Sketches

You have to learn to draw before you paint. Any serious artist will tell you that. I began to sketch as a child, and then resumed sketching years later. Most paintings I have done started out as a sketch, using a combination of pencil and mostly charcoal. Drawing allows you to learn about lines, shapes, proportions, but also about values. Getting the values of light and dark right in a black and white sketch can help set the stage for getting it right in color. A critical tool for me is a blending stump—a soft, pencil shaped object that allows you to take a pitch-black charcoal area and create intermediate values such as greys. What you see on this webpage is a series of portrait drawings where some faces are recognizable because they are famous people (can you guess?) while others I chose randomly from various sources because they seemed interesting to me.