As I previously shared, I’ll be participating in Life Book 2015, beginning Jan 1st. After exchanging a couple of messages with Tam and confirming that painting faces is a significant portion of Life Book, I decided that I would learn to draw a face.
Enter Dina Wakley. It’s no secret how much I love, love, love her acrylic paints and stamps or that I’m her #1 fan girl, but I’m also really drawn to her scribbly style faces and their vibrant splashes of color. So I contacted her to see if she’d be in San Diego anytime soon. I struck out there, but she did tell me about her online class called “Facing the Facts”.
In it she offers great tips, talks about common mistakes that beginners tend to make and offers ways to correct them. She also says that getting good at faces, or anything really, takes practice and encourages us to commit to 100 faces, beginning with our first face that we’re to sketch before watching the first video.
So I did. I got my reference, just like she suggests and gave myself a couple of minutes to sketch it.
Here she is (OMG, am I seriously sharing this in public?!):
After I sketched her I watched Dina’s first lesson and listened to her talk about those common rookie mistakes like my “joker’s mouth”, “overdrawn hair” and the dreaded “fully visible iris”. In short… YIKES!
But hey, no worries, right? It’s only face #1 out of 100… 99 more opportunities to improve.
This morning I decided to sketch face #2, using the tips offered in Face the Facts and can already see improvement. Ok still lots of room for improvement, but wow, what a difference already!
I’m seriously glad that I decided to take Dina’s class and recommend it to anyone. 98 faces to go and I’m looking forward to seeing my development documented in my sketch book.
Art & Whimsy 