Painting a Portrait Using Ideas from Chuck Close Paintings--Part 1

This is the final version of my ten year old art student's self-portrait.  He completed it in six sessions of about one hour each.

One evening when J. W. and his mother came in, she mentioned that the art class J. W. had signed up for had been cancelled.  The students would have been making a Chuck Close type portrait using ink pads and their thumbs.

I didn't  have any ink pads and didn't want to buy any but...I had three shoeboxes of the original type of acrylic paints in tubes.  Since I have switched to the newer acrylic paints that dry slowly I had no use for the older type.  An opportunity to clean off another shelf!

I am fascinated by Chuck Close's huge portraits, ( 100 by 80 inches or about that)  The entire area is a face.  Not only that, squares that make up the painting are tiny abstract works of art.  There is no visible face when the painting is viewed at close range but seen from the entrance to the next gallery the face emerges and the tiny abstract squares disappear.

This is the Chuck Close painting I printed off to show J. W.  He was fascinated by the intricate patterns in each small square and also by the fact that if he stood as far from the picture as he could , the face was visible but the little patterns were not.

I also showed him a portion of his own eye in a greatly enlarged form so he could see the individual pixels and how they varied in color.  So glad I have a computer so I could show him this.  If you click on the photo below, you can see the pixels much better.

This was J. W.'s introduction to acrylics and mixing colors as well as to Chuck Close. I knew this project might become so tedious he wouldn't want to finish it so I had him try the technique on an 9 X 12  inch sheet of 140 watercolor paper. I prepared it for him by marking it off in 1/2 inch squares, again because I thought he might find setting up the page tedious.

He decided to paint a large letter "J" for his practice piece.

The next week he added the background and played around with painting a few designs in the squares.

He was still eager to try his self-portrait.

Using the poster option on our printer, I doubled the size of his portrait.  This made it 11 X 15, larger than life.  You can see the tape which I used to tape the two 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of copier paper together.

Week 1.  He liked the idea of using the T Square to draw the 1/2 inch squares and drew them in so quickly I was surprised.  He used 140 weight watercolor paper.  It was heavy enough to use with acrylics and it was lightweight enough so the photo showed through when the lightbox was turned on.

He traced around his features and was ready to start painting.

I told him to start with his mouth and then his eyes.  The facial features on Chuck Close's paintings are an integral part of the whole, not painted on after he has filled in the squares.

He immediately decided to put some small shapes on the lips.

From this point onward, he worked on the painting for forty-five minutes or an hour each time he came and spent the rest of the time experimenting with the effects he could get using acrylic paints on  various types of acrylic papers.  This helped keep him from becoming bored or discouraged about his progress on his big painting.

Week 2.  He spent a lot of time learning to mix a flesh color.  As I recall, he used orange, white, and burnt sienna.  I think he also used a bit of red and blue.  He mixed enough paint so he would have it for the following weeks and stored it in a recycled plastic vegetable container from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Week 3.  I showed him his photo in grayscale.  Computers are a real asset for seeing values in a photograph.

He mixed another flesh color because he noticed that the flesh in the photo varied in value.  Again, he spent a lot of time adjusting the color.  We talked about the area around the eyes appearing darker because that area is shadowed by the brow.

This must have been about the time I received the Chuck Close book  I ordered from Amazon.

Chuck Close Face Book, an Abrams Book for Young Readers, is a marvelous book.  It was a tremendous help as I guided J. W. through the rest of his project.  I still haven't read the book from front to back but each time I open the book I come across a new interesting comment or idea .  How Chuck Close works is described by  answering questions from  student artists.

One quote from Chuck Close that I will long remember is, "I think problem solving is highly overrated.  Problem creation is much more interesting."

For the rest of the story of J. W.'s steps in creating his self-portrait, see  Painting a Portrait Using Ideas from Chuck Close Paintings --Part 2

Drawing the Scary Monster

This is a 12 inch tall (30.48 cm) Godzilla I have had for twenty years.   My grandchildren who are now adults once played with it in the bathtub.  It was great for bathtub play since the tail twists off so the water can be easily emptied out.  My eight year old art student was interested in drawing it so  I set up a scene for him to use as a starting point.

The balancing of the monster was a bit tricky.  The fire house and the library below his feet are from a set of nested stacking blocks. The building to the far left is a box covered with scrapbooking paper which could possibly be interpreted as a modern skyscraper.

The  student decided to use an 12 by 18 inch sheet of drawing paper.  (30.48 by 45.72 cm)

The first problem to be solved was getting the monster the right size so the buildings could be part of the drawing.

After several false starts, the student solved his problem.  "If I trace around the paper I drew Godzilla on last week, I can draw the new Godzilla inside the rectangle and it will be the right size."  ( He had drawn that Godzilla on a 8.5 inch (21.59 cm) by 5.5 inch (13.97 cm)  page.

He decided he wanted an original monster, not an exact copy of the model he was working from.  This is the sign of an artist.  We take what we want from the model or scene we are looking at and add our own ideas.  The photo below shows what he accomplished at his first session.

