15 Minute Portraits

Some sketches from the July 09 OIC Portrait Day event at the Red Dot Museum - I really should go more often. All the portraits were of folks off the 'street' (we were indoors) who signed up to model for 15 minutes, so sometimes its a challenge for all artists because they weren't paid professional models. But that makes it more interesting because you gotta use a lot of short term memory. The models also could buy the portraits they liked (there were at least 40 artists there) at 8 bucks a piece - so thats' not too bad!

In case anyone was wondering about the size of the sketchpad, its an A3 (or 11x14 for you north american types)







































The pooch (image below) presented a different challenge. Pooches being Pooches, can't sit still for too long - especially when its an 8 month old Italian Greyhound thats full of energy. Still it was a very rare opportunity to get to observe and draw dogs up close, the last time I got to draw critters up close was a few years back when the Prof had a couple of birds - a Great Horned Owl and a Peregrine Falcon - that were brought in for our ornithology illustration part of the program.

I was actually hammering away at this one because its only 15 minutes and you can only get so many details in. My previous experience with dogs helped a lot with the structure so a lot less time was spent on observing and more on actually drawing.































Pooch was awesome by the way, he's a real darling -