FISH HOEK ART SOCIETY: Posting our Portrait Challenge

This has been fun! We may not all be Singer Sargents or Rembrandts, but it seems there is a much enthusiasm among some of FHAS members. More than one portrait was submitted by some members and all are included here.

Portrait or self portrait? There were some very brave and entertaining attempts at self portraits so, well done. It isn't easy coming to terms with wrinkles, scars and bad hair days not to mention light and shade, but our members rose to the occasion.

However, it is not only a question of accepting our character lines; most subjects have firm ideas about how they look and the artist runs a fine line between getting a likeness that is blessed by the sitter and being able to do a realistic yet artistic work. Maureen pointed this out when her 'sitter' wasn't too happy with the result that Maureen herself liked! You can't win them all, can you!

What medium works best? You'll see that drawing media were most popular. Pencil, pastel and crayon: they are the easiest to control. There were some acrylics and oils too - again fairly forgiving media. But watercolour?

Collectively we shied away from this and I believe to do a recognizable portrait in this medium requires courage (or an intimate knowledge of which colours can be lifted if an error happens). Ann Z was the only one (correct me if I am wrong) who submitted some portraits in watercolour - she's good at this and has done a number of them over the years.

As you blogger, I set myself the challenge of doing a self portrait in watercolour. A visitor to the house kindly identified me from the finished work ... but my husband did not! Enough said.

But I found the challenge a great one and did another work in pencil (on the wrong kind of paper) which is passable and I learned that one can't just pick up a scrap of paper from the back of the cupboard and expect pencil, or crayon, or watercolour, to be perfect on it. A good lesson learned: choose your support carefully.

All good works take time. Sometimes, as really famous minimalist artists will tell you, the time is spent thinking rather than wasting effort on coloring away at bad, ill-conceived works. But all works - especially portraits - require consideration and though before the first daubs are put down.

Are you enthused to try a portrait now?

An easy way of starting portraiture is to use a photograph and create a grid over it to break it down into sections and ensure the proportions are correct. So, if in your A4 photo, you might want to break up the image into 4cm blocks.

Alternatively (and the great masters didn't have this great technique) you print out a picture and rub a 2B or 4B pencil over the back and then with an HB pencil or even an H, you trace the outlines of the defining areas of importance (eyes, eyebrows, mouth, ear, top of head, beauty spot, chin etc etc etc) on to your paper. It's the easiest way to ensure features are proportionally correct. After that, the rest is up to you!

You may have seen a couple of the images below previously but they are good examples of FHAS members' works.

And so to the works in no particular order.