Faces II
Social media & art
When I started this project I still had facebook, where I shared most of my work and sometimes also on reddit. More than feedback on my work, I was looking for validation as an artist. It was important to me to be recognized by my peers as a skilled artist. Naturally, this also heavily skewed my work in the direction where I expected to get more shares and likes. This skewed my perception of art and kept me from working on my fundamentals. The expectations that I was setting for myself were unrealistic and ultimately unsustainable.
Each painting takes me a 2-3 hrs to make. After making about a hundred of them I wondered as to why I was doing this. Why was I so desperately vying for people’s attention? Is all the time that I put into making art worth the few seconds it takes for someone to swipe through my work? How can I compete with the glut of content fed to us from apps already competing for our attention. What am I really expecting when I share my work with someone? Does polite encouragement and/or adulation from others justify the time that I invest in art?
I took all of this in a positive sense. Art meant more to me. I just hadn’t realized it yet! I looked for a new purpose in art. I started asking myself the right questions. What do I want from art and why do I continue to do it? What is the message that I want to express and how can I grow to learn to do that? I reminded myself that it was not a job and I had no obligations to fulfill. Lifting this pressure off myself provided me the freedom to explore new avenues zonder judgement.
Why are all my drawings women?
It started with convenience. My drawings of women were much better than my drawings of men. Facial hair is difficult to draw/paint. Properly drawing detailed hair is very time consuming. It is something that I avoid even now. Irrespective of my excuses, my drawings of women’s faces were on average better. This was the very first project that I was working on and at the time I relied on social media for validation. Getting a better response for drawings of women skewed my drawings towards women. This formed the foundation for the work and I decided to defer drawing men’s faces to a later date. I promised myself that the next project would focus on men’s faces.
Eventually when I did try to start drawing men’s faces, two things had changed. First, I was much better now at drawing women’s faces which only increased the difference in quality in drawing the faces of the two sexes. Second, I wanted to focus on more than just drawing a pretty face. I wanted to experiment with color, emotion, etc. I was getting quite quick with drawing women’s faces. Which allowed me more time to experiment with other things in an art piece.
A consequence of working with deadlines and quotas is that it forces you to prioritize things. I had to make a tactical decision to go further in my work with drawing women’s faces. This does not imply that I do not intend to draw men’s faces. It only means that I need to account for it and include it in my plans on the next cycle.
Developments in my technique
The reason that I started drawing faces was because I sucked at it. I found drawing landscapes the most forgiving. Mistakes do not not severely affect the final piece. It can still be beautiful to look at, even if it’s not accurate to photographic detail. Our familiarity with the faces of others makes blemishes in the final piece stand out. My aim in taking on this project was solely to attack my aversion to drawing human faces. I enjoy learning by action and I jumped right into it rather than starting with the fundamentals. I do not regret this decision. I feared that starting with the fundamentals would have been boring and would not be sufficiently motivating to stick with (long term). I used images on the internet (pinterest is amazing) and scenes in movies/series as my subjects. I drew what I saw and they generally turned out OK. This was quite sufficient for me in the beginning. I do not do this so often anymore, mainly because it leaves me little room for expression. Here, I’m just making copies of what I see and the message is not really in the art, but more in the picture that I use as a reference.
On further development, I started using learning to draw books and focused a lot on human anatomy. I did not study it from the perspective of medical precision but rather to identify the optimal position of different features in relation to each other. For instance, if the position of an eye or a nose is not anatomically correct, it will look strange despite how photographically accurate they might be drawn. With a high level of detail, you can get away with a lot of things! While the human eye is very adept at detecting things that are off, it can still be very difficult to point at what the error is. Digital tools help fix a lot of these errors. Simply flipping the figure vertically or horizontally brings to your attention glaring errors. However, using conventional methods, a better understanding of anatomy helped fix a lot of those errors. Highlights and shadows are another challenge. One that I did not get into yet at the time of writing this. While it is easy to imagine how light reflects off of a ball or a cube, it is not so simple on a face where you have secondary light reflected from facial features which creates a complex texture of light and shadow. Not to mention, how blood flow to different parts of the face directs a blush! I did not go into all the details needed to fully understand how to draw faces. Achieving perfection at each stage before moving on to the next is not a practical way for me to work, especially given the time I have available to spend on art. I had to move on.
Once I got good at drawing faces (at least with some proficiency in certain angles), I focused less on getting the face right and more on the emotion expressed. This was a very fun phase for me in this project. Rather than being restricted by rules, now I had freedom in shaping my expression. Most of my work in this phase was heavily influenced by music. Generally taking on a tone of darkness and despair. Eventually this led to experimenting with color to further highlight the theme of my work. This work lasted 3-4 years and I learnt the most about art and myself working on this project. I had never had such an undertaking before and I feel a deep sense of closure on putting all of my art pieces together.