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Out of My Comfort Zone: Three Portraits from Winter 2009

November 14, 2010 By: Paul39 Comments

Painting is such a personal thing. I think each of us, over time, evolves a process, an approach to painting and drawing that works for usto a greater or lesser extent. For most of us, that process is most likely a mish-mash of our own discoveries, stuff we’ve learned from books,elements we’ve picked up from

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Sight Size Self Portrait Drawing – November 2009

November 7, 2009 By: Paul22 Comments

In the last series of posts I covered a sight size copy of a portrait drawing ofLady Sarah Spencer by Sargent. I was particularly interested in trying to move beyond a mark-for-mark copy and to develop myability to conceptualise form. I wanted to see what I could learn from Sargent’s approach to simplifying, strengthening andconceptualising

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More Head Drawings – Planes and Form in Sargent Portrait Drawings

February 4, 2009 By: Paul15 Comments

At the end of the last post on the planes of the head, I’d mentioned that I’d done a series of copies of Sargent portrait drawings, emphasising the planes and the form. Having worked for a little while with Loomis’ planes, and sculpted a head that emphasised the planes, I was looking for something with

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Feeling the Form – Loomis and the Planes of the Head

December 30, 2008 By: Paul34 Comments

This post is picking up a thread that I dropped in April 2007, the Loomis head drawings. Most of the drawings in this post come from the year of no posts, but I’ll update the site with what this practice has lead me to now in the next post, and so bring at least this

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Three Self Portrait Drawings

May 7, 2007 By: Paulcomment

These three drawings were done with about a month between each, and were each an attempt to construct a selfportrait drawing using theLoomis approach to head construction. It’s interesting to see how differently they’ve come out. You certainly wouldn’t think that they wereall drawings of the same person. At least, I wouldn’t. Distant cousins maybe.

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More Loomis Head Drawings

April 30, 2007 By: Paulcomment

These sketches are a few more examples of heads based on the Loomis book, ‘Drawing the head and hands’.All these heads have been constructed using Loomis’ ball approach, which I covered in mylast post. I’ve included a selectionhere to show how much I struggled with getting a reasonable feeling of the form when I first

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Constructing the head – Andrew Loomis

April 14, 2007 By: Paul11 Comments

For the past couple of months I’ve been working through the beginning stages of “Drawing the Head and Hands” by Andrew Loomis. There’s any number of books out there, all promising to teach you to draw this most difficult of subjects. But since getting hold of a copy of “Creative Illustration” by Loomis, I’ve come

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Self Portrait Drawing – 28th March 2007

March 28, 2007 By: Paulcomment

The write up for this drawing ishere. Back to portrait drawings

Self Portrait Drawing – 16th February 2007

February 16, 2007 By: Paulcomment

The write up for this drawing ishere. Back to portrait drawings

Self Portrait Drawing – 29th January 2007

January 29, 2007 By: Paul1 Comment

Woah! Scary-face! The write up for this drawing ishere. Back to portrait drawings

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Hi, I’m Paul

I'm a (mostly) self-taught artist. I paint realism in oils, mostly still life. I share my work, my evolving process and what knowledge I've gained on my own learning journey here, in the hope that it might help you on yours.
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