Portrait – Drawing and Sculpting (Mouth)

On June 26th and 27th I posted sculptures of the nose and ear. Here comes the mouth.

As a reminder: the purpose of sculpting parts of the face (in this exercise) is to understand their shape better – the plane breaks, the volume, the relationships of the parts of the face to each other – consequently it helps to become better at drawing (the face). In addition one can practice drawing from the sculptures – drawing from a 3-D model – e.g. the following photos show how the shape of the mouth can create shadows on the face, it also shows the “hills” and “valleys” of this part of the face quite well. You could also draw the feature from different angles – e.g. practicing drawing a foreshortened view etc.

The following photo shows well that it’s really only a sculpture of the mouth. Neighboring features of the mouth are only developed as much as necessary to understand the relationship hence the nose in this sculpture is really a rather undefined lump of plasticine serving as the “boarder” to the north (casting a shadow) and showing that the philtrum groove of the mouth connects to the nose – although it doesn’t show the details of how exactly it connects to the nose as this information is not needed for drawing the mouth.

 

Portrait – Drawing and Sculpting (Ear)

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post – a few construction drawings of the ear and a photo of the sculpted ear:

BTW – the lines around the ear are not supposed to be earrings, they are construction lines demonstrating the shape of the object – and the plane changes,  they show how the form turns in space.

Portrait – Drawing and Sculpting (Nose)

Last quarter (Spring 2012) I took “Beginning Portrait – Drawing and Sculpting” at Gage (instructor: Suzanne Brooker). One week we drew (from the life model) and the next week we sculpted (from the same model) one particular feature of the head.

The point is to understand the plane breaks, dimensions and relations (of the features) of the face/head. To achieve this we drew so-called construction drawings that show the breaks and then sculpted this part. Sculpting (since it is 3-D) really enhances one’s understanding of the plane breaks and relations of the features to each other and as a result improves one’s drawing skills.

To illustrate here an example of a simple construction drawing from an artistic anatomy book:

And here are a few of my construction drawings of the model’s nose:

And the sculpture – the focus is on the nose, the other features are not really developed, only as much as needed for reference.

I’ll post other features of the head in the next few days.

Thanks for stopping by.