Guidelines For Pencil Portrait Drawing - The Difficulty With Seeing

For inexperienced artists the difficulty with seeing lies in the conflict that exists between the concrete visual reality of an entity
and the way the mind attempts to represent our perception of this reality on the drawing paper. This attempt always involves the predispostion to draw our iconic preconception instead of the concrete reality.

Iconic preconceptions are part of a involuntary visual lingo that uses symbols to represent known entities. This lingo of symbols evolved as a mechanism to help us survive as a species. These symbols help us, for instance, to instantly recognize food sources or dangerous predators.

When we observe an unknown entity our involuntary mind immediately tries to form a new symbol to represent and store the entity in memory. Often beginning artists will more correctly draw unknown entities than familiar ones because they are not yet wedded to the new symbols.

However, when they try to draw the same entity a second time, it is likely that a more iconic picture will emerge because ready to use symbols have already been stored in the mind.

Consider, for instance, the word "head". Immediately an image comes to mind which is iconic for the head. Unfortunately, this symbol is only a iconic image of a head and is always a gross simplification of a real head. Nevertheless, there is a strong involuntary pull to draw the schematic instead of what we actually see.

It is this inconsistency that artists must learn to conquer. This is particularly a problem for pencil portrait artists. When drawing a portrait the artist must resolve numerous layers of symbols to realize a realistic effect.

We now will describe a very good exercise to learn to overcome the problem of schematic drawing.

We will be drawing from an upside-down photo. This way our symbolic preconception of the head is interrupted. We will be forced to draw without our schematics. The result will be a purer drawing experience unfettered by a contaminated observation.

As you draw the lines and hatch-in the values you will feel quite awkward in your drawing. This is a good thing. Do not be concerned with the quality of your work. This is an exercise in seeing.

When practicing line and tone this way, beginning artists often get better outcomes than from the right-side up way. Trust yourself and throughout the exercise only look at your paper image in the upside-down position even though it may feel quite uncomfortable.

You will learn to see and draw tone as forms and will be able to break down hard edges into short, straight lines instead of the general schematics your mind will give to the nose, the ears, etc.

Thinking of and naming perceived entities will lead you down the garden path of almond shaped eyes, two holes for nostrils, a cluster of lines for hair, cauliflower ears and something that looks like an M sitting on a bowl for a mouth instead of what is actually there.

Artists will never be free of symbolic predeterminations|fixations. The schematics actually adapt and become more refined. It is only by constantly analyzing and abstracting shape that we are able to draw realistically.

By: Roberto Bell

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