koukla carolyn

Faces are hard to see. They’re visually complicated. They are three-dimensional forms that catch and reflect light at all kinds of different angles. They are constantly changing expression, and expression itself is a complicated and subtle thing. Faces hold things back so that you have to look carefully to see what a face is revealing and what it may be concealing. They are immensly challenging things to draw. -Peter Steinhart in The Undressed Art

We were sitting in Barnes and Noble and Jeet was reading my assignment for my class on Mongolian and Turkish history—very confusing stuff. Apparently, he didn’t realize I was drawing him because he was moving around and scrunching his face into strange contortions. If he had known that I was drawing him, I think he would have been perfectly still and this would have been less of a challenge. This was very good practice for me, even though I see many mistakes in it. I used olive green, yellow ochre and sienna brown Prismacolors for this sketch.