By the second week he had more good ideas.  Instead of putting the fire truck in the fire house, he left the fire house empty.  Just the pole the firemen slide down is visible.  The firemen in the truck are out trying to save the town.  He invented buildings and added a two lane road.  The background was colored with crayons so the important parts of the drawing remained important because of their strong marker colors.

After putting the drawing on my easel and thinking about it, he decided to use a fine line marker and add scales to his monster.

The result is this great drawing.

Children's Drawing...Front-facing Animals

In the first class, we drew side-facing wild cats (Tigers and Lions).  In the second class we talked about dogs compared to cats...the shape of their bodies, their ears, their muzzles, and also how the sky appears to meet the land in the distance.

Now, in the third class, we talked about front-facing animals.  It can be difficult to visualize three-dimensional muzzles pointing toward us and recreate them on a flat sheet of paper.

Sometimes it helps to use visual guides.  In this case we used stuffed toes of socks and three ounce plastic cups.

Next we looked at models of horses and wild cats.  We noted the shape of their nostrils and nose in general, the difference in length of muzzle, the eye placement on the skull and the placement and shape of the ears.

After that, we used the stuffed sock toe skull and a plastic cup muzzle to make them look similar to a lion.  I cut the plastic cups so they would be short like a lion's muzzle.  We drew the nose and mouth on with Sharpie markers.  We used masking bits of masking tape to show the approximate eye position.

Then we repeated the steps to make a model similar to a horse's skull and muzzle.

Our next step was to draw a front-facing horse head, using what we had learned.  The students used those faces as the first step in drawing their pictures for the evening.

Children's Drawing...Dogs

First we looked at photographs and talked about how the sky appears to meet the ground in the distance.  We also noted that often the ground appears to extend "up" behind what is sitting on it.

After comparing the lion and tiger models from last week and the dog models the students chose to draw this week, the children worked on their own. (Last week we drew together as I drew and discussed each part...the eye, the muzzle, etc.)

These are the models the students chose to work from.

Children's Drawings...Lions and Tigers

Last Thursday was the first of five weeks of children's drawing. I told the children I would put their drawings on my blog. The drawings were done using markers. I brought in picture books and copies of two of Henri Rousseau's jungle plants paintings to give the children ideas for the backgrounds.

As I often do, I led them step by step through the process of seeing their animal. Since the class was small, each had a large plastic model to use.

 One helpful hint is to start with the eye. The eye is one detail that encourages the artist to draw a larger picture. Here is the model I worked from.

 Below it is the sketch I drew as I talked.

I am not as concerned about drawing a really good lion from the model as I am about encouraging the children to look hard at their models. As it turned out, I made the muzzle much too long so that was a good opportunity for me to show the children how a drawing can be corrected if it is drawn in markers.

I also see that the legs are too long. However, the legs are fine for explaining how to keep front and back legs the same length by drawing a line of tiny dots across the page. We talked about where the back side legs seemed to be when we looked at the models even though our brains knew they were on the same level as the front legs. This was a good opportunity to discuss how things appear differently when they are farther away.

There wasn't anything I could easily do about drawing the body longer but we talked about the fact that it was too short.

Here are the children's drawings and the models they drew from.

Happy Birthday, Barry

I've heard you are enjoying high school. I'm glad.

Here is a photo I took at the county fair. I was taking a picture of Grandpa and Courtney but you are in it, too.

Here you are a little closer.

This year as I write the Happy Birthday Blogs, I am thinking of books I associate with my grandchildren. When I think of you I think of Manga drawing. It is something you are really good at. (You are good at other kinds of drawing, too.) I gave you one of the books in Tadashi Ozawa's series, How to Draw Anime and Game Characters. There are a lot of books in the series.
 

Every book in the series has useful information for drawing people even for people who are not primarily interested in Manga and Anime.

I hope your day was a good one and that you did something special to celebrate.

Love, Grandma

Drawing a Giraffe, A Step-by-step Method

This is the 12 inch  model the children used as a guide. I probably bought this at a zoo gift shop. First we talked about the basic shapes we saw...circles, ovals, rectangles, triangles. We also decided whether to use the paper vertically or horizontally. We drew an imaginary giraffe on our paper with our finger to get an idea of how big we wanted to make our giraffe. And then we started drawing. Remember you can click on the pictures to get a bigger image.

Here is a diagram of the shapes we used. Notice that most of the triangle shapes are only approximately triangles. The points are blunt or chopped off. I thought it might be more useful to anyone doing their own drawing to see the order in which we drew so below are the steps in the order in which we did them. The students used a crayon or marker in a color that would blend well into the finished drawing. Most chose yellow or orange.

To see the results of this step-by-step method, see the August 15, entry. All 17 children's drawings are in it. You will notice that some of them came up with ingenious ways of adjusting their drawings when they did not like the lines they had drawn in crayon or marker.