Tag: Portrait

Portraits

hands

I’m out with my Olympus DSLR again and today it’s the portrait module from Ben Hawkins’ book, The Complete Beginner’s Photography Course. That includes a portrait of hands, so I set up a mirror and photographed my ‘all-fingers-and-thumbs’ method of holding the camera.

For older gnarly hands like mine Ben suggests going for black and white and adding a bit of grain.

Pet Portraits

Bertie the terrier

Our next challenge was pet portraits, although challenge is hardly the right word as it would be impossible to take a bad photo of Bertie.

“Does he mind having his photograph taken?” I asked the woman at the next table in the Little Owl cafe, RSPB St Aidans.

“He loves it!” she replied showing me her phone with Bertie filling the home screen.

In the book Ben Hawkins suggests setting the shutter of your camera to silent when photographing pets and you can see that Bertie was getting a tad suspicious by the time I took this, the second photograph.

Add Context

sewing room

We’re asked for a portrait with the figure in context so as we sat in the Rivers Meet Cafe in Methley, I couldn’t help thinking that the busy sewing room, with the Monday morning class hard at work, would be a brilliant setting. I got what I was after straight away, or I thought I had when I checked the photo on the camera’s flip-up screen. It was only when I got it on the big screen back home that I realised that I’d caught my model mid blink. Moral: always take several shots.

Heads Up

grids for copying drawing

It may seem obtuse to turn my artwork upside down as I enlarge my characters from A3 to A1 with the aid of a grid, but with such a large sheet of foamboard, it’s easier to reach the top this way. When it came to the faces, I drew a tighter grid to help me get the details in proportion.

Besides, as Betty Edwards points out in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, upside-down drawing helps you make the shift to ‘R-mode’, so that the logical left side of the brain isn’t continually saying ‘Ah, I know what this is . . .’ (a nose, for example) ‘so don’t need to look so carefully now’. When you switch over to your right side, she suggests, you draw the shapes as they are, without preconceptions.

Even so, when I came to the eyes of these characters, I could feel myself thinking, no, that’s not right, that doesn’t feel as if I’m drawing an eye.

Look forward to turning the board right side up.

Jon Snow

Jon Snow

This week’s final one-hour live portrait-drawing session on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week was Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, painted in oils by Catherine MacDiarmid. As the camera kept cutting to her explaining the progress of the painting, she made it onto the top right hand corner of my page, above Portrait Artist presenter Joan Bakewell.

Jon explained the cunning plan behind his brightly-coloured tie: when he’s interviewing people they’re attracted to the tie, which distracts them from scrutinising his face too closely. It didn’t work on Catherine though, as she added a suggestion of the tie only towards the end of her 4-hour session with him. She explained that she invariably starts a portrait with the ‘golden triangle’ of eyebrows and nose. Once she’s established that she introduces the rest of the face but she’s content not to define the edges, she lets them move freely until she’s happy with them. The mouth, which she finds one of the most difficult features, is usually the last to go in.

Jon’s preference for colour was to extend to his shirt – he thought that he should wear blue – but Catherine requested white as she’s keen on reflected light, even adding a subtle dash of reflected colour of the tie below his chin.

Russell Tovey

Russell Tovey

Thanks to Sky Arts, I got a chance to draw actor and one of this year’s Turner Prize judges, Russell Tovey, today in a one-hour session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I won’t be standing by the phone next week to find out if I’ve won the coveted title as I’ve already seen some of the competition, however some artists had an advantage as they took the chance to start 3 hours earlier as the live programme was preceded by a podcast session. One hour drawing from a screen was enough for me.

At first I thought that perhaps I’d do better if he just sat still instead of chatting to the artist painting his portrait but really that was the point of the session. I could have drawn from a photograph otherwise. The way his expression changed and the way the light changed made the session feel similar to drawing someone in real life.

Postcard Portraits

Richard 1976
Self portrait, pencil and watercolour, May 1979
As I was drawing my self portrait, this fly settled on the page.

If portraits were postcard size, you’d be able to fit the shortlist of the BP Portrait Award into Horbury’s telephone box art gallery. This self portrait, from forty years ago, is from one of the ‘Bushey’ 7 x 4½ inch landscape sketchbooks that I used in the late 1970s, as are all but one of the fourteen sketches in this post.

