February 2010

Drawing the ¾ View Portrait
with Hands in Graphite Pencil

A sustained study of a gesture, such as lighting a cigarette on a wind-swept street, offers a myriad range of drawing possibilities and challenges. First, there is the issue of the gesture to contend with; composition, drawing media and approach must work together and present a cohesive correspondence and intent.

My subject is a middle-aged man who has most likely spent his working life in various physical jobs. Character dictates the approach to drawing. A highly polished drawing would be incongruent with the rough, working class persona of my subject. On the other hand I want a fairly resolved drawing, one that would go beyond a gestural sketch.

My choice of drawing medium is graphite pencil: specifically I limited myself to a Staedtler Mars Lumograph 8B, HB and for the final approach a 4H. The HB and 4H graphite pencils have a shiny luminescence whereas the 8B has only a slight shine and borders on being matte. Choice of drawing medium is a personal decision: I prefer the Staedtler Lumographs, Van Gogh, for example, preferred Faber.

The ‘traditional tried & true’ approach to beginning a portrait drawing, and painting, is to first establish the overall general layout of the gesture. Most untrained artists will begin with a feature, the eye is the most popular, and grow out the drawing from there. This may work for a while but it is a limiting approach fraught with numerous pitfalls.

The preferred professional approach is to first quickly sketch in the overall gesture without taking any measures. This has two benefits: first your drawing will be more fluid and, second, when you do measure and check your proportions you are training yourself to see and draw more and more accurately. The term I use for this initial sketch is striking the arabesque; many artists prefer contour, some use mise en trait. Terminology expresses intent: arabesque expresses rhythmic movement whereas, for me, contour implies a static envelope.

This initial arabesque should be quite light; I have significantly darkened and adjusted the beginning images of the drawing so that they can be readily seen for learning purposes.

Once I have sketched my initial arabesque I place the large masses of form into their corresponding areas. In other words, I want the hands as a single mass to relate accurately to the mass of the head. Again I am not taking any measures; I am working solely through looking at both positive and negative shapes. This stage is generally referred to as the construct.