Mike Carp

Sometime last year I decided I wanted to get better at drawing portraits.  I came up with a sketching exercise where I clicked on a random mug shot from a collection I have culled from the archives at TheSmokingGun.com, and then tried to draw whatever popped up.

Mug shots make great reference material for practicing portraits. They provide a clear view of a person’s face, while the whole I-have-just-been-arrested aspect provides a range of facial expressions that you rarely get from other photographs.

This one here isn’t the most exciting mug shot, but whatever.  As for the drawing, you’ll see from the hair and the skinny neck that I gave up on trying to get a photographic likeness and just decided to make it more “stylized”.  That is a nice way of saying I got frustrated and impatient and just decided to finish it.  If something isn’t quite right, I can just say, “Yeah, I meant to do that.”

Works every time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 4:30 pm and is filed under sketches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.