Portraits: Idea 2

I really liked my previous idea of displaying emotions around each other in one single line, and wanted to develop it.

I was thinking of how I could incorporate masks into it and then thought: what if I did the main person wearing a mask, with emotions surrounding her? This could then show that we have many emotions hidden “under the surface” of our “masks”.

I first drew the basic facial structure before doing the mask, as it had to look as if it was actually sitting on a face. I then drew her eyes beneath it.

After that was done, I drew circles to get the general idea of where to place all of the other faces. It took me quite a while to do this as I kept changing my mind but after I had a structure I started drawing the faces.

I drew my sad face first, using the same reference photo as I did last time (I used all of the same reference photos of myself for this idea).

Now that all of the faces were done I realised that it looked a bit messy because of all of my lines, so I went along and grabbed my sketching pencils. I chose 4B and 2B as they were quite strong, and drew around the lines needed.

Because the lines were quite dark and I didn’t know what to do with the sketch, I traced over it so that I could do some experiments on the copy.

I can now do some experimentation! I wanted to try out Giacometti's style where he did a lot of "rough" shading, although I'm going to use pen instead of pencil.

Conclusion:
I soon abandoned this idea because although this is a pretty interesting piece, it might be a bit "spooky" because of the mask. For some reason I keep thinking of horror films when I look at it and I don't want the readers of New Scientist to think this as well.