Face to Face! Urban Portraits That Tell Stories

Instructor: 

MarinaGrechanik

Date:

April 27, 2018

10:00 AM –
1:30 PM

Workshop location: 

Tel Aviv, Israel.
(exact location TBA)

Space is limited: contact ultramarin71[at]gmail.com
to make a reservation and arrange payment.

Maximum number of participants: 15

Skill level: Suitable for all
ability levels.

“Faces
are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most
interesting aspect of other people – the point where we go inside them – is in
the face. It tells all.”
– David Hockney

For me there is no more
interesting subject than sketching people, and of course the most fascinating
part is – their faces. When I can’t pull out my sketchbook, I catch myself
sketching with my eyes – watching the celebration of the human faces that
constant surrounds us – men and women, adults and children, faces in all shapes
and colors – talking, laughing, crying, telling us about themselves in all
sorts of ways.

In this workshop we’ll
practice drawing portraits, but not in a traditional academic approach.

By doing series of fun
and freeing up exercises we will learn:

·        
to overcome the fear of drawing faces

·        
to free up from automatic approaches and selections

·        
to discover what is the essence of
“likeness” in portraiture – how to get the real, profound likeness,
and not only the external one

·        
not to mechanically copy  reality , but to observe the essentials from
the artistic point of view, and to sacrifice the secondary

·        
to adopt new approaches and understandings

·        
to connect to the emotional side of drawing

·        
to strengthen hand-eye coordination

·        
to improve the ability of observation

·        
to enjoy the process without thinking about the result

·        
to see personality and story in each character

·        
to tell the story with the portrait

Schedule

Meet and
greet – 15 minutes

Exercises, 3
sessions –  30 minutes – 1 hour duration
each

Final
conclusion – sharing our work and insights – 15 minutes

1. Warming-up  duels

Participants will divide
into pairs and draw each other in three different exercises:

1.    
Eye-hand connection

·        
Blind contour – draw without looking at the paper.

·        
From memory – draw without looking at the model

2.    
Exaggeration (caricature)

·        
Strengthen essentials and exaggerate

3.    
Capture emotions

·        
Simultaneous sketching – look at each other expressing
certain emotions.

Finally, we will share
the portraits and discuss what each exercise contributes.

 2. Going
out!

After the warm-up, we
will sketch fast portraits of people passing by on location.

We’ll give a title to
each portrait. The title can show what we think about the character or what
she/he looks like.

We’ll try to apply what
we’ve learned in the previous exercises and pay attention to hand-eye
coordination, capture the expressions of emotions and strengthen the essential
and what is authentic in each character we sketch.

At the end of the
section, participants will display as many portraits as they made in various
approaches and will share their feelings during exercise.

 3. Telling
a story

We’ll tell visual
stories based on a portrait of a stranger from observation.

The sketch can include
the full figure drawing, but the focus should be on his/her face.

Besides creating an
external likeness, we will try to transfer the character’s personality and our
relation to it. We’ll build our subjective story.

At the end of the
session participants will introduce their stories and share experiences.

Supply list:

·        
A
small sketchbook (~A5 size) from chip paper and pages you can tear out

or

·        
A
package of chip A5 or A4 sheets and a clipboard.

·        
Tools
you like for line drawing: pencil, pen, etc…

·        
Tools
you like for shape drawing: wide marker, paint brush, pastels, etc…

·        
Bigger
sketchbook of quality paper for the last exercise.

·        
Your
favorite tools for the last exercise.

·        
Courage
and good mood 🙂

Workshop cost

30,00€  (120 NIS)

Registration

ultramarin71@gmail.com

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