Above: Pentel Pocket Brush Pen sketch with gouache layers on blue paper (see left side of image for paper color). Click on the image to view an enlargement.
Have you ever noticed how on TV some shows, even shows that you believe must have a large budget EVERYONE has the same hairstyle? Sometimes all the actors, regardless of gender look as if they've walked through the same wind tunnel.
I know some of this is related to what's in style in the broader culture at the time. But part of this phenomenon is also simply "the" style of the leading stylist. Sometimes instead of giving everyone a haircut based on what their character would do a stylist gives the hairdo he or she thinks is needed. It's not the same thing at all.
I'm was watching one of those shows the other night and when I started sketching yet another man with the same hairdo I couldn't stop laughing.
But then I guess it's working because the spiky hairstyle is what got me to stop and want to sketch in the first place—that and noses and ears.
In our final memory drawing class we did a slew of stuff, but one thing we did was play a "parlor game" where you have a folded sheet of paper and someone draws a nose on the first panel and passes it left. That person has 30 seconds to look at the nose, fold over the panel and redraw the nose from memory. Then the sheet of paper gets passed along again. This time the only reference for the next participant is the previous participant's interpretation of that nose. And so it goes. (There were 9 of us each starting a sheet and passing it on.)
Well when asked to draw a nose, any nose, of course I asked, "should there be any context? any part of the face?" It was left up to us.
So when asked to draw a nose of course I drew Adam Goldberg's nose. (At the link scroll down to the final images of him in profile, that's the nose I drew.) After passing through eighteen 30-second interpretations the nose derived from the nose I drew didn't even look like the nose on the park ranger in Yogi Bear!
It's a fun thing to try.
But I'd rather draw real noses—speaking of which Adam Goldberg is on a new cop show "NYC-22" which is on Fridays I believe. I'm not sucked into it yet after only a couple episodes (and too many characters for me to care about) and it's nothing like the fabulous show he was in called "the Unusuals" that was cancelled (where all the characters were immediately interesting), but I will continue to watch. I love opportunities to draw noses with character. Or ears.
Get a long, long sheet of paper and fold it into panels so that all the folds peak on the same side of the sheet (and therefore each panel can just be folded away out of view). Have everyone start a sheet with the leftmost panel and pass it on. After 30 seconds the "reference" has to be folded out of view and a remembered nose is drawn on the next blank panel. Then pass it to the next player. Keep the drawing simple, with bold lines. (A thick pen or the PPBPB would be ideal.) See what happens.
