Drawing Faces

Graphite and watercolor in Aquabee 6×9 sketchbook
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These are two more faces from my project of drawing faces from a book of character actors acting that I  explained in a previous post here. This actor was supposed to be a soccer dad whose daughter just scored a winning goal in the first picture and a Hells Angel preparing for a confrontation in the bottom picture. Drawing the top picture I could really see what all the muscles in face were doing to pull his skin here and there.

I had to draw the first one twice–the first time I didn’t get things lined up at all. I seem to always want to make faces and their features symmetrical whether they are or not. I try to straighten tilted heads, make mouths the same size on both sides of the face even when the head is turned so that it’s shorter on one side. The second time I looked more carefully at angles and where features lined up with each other and their sizes in relation to each other and I got closer to reality.