Expressive Portraits with Veronica Lawlor

 

2/11/23 Exercise from Life Drawing Symposium's "Expressive Portraits" mini workshop

New York reportage artists Veronica Lawlor and Melanie Reim are offering mini online versions of their popular Life Drawing Symposium workshops this year. On Saturday, I took one on “Expressive Portraits” that I hoped would fit well with all the portraiture study I’ve been doing. (Unfortunately, Melanie was still recovering from complications from COVID, so Ronnie taught it alone.)

In the first exercise, we studied hands, an important part of human expression, and then the head by drawing them as structural, geometric shapes. Ronnie broke down all the parts in her demo and showed us images of masters’ drawings in which the artists were doing the same thing in their studies.

Next our model/actor Laura portrayed various emotions with her facial expressions. Each pose was only 30 seconds, so we had to capture the essence of the expression with just a few key features. Although eyes and mouths are always important in revealing feelings, I found that the shape of the eyebrow is also a critical component of expression.

The last exercise was the most fun as well as the most useful for real-life sketching: Laura improvised a character spinning a yarn about famous actors she claimed to know. Our task was to draw her as she told her tales, capturing as many expressions as possible. Occasionally Ronnie would ask Laura to freeze a pose for a few seconds, giving us more time to draw, but in general, we all had to keep up with Laura’s continual movements. It was a challenging but realistic exercise coming from a reportage artist. Ronnie packed a lot into two hours!