If you follow me on Instagram you have probably figured out my one of my goals for 2019. I’ve challenged myself to painting 100 heads this year. The 100 heads challenge is pretty common among artists on Instagram. So I’m not coming up with anything new here. But I thought it would be a good way to practice my portraiture skills. I generally enjoy painting people but also find them to be quite difficult. You get one detail wrong and it throws off the whole picture! My goal is to also try going about these heads much more free-handed than I typically start a painting, which usually involves printing out the image, and tracing a few key spots to make sure my proportions are right. However after a few ugly starts I’m still using a ruler as a crutch. I’ve also given myself permission to keep the ruler since I am, after all, an engineer 😉 But we’ll see how things evolve.
You can follow my progress on Facebook or Instagram. I’m only on head #5…. and we on day #16 of the year. So I need to catch up.
Head #4- Marie Kondo
Now for a story and a trip down memory lane….. it occurred to me just a couple days ago that this isn’t my first 100 heads rodeo. I don’t know how I didn’t realize this earlier, but I drew 100+ heads for my wedding favor gifts back in 2009! Yes, I drew one for every guest at our wedding. Here is the whole gang (sorry about the terrible picture):
And a close up. Again, I apologize for the terrible photography.
I actually wrote a couple blog posts about this in 2011: this and this one.
Looking at these pictures has also sparked flashbacks of when I actually took this on. I set up a schedule for myself and calculated how many portraits I needed to draw each week in order to get these done before our wedding… which I recall being 5 or 6 each week. Oh and tracking down head shots of everyone- that was a chore! It involved lots of stalking and a few awkward emails. But I did manage to pull it off and finishing this project remains one of my greatest accomplishments ever.
If you’re wondering how exactly I went about this, here is a quick recap: First, I drew up a male and female generic body. (BTW each body is holding a picture of my now husband and I.) I scanned in those drawings. And then for each person, I printed out a body and drew on a head. Easy peasy. Ha. For each head I cheated a bit and traced a rough outline before starting. Because, again, it is really difficult to draw facial proportions correctly!
Also, you can see from the favors that we got married in 2009. So it looks like I’m on track for a 100 heads challenge every 10 years 🙂