Puzzling out Portraiture

Beginning my street portrait artist career on Monday, my group drew Megan.  I started out in wide general fast sweeps of my arm to position her head on the page.  Hair is the most interesting part of a portrait for me but I had to fight of the urge to darken and enhance it right away as I still needed to get the sizing correct first.  Saul Leiter's description of Joanna's hair is phenomenal.

 SAUL LEITER | Joanna | 1947

I underestimated the angle her head was resting so I had to go back in and realign her nose and mouth.  Her eyes where not working at all the way I tried to describe them.  The first problem was that I was trying to outline them!  I don't know what was in my mind to draw them like this but this is what I attempted to do over and over to get the outline shape right.  This exasperated the already flat problem I was having in this area of the face.  Amy came over and helped me to more accurately describe the nose and showed me what I was doing wrong with the mouth.  At the end of class I was somewhat satisfied with what I accomplished in my first portrait session but new I had a long way to go.

Wednesday we drew Paul.  For some reason this drawing came naturally for me as I didn't have to deal with the mouth and very minimally with the nose.  Unfortunately this drawing filled up a lot more paper then my first one of Megan but I liked this about it.  I just squeezed in the top of his head from the edge of the paper.  With Paul, Amy pointed out how ridiculously small I drew his ear.  Strangely I didn't see this until she pointed it out.  Usually I have a really hard time with the eye but with this new view of  looking at the back of his head I could see the structure of the eye a lot more clearly and it seemed to come out naturally in my drawing.