Here's a portrait i started of my darling Fiance from Thailand, will continue as soon as my student loans comes and can buy the necessary materials to carry on painting.

Drawings

This week I've mainly been doing research on the Internet and a few drawings in lead pencils as this is my only medium left to me to use as am skint intill my student loans come through and therfore stock up on art materials. The exercise here is purely to home in on my skills on perfecting precision drawing to help me later on in my creative portraits that's why theirs no creativity in these works.




My reference photo for my WIP of torres

First (work in progress) of Liverpool footballer torres. Total time so far 14 hours, long way to go... best get a lot of coffee in,,,,lol

Second WIP of torres, 12 hours flew by, can't wait to start again tomorrow, as there's still a lot to get on with.

Torres nearly finished in to 40 hour of drawing, i now just need to clean it up, add some more details on cheeks and add a few more highlights and find a solution how to erase crisp fine highlights on the hair, if anyone as tips on on how to do that I'd be very grateful thanks

First 8 hours of LFC manager rafa benitez, shocked how rapid this drawing as come along in the space of 8 hour.

David Kassan

What is it about art that captivates the human psyche? What stops us dead in our tracks, staring and wondering for immeasurable moments in time? David Jon Kassan has been exploring these questions in his art for years now, and chances are you’ve seen his distinct work somewhere around you, either in a gallery or on a magazine stand. Kassan’s pieces are familiar yet startlingly confrontational in their intricacies and beauty.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close mapped out a singular style by drawing upon elements of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Photo-Realism.
Taking the photographic portrait as his subject, presenting it on a colossal scale and then putting it through a complex process of deconstruction and analytic reconstruction, Close created a new kind of art. Antecedents for his approach can be found in advertising billboards and much further back in Renaissance techniques of squaring up drawings for transfer to large-scale fresco paintings.
A work such as Nancy, an intense rendering of Close’s friend the artist Nancy Graves, is a confrontational presence. Part actual portrait, part visionary idea of a portrait, the canvas is a translation of the original photograph into a painterly surface of individual marks that coalesce to form areas of focus and fuzziness

As my university seem to like students keeping sketch books here is mine I just start for this term. I tend to struggle with sketch book as I am a perfectionist I find it very difficult to do quick studies I can’t help myself but draw it as a realistic as possible, so to get away from this I tried pen & ink then I used pencil but keeping it in a scribbling action on the paper I quite like the results will carry on doing this with live studies of people

moody daughter

This is my second study in charcoal of my 16 year old daughter Kirstie, I took numerous photo’s
To get the correct lighting and pose. Still learning using charcoal but starting to add personality
mystery and I am going to do this pose again on a larger scale maybe on primed canvas need to think about that.

As a realistic portrait painting can be a slow process for me to complete and whilst looking at Artists Dirk Dzimirsky and David Jon Kassan, I have decided am going to start my work in charcoal. This drawing of a Thai woman a friend of my fiancé, is my first exercise, its purely to familiarize myself with the medium of charcoal and overcome any problems that come with it. The Size is A3 on pastel paper using charcoal pencils and took 6 hours to finish. I learnt quite a lot about applying and shading with smudge sticks and the speed and realistic affects you can get in such a short time.

Research



I love realism. When I am trying to reproduce a photo -realistic portrait i can go into a trance like state of intense concentration , therefore I can understand the complexity of a piece of realistic art especially in portraits because the identity and facial features in everybody’s face are unique to that person and any mistakes no matter how miniscule can easily be spotted by a viewer.

when researching various artists i can understand the time and effort required to create a super-realistic portrait. When I see it done well, it inspires me to create similar skill levels to produce photo-realistic portraits in my own work.



Artists that i am researching so far that have inspired me are the likes of :David Jon Kassan, Toni Hariyanto, Ken Lee Sadako, Dirk Dzimirsky and my favourite artist the great Chuck Close.



In my portraits i going to attempt to depict my subjects as they appear in everyday life without embellishment or interpretation to scrape away the superficial, revealing the true identities and their personalities.

To do this my subject matter is going to compare between family and friends to a different culture of people on the other side of the world in Thailand who will be complete strangers to me which will i hope take away any personal involvement with the sitter and completely immerse myself in the drawing or painting to see if i can drag out the inner personalities and portray this in the work.