We were cleaning/clearing our massive collection of photography books last week and Andrew “discovered” a monograph of August Sander’s portraits published by Aperture Foundation 1977. Sander has been referred to as “the soul and chronicler” of post WWI Germany. Andrew immediately started drawing from this amazing source of human history and I soon followed.
Starting with mine here. . .
I guess it’s possible that one might find such a fellow as this in an upscale bakery, but the expression, the stance. . .I don’t know. . .it seemed of another time.
And Andrew’s next:
Andrew gets all this texture with two pens, one superfine Micron and a brush pen. And he’s not satisfied with copying, except the clothing maybe and the facial characteristics. And then the fun weirdness of his mind takes over and exaggerates!
Ok, so when I saw how much fun my son was having with exaggeration, I asked his advise and these two boxers I picked out to draw got a workover.
When I was done he patted me on the back and said “that’s good Mom” and I glowed a bit.
Actually this was Andrew’s first real stab at portraiture, from a picture on Sktchy, minus the mushrooms which he added.
This is a guy from the Sktchy archives. In the picture he was sitting in his car and must have taken a selfie. Thank goodness! His was one of the best sources I’ve run across for working with light and shadow shapes. It was almost easy to forget it was a face and just paint layer after layer of glazed shapes, without worrying about color or even subtlety. I could have kept going for a while with more detail and correction, but I stepped back and was stunned to see this fellow glowering back at me. So I figured it must be done.
To see more of Andrew’s drawings visit his Tumblr page.
susancornelis.wordpress.com 
Great selection of drawings and subjects. We can get so caught up in making portraits look life like that we forget to have fun and acccentuate features that convey an essence.
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I know what you mean kathy. It takes a very clear intention to break away from what we’ve already learned to try something new that might fail (as if there were such a thing in art making!)
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Susan, I am mesmerized by your son’s work (on his Tumblr page). He is really an artistic genius. Wonder where he got it from. :] Also, the last portrait on this page is just amazing. Both of you! Jeeeez! ❤️
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And to add to my delight to have such a son, he is now playing around with my love, watercolor, and is so excited about what it will do. I hope you are still making your wonderful art creations?
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I love these!!
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