Bit of a rookie mistake here, but working through this portrait I’ve unintentionally straightened the tilt of some of the facial features. It’s funny how this makes one part of the portrait feel wonky but it’s never where the actual problem is. I’ve been struggling with the jawline for a few sessions now trying to get it dialed in and finally took a step back to recheck my center-line and the angles of tilt of the eyes, nose, mouth and glasses and realized they were incongruent.
It wasn’t much, just a few millimeters but it’s enough to lose the symmetry and make something look wonky in the drawing of the portrait.
The tilt of the head looks much better now. I still have a bit of an issue with the center-line of the mouth – it’s pulled just a tad to the right. I’ll resolve that next session and I think I’ll have the drawing issues resolved enough to really move on and work on finishing this one.
I’m reminded of the late, great Martha Mayer Erlebacher who always taught that it was like thresholds that you had to get past before you could move on to the next level. She would say that it wouldn’t matter how good your colors were or how impressive your paint handling was if you had drawing errors that were unresolved. Only by getting the linear drawing right did you earn the opportunity to move on to the painterly properties.
Almost ready to move into those next levels.
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