Wednesday 16 October 2013

Literature Festival/ Symposium

One of the things to emphasise about this project is that it is about drawing people! At a very basic level, achieving a likeness and doing drawings that are Good is going to be centrally important, otherwise everything else will just be a bit of a smokescreen, really. 

I generally put up my more successful efforts on my sketchbook blog: asmalldrawingblog.wordpress.com and one of the things I have discovered is, put bluntly, that if you do manage to achieve a likeness then you have at least achieved something, and people generally appreciate it. Plus: this is even better if you are drawing a famous person - sorry - because obviously people quickly 'get it' or they don't depending on the strength of the likeness. So I had some good feedback from other bloggers for my drawings of Ian Hislop and Andrew Marr at the Literature Festival, including feedback from Mr Marr himself: 






The thing to say here is that, within the world of jump racing there are a number of very famous faces and, since the world is quite a small one, a wide cast of well-known faces and characters. So achieving likenesses here is going to be important. It is, in a way, a bit like the cast of characters here at the university, well known to all inside the circle but, hoho, to fewer without: 










The last one is a bit crazy - I made him look like a beaver man. Again, it is worth stating that there are some occasions where you have too long to draw someone and end up not stopping when you should and go on and make a mess of the drawing. Also, if you know a face reasonably well you are more able to know when to stop - when the drawing has done its job - and you are not working out what someone looks like while you are drawing them quite so much. So in the picture of Kieren watching the symposium I have got him quite well, with a sense of his horror at proceedings, whereas the other two characters are drawn with too much drawing! 

Thoughts: 
1: Know some faces at the races
2: Practice drawing them maybe beforehand?
3: Remember not to draw too much! 



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