Studying "Head Structure"...

Hello readers!

Well, I've been at back at school for about a week now, and this school year has certainly gotten off to a very busy and exciting start! It looks like it's going to be a really wonderful semester--lots of excellent new classes and teachers! The workload now is slightly overwhelming; I have a lot of major projects to get up and running plus little extra assignments to work through as well.

One class which I'm particularly enjoying so far is called "Head Structure". It's basically a class where we study the form and structure of the head in depth through drawing, painting, and finally sculpture. At this point, we're still just in the drawing stage. The professor did a brief demo in the last class, showing us the method he uses to set up the head and the proportions of the features correctly. I did a brief little sketch illustrating his method:



As you can see, he begins by drawing a circle and then working all the proportions off of that...

The assignment from that class for this week was a self-portrait in white chalk on toned paper. I used the same method to set the drawing up, and here's how it turned out:



One particular lesson the professor wanted us to be working on, was to "load the light mass" first after working up the initial drawing, meaning that I began by adding in the white chalk first for the light side and then used charcoal for the "dark mass".

I think I'm pretty pleased with it over-all, especially considering how much I hate doing self-portraits. Anyway, I'll bring it in to class this Thursday and see what the teacher has to say about it!