And here's the last of the Bert Dodson exercise drawings that I'll be sharing. I…
Donald Trump
I took a break from the planets today. A charcoal painting is long overdue and I thought I’d have a go at a charcoal portrait for the first time. I picked the famous Donald Trump scowl as my source photo, a face that’s just screaming to be painted.
And there really is very little to say about how I put this one together. I picked out some orange paper, just put as anybody else would. Then I put down a grid and pencil outlines. I did this using an orange charcoal pencil so that I didn’t need to worry about erasing all the lines later. In fact I found that I could just wipe the lines off with a chamois.
Then I died all the charcoal. I started with the eyes and then moved on to the darks that designed the contours of the face. The great thing about charcoal is that I can keep tinkering with it without worrying about muddying paint or filling the tooth of the paper – if there’s too much charcoal on the paper I can just remove it. So I tinkered with this one for ages, never being really happy acting so many times with a new set of darks and facial creases. The eyes weren’t positioned correctly at one point but I managed to move them to somewhere where they look like they belong. The hair is where I had the most problems. I struggled to get variegated colours with light highlights and dark bits – it all ended up a bit too uniform.
Anyway, I eventually got to something I was happy to stick with. Strangely, while I’ve not quite got the eyes, the mouth or the facial expression right, I think I’ve managed to capture the personality and the foreboding sense of menace in the scowl. And this one does look good when you catch it out of the corner of your eye. So I’m happy with today effort – remember this is my first ever charcoal portrait.
This one is up for sale. Would make a great offensive Secret Santa present for anyone with any moral fibre.
Leave a Reply