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.
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