted to. Rather, I tried to be patient and take smaller steps. First, I needed to familiarize myself again with form and understanding its relationships with its surroundings. How does form interact with the space around it? How do I use line and marks to express something about the person or an emotion?
Capturing a special moment
This was one of the later attempts. Previous ones had issues with proportion…But with this one, I felt like I had a better feel for it. The lines are starting to feel more fluid too!
After some weeks of working in pencil and pen, I felt confident enough to venture into color. I played around with different types of colored pencils and ways of layering. Prisma colored pencils was a clear first choice, but I quickly fell in love with Caran d’Ache watercolor pencils. It’s clear to me that I seem to also really enjoy layering color in this medium. Colored pencils are fast and can capture the speed at which my hands move across the page. However, it took some adjusting to since I cannot mix my colors as I do with watercolor. Drawing a portrait of Alia Shawkat was especially energizing! That sketch really allowed me to see the potential of colored pencils and how I can use it in my work.
A whole sketchbook was devoted to drawings like the ones below. I love that they are small moments but each one served a specific purpose. Individually, they explore various questions I had about colored pencils. The middle one, for example, was about how I can blend my subject into the background. Put in another way, is it possible to fade my subjects into the background by focusing on capturing light? And together, each sketch was a different way of asking how I was going to bring my style of watercolor into portraiture. That’s the ultimate goal I have for all of these sketches- they are stepping stones to build up enough confidence to start painting portraits.
Pauli Murray
At the same time that I was having a blast with colored pencils, I was still sketching away in black and white. I watched a documentary on Pauli Murray and immediately wanted to create a study her and reflect on the power of women.
I’m very much still in the exploratory phase with portraits and colored pencils. The more sketchbooks I fill with these moments of curiosity, the more sure I am that I will be making these for many years to come… Below was an afternoon spent sketching a landscape by the lake. I love the quick marks and that it’s a broader capture. I was also reading a lot about Impressionism at the time, and I can see some of that coming through. To be continued, for sure!
Lake in Ohio / Yao Cheng
