Outline Time!: Week Five

This week I decided to focus on the outline of my final painting. I did not spend my whole week doing that only a part. The other part of the week I began painting it but I want to just focus on the outline in this post.

 Before I could start drawing, I divided my canvas and a printed copy of the original American Gothic, into fourths. I only drew lines to divide them, I did not cut the actual canvas into pieces. I did this because I noticed in my original sketch that the different things in the picture were not proportional, and I did not want my final piece to be the same way.

I was able to sketch out everything but I saved the faces for last. I have never been that great at drawing faces because I can never get the mouths right. I decided to do some research and see if I could find any helpful resources on the internet. After only a few minutes of searching I was able to find two great sources! The first website I found is called The Proportions of the Head. This website taught me how the different features of the face line up inside a grid which allows artists to make faces proportional.

The second source that I found is called Learn How to Draw a Face with Confidence. This website used a similar technique as the first site, but instead of using a grid and drawing the outline of the face you start out with a circle and use dashed lines to line up the features of the face. I like this source more because when I have tried to draw faces before I have used something like this method and it was successful with figuring out where the features were and the shape of the face.

I used techniques from both sources to draw the faces on the canvas. They may not look recognizable yet, but that is because there is no detail like shading. I found both websites very helpful and they both furthered my progress in drawing faces and the project.