The red pullover was knitted for me by my old friend John Blackburn’s mum, Barbara. Mrs Blackburn was a thrifty knitter and, when you’d grown out of a jumper, she could unravel the wool and use it again. In this way, a batch of wool could be recycled through several generations of jumpers.

In the background, you can see my home-made bookshelves in the alcove. When I drew the portrait, I sat at my work bench on a utility Windsor kitchen chair, which is why I look as if I’m leaning on a gate.

My room
My room in a shared flat. I assembled my work bench – complete with vice – in the room so when I moved out a few years later I had to saw through my built-to-last mortice and tenon joints in order to bring it down the stairs! Now in a cut-down version, it is hinged to our garage wall.
Continue reading Postcard Portraits

Boy with a Hoop

head and shouldersframeMy great grandfather George Swift was born in Sheffield in 1840 so I guess that this portrait of him was painted around 1845. As far as I can tell, the painting isn’t signed.

It reminds me of those formal Victorian studio portrait photographs which often have a formal park on a painted backdrop.

socksflora

My mum remembered as a toddler being prompted to look at this painting and say ‘Granddad, pull your sock up!’

The urn of flowers is a corner of the painting that appeals to me. I can imagine the portrait being produced by a team, with one artist adding the floral flourishes.

dome

George SwiftThe pleasure dome in the background looks like the artist’s invention but the setting reminds me of Sheffield Botanical Gardens, a place that my great granddad George was familiar with.

When we drive past the gardens, I always find myself remembering my mum’s story that, when she was a baby, George would push her in her pram to the gardens but he complained that;

‘This baby always starts crying as soon as I get to the gates! And I have to turn around and bring her back to be fed.’

His good looks have come down through the generations and we’ve got photographs of one of his great great great grandsons standing by the portrait, hoop in hand looking very like his ancestor.

I had some difficulty photographing the painting because of the glossy varnish. Surprisingly, even though I had my camera on a tripod it came up with a ‘blink detected’ warning! I think it’s more likely that great granddad was winking at me.

Blitz Damage

versopatchThe canvas has a tale to tell. Two patches of rubber glued to the back show where it was repaired when a bomb hit my granddad Swift’s house during the Sheffield Blitz.

lips1846rowneyThere are two maker’s stamps on the back of the 3ft x 2ft 6 inch canvas. Geo. Rowney & Co. supplied the canvas, and perhaps the stretcher. I can’t decipher that London address.

There’s a clearer stamp from H. Hodgson of 39 West Street, Sheffield. It appears that Hodgson was a ‘Carvre & Gildre’, so presumably the carver and gilder who supplied the ornate frame.

1846hodgsonIf you’ve any ideas on that last line of Hodgson’s stamp, please let me know. Could that last word be ‘Stationer’?

Beatson; Girl with a Book

Gladys Joan Bell, 1924My mum, Gladys Joan Swift (as she was then), looks about six in this portrait, so it must have been painted around 1924.

signaturecanvasIt was painted in Sheffield by Charles Beatson (1864 – 1949). He painted historical subjects including a Portrait of a Cavalier. In those subjects, I can see the influence by of Dutch painters and I think there are hints of that in this portrait, that’s if you can get past mum’s 1920s party dress!

The canvas is 3ft x 2ft 6 inches. There’s no makers name on the back.

book

mumbook2I’d love to identify the book that my mum is holding. It might be there to add a splash of colour but, even so, it looks like a particular title. It’s possible that my mum had brought a book with her to the sitting but I think that it’s more likely to be a prop, something Beatson was able to put his hands on in the studio.

When I invert and stretch it in Photoshop, the illustration on the back cover looks like a woman reading from an open book to a boy.

Gladys Joan Swift, oil painting by Charles Beatson.One of my mum’s favourite books was Alice in Wonderland. In her final illness, in January this year, when she was confined to bed in a nursing home, she asked me to look out her childhood copy of Alice and to bring it in and read it to her, describing to me just where I’d find it on the bookshelf. I’m sorry that I didn’t get around to doing that before she passed away but between the two of us we managed to remember a few of the lines from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.