 |
 |
|
 |
||
 |
||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
A
BIG FAMILY gathering and, although we haven’t got everyone here
this afternoon, every chair and much of the floor-space is taken up with
our guests, so I can’t get across the lounge to fetch my sketchbook
from the studio. I take a ballpoint
pen from a drawer, pick up a discarded letter and rest it on a magazine
to sketch the latest addition to the clan; Harry,
aged only two weeks.
Babies have such a rounded features. They’re far from identical but
they haven’t developed the craggy, chiselled individuality that makes
the ‘lived in’ faces of adults such a joy to draw.
It’s
easy to be discouraged and to concede that you’re not going be able
to catch that baby-faced delicacy, so
all you can do, as with any other subject, is draw what is there in front
of
you
and
not
make
assumptions;
for instance, you can see where I have greatly underestimated the size
of the head in relation to the face in the main drawing on the left. The
horizontal line going across the middle of Harry’s head is where
I’d originally estimated where the back of his head would be. This
would have given his head the proportions of a toddler instead of those
of a new-born baby.
