Beginning stages...

My friend, who's portrait I'm drawing here, took this photo (notice the shark arm doing the drawing...it was a sunny day outside and we had markers) as I was in the first stages of this new project. I'm drawing 6' X 4' drawings of the faces and hands (with a few exceptions) of people I know. I'd been thinking about doing large-scale drawings for a project, and I thought about how much of a person you would have to see (say, if they were walking towards you in a fog) in order for you to get a decent sense of that person's energy, or personality. I've tied in a little palmistry and body language and put together about a dozen of these in my head. Now I have to get them done. Usually, a grid works against me if I'm doing a portrait, so I leave out that step and jump straight to interpreting a face, but I want this to be less about my characterizations of people and more about their body language and the power of suggestion in the way that their hands and faces are being presented. So accuracy is important to me. I want these to really look like the people in a more photo-real sense than what I'd normally shoot for. I have high hopes for these.