Amdall Gallery

Anyway, back to artwork. The girls recently took a trip to the dentist for a check-up and had quite the fun time. They weren’t especially wild about the teeth-cleaning part, but otherwise they regarded the entire thing as a grand adventure. The dental exam chair was clearly intended to be playground equipment for them. Despite the fact that I wasn’t really interested in drawing the dental chair or exam room, I thought a scene of them hamming it up might be fun. Not exactly challenging myself, but it’s fun to do a comfort zone project from time to time.

As I was working on this sketch, our oldest came over to draw with me. She mentioned needing to make some “mark hearts.” This is a term that, as far as I can tell, she invented. She started calling my scrap color-testing page “mark hearts” about a year ago, which I believe is because hearts were her closest frame of reference for a squiggly shape at the time. The name has stuck though, I just naturally call them that now. She sometimes becomes more fascinated with making mark hearts than actually drawing something!

This drawing from the kids’ dental appointment was pretty informal. It turned out well though, I think. Here’s the final version, which I follow with some more discussion and a progression animation:

Although I didn’t include it, and never really intended to, the kids here are actually relaxing together in the dental examination chair. The oldest has her ever-present stuffed pal Mr. Bunny, and the youngest has a little stuffed Care Bear that she calls her Grumpy Bear. I wasn’t too worried about it, but I recognize the perspective is a bit wonky; the oldest is slouched down quite a bit. As I said, this was meant to be a very loose, not overly difficult comfort sketch.

Overall, in large part because of my familiarity with drawing these girls, this turned out well. They each look very much like themselves, and the facial features are on point. I may have gone a little too large with the youngest’s nose, but it’s close. As usual, the teeth were a struggle, and remain something I need to work on. I did a good job incorporating some purple into the skin tone though (mostly around the eyes), which is something I’ve worked on before. Purple looks weird at first, but once it’s blended, it does look pretty natural.

I took about seven progression photos, so here’s my typical .gif pulling them all together:

As I mentioned, Unsplash-derived portraits will be fairly major on my agenda over the next month or two I think. So, there will be some somewhat random and hopefully unique-looking subjects on tap. I’ve also been trying to figure out how I can participate in artist Hilda Rogers’ “Face A Day in May” project. It’s a very fun undertaking in which she’s basically painting a new portrait everyday, and I’ve wanted to get in on the fun by sending an image. I also briefly entertained seeing how many days I could do a portrait per day, but realized my streak would surely stop at one. Regardless, plenty to do this summer on the drawing front it looks like!