Series of Drawings 1-2/10

Following the critique, I started looking at my drawings and decided to focus on creating more and allowing my work to guide itself.

By doing a series of 10 drawings I wanted to focus on the cropping of the images and the focus of my face as well as build my confidence to share WHY I do this.

Note: Throughout this series of 10 works I have had a concussion and decided (as to not strain my eyes) to look at redaction within my drawings.

(Keeping concussion in mind) I started with 2 of my reference images which were more staged than the common candid photos that I use. These photos are crystal clear with high contrast allowing me to really simplify my process of drawing by focusing on the shadows and highlights rather than getting into the nitty gritty details. I also started with these 2 as A3, again to not strain my eyes with a smaller drawing.

I cropped these images down, focusing on the facial features.

Below are the reference images I have use. I have placed a red box on the images to show where I have cropped to. The red box essentially marks the edge of the paper.

When thinking about redaction in these drawings (Redaction: typically refers to censoring or obscuring information), I wanted to lean into a different way of censoring areas of the images. I decided to purposely ignore areas of the drawing, focusing on 2/3 main components of the composition. With this I looked at omission.

Omission refers to something that has been deliberately left out or excluded. Unlike redaction, which is more like censorship and feels like editing, omission carries a quieter, sometimes more psychological weight. It's not about hiding, but about refusing or withholding. In my case of portraiture, the use of omission expresses a kind of emotional restraint, ambivalence, or intentional ambiguity, making the portraits feel both present and absent at once.

These drawing are proportionate with the reference images, meaning that if I decided to carry on with the full image, everything would fit together easily. The practice of omission has left a very minimal drawing with plenty of blank space on the page. I found that the blank space, paired with the proportions, open an area of imagination. What is the rest of the drawing? What does the full face look like?

Note: Carrying out these drawings to show my partner I had the one on top of the other. The sunlight hit the pages creating some translucency, allowing the drawing from behind to be seen through the page at the front. (See photo below). This created a whole new composition of which I was intrigued as my first thoughts when seeing this was 'Picasso' and 'Cubism'. I also had a thought about the two layers and how it can be recreated onto one singular page, possibly revisiting the coloured layers from my previous works.