This is sort of a part two from my post Friday night about drawing my wife, and the challenges of art involving people you are close to. Basically, the goal I’m striving for is to get some more accurate sketches of my wife, since several I’ve done in the past didn’t quite look like her. The first attempt I think worked out pretty well, and now I’m upping the ante a bit. That sketch definitely looked like her, but she’s looking down and it seemed like an “easy mode” attempt. In other words, successful but we could probably place an asterisk next to it.
This time, I went with a close-up view of mostly just faces. Close-up and faces forward would be a real challenge to see if I could accurately depict her. There is no hiding behind down-turned faces when it’s pretty much only heads in the drawing! For bonus points, I added our girls. Here’s how it turned out:
Overall, I’m going to call this a success. I really like the sketch! It turned into a pretty funny scene, but that was actually sort of unintentional. When I started out, I was really going for my wife and our oldest smiling, with our youngest being her serious self as usual. As I progressed, my wife’s expression changed to kind of a wry humor at our oldest’s reaction. And the oldest kiddo went from a normal smile to either a forced smile, a toddler’s discomfort with being bothered, or a mischievous look. As the expressions shifted, I didn’t fight it at all because I thought it was an interesting direction. You can almost see this change in the progression .gif I included below:
I had fun with this one, and I like the results from both efforts in this two part series.