PORTRAITS AND EXPRESSIONS

Sleeveface: "One or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion."

WIRE PORTRAITS

Wire portrait of Elena.

Lamp, A2 paper, pencil, chicken wire, wire cutters, masking tape

Model sits in front of wall with a lamp shining onto their face - aim to get the silhouette fitting into the A2 dimensions. Tape a piece of A2 up behind the shadow and draw around the shadow in pencil while your model sits still.

Once done, cut 1m lengths of chicken wire and stick down the beginning of the wire to the start of the pencil line. As you mold your way around the portrait circumference, you will need to tape down the wire to stop it shifting.

Think about the continuous line. The eye can't sit in space, it needs to join itself into the profile. Have fun with the hair. Twisting and turning and bunching and bending.

If this is part of a group project it should take two lessons. Once completed, suspend each wire portrait from the ceiling (white sewing thread and plenty of blutac). With the lights off, turn on a few direction lamps, move around until happy as Larry (ask Larry if he's happy) and start taking photographs.

Wonderful shadows emerge.

You could also create continuous line drawings from the collective pieces.

A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant.

If the SoW brief is Portraits, where do you start? What does your face say about you? If 100 people who didn't know you, looked at a photograph of your face, what would they think about you? What do you want them to think? What's your best feature? What are your character traits? Write 5 of them and get a friend to write another 5. In this section, we will look at different portraiture techniques. Below are a few examples taken on the same day, of my silly old face.

CLOSE-UP OF EYES

Take a digital photograph of one of your eyes using digi macro. Make sure the light is good. Print it out and when copying it out onto a piece of A3, look carefully at every single crease. You may click on my eye, enlarge it and print it - but please, please, please - do include every single wrinkle.