Sharing: how to draw a human head

One of my ongoing goals is to spend more time in my sketchbook – live sketching is a great way to get better at seeing what is essential in a scene or subject.

Lucky for me, there is a fairgrounds nearby, and there are horse shows there nearly every weekend. Riders do a lot of waiting next to arenas, so it’s a great place to catch a quick sketch.

While the horses are relatively easy for me, riders have faces, and those are not so easy. YouTube to the rescue! I found this great video from Art of Wei that shows an easy method for drawing a head & face from any angle:

Painting a dappled horse

WIP-dappled-horse

Just starting a watercolor of a gorgeous Quarter Horse in the show ring. One of the reasons I wanted to paint this is the light dappling in the horse’s coat.

There are a couple of ways to create the effect of a dappled hide. One is to lay down a fairly strong wash of color, wait until the wash is just losing the shine from the water, and sprinkle the area with salt. As the salt dries, it pulls water from the paper-and pulls color with it to create spots. Very effective, but it takes a long time to dry, and is messy.

For the impatient among us, there is the technique I used. After laying down a strong wash of color and waiting a few moments for the shine to fade, I grabbed a spray bottle of water. Holding it about 18″ from the paper, I barely squezzed the handle, causing the nozzle to “spit” random-sized drops of water onto the paper. The water repels the pigment, creating a similar effect to salt.

Dappled-starting-face

Above, the first background wash has been dropped in, and the details of the face begun. The eyes, muzzle and ears are always the first place I go on an animal portrait. This is off to a good start, but if something doesn’t develop well, I’ll abandon the painting and start over…

Detail of the face. I'll work out from the areas that are started, creating and connecting the structure.
Detail of the face. I’ll work out from the areas that are started, creating and connecting the structure.

After about 2 hours of continuing to detail the head and body, the form is developing. I’ll work on the rider and tack now – need to see the relationship before I go any further with shadows.

The horse is rounding out; now it's time to add the rider. That will show me how dark to build shadow values on the horse.
The horse is rounding out; now it’s time to add the rider. That will show me how dark to build shadow values on the horse.

Now that the rider has been roughed in, all of the light values (and many of the mid values) have been established. The final steps will be to give the rider and tack a bit more detail, and to add some dark values to “pop” the horse.

The rider will get some form, but not too much detail - just enough to give context to the scene.
The rider will get some form, but not too much detail – just enough to give context to the scene.

One problem I’ll need to resolve is the background: the arena and stands cut the painting nearly in half. The transition will need to be lowered a bit for a better visual…