It was so exciting class and I’m very happy with results.Portrait and proportion theory is not an easy subject so we had to start with some good preparations to it. You have probably noticed that kids tend to simplify their drawings and paintings to very basic shapes. We had to work through it and highlight some other obvious details of eyes, nose, and lips to give them more realistic look. Natalie did a fantastic job and improvement was very much visible with each next try.

Then we started putting eyes and noses together and adding eyebrows and philtrum.

We had some challenging moments with lips shapes and how it should align with the center of the eyes but as mentioned earlier, practice makes perfect!

Next part of practice was drawing a face mapping representing all of the rules and distances between important points of the face elements. It did feel a bit strange at first as drawing looked very messy with all of those lines and then eyes, nose, and lips between them but this is the process of learning on face proportions so we had to go through it. The most important are that you can see results so quickly and you suddenly are convinced that if you repeat this procedure several times you will be able to position parts of the face in the right distances from each other without using face mapping.

I’m so proud! Natalie did her first author portrait so well. We took her photo and then displayed it on the iPad.

She did some face mapping first and then portrait started coming together piece by piece. When all elements were in place we erased helping lines and started working on all of those details, like lines of the lips or freckles. So adorable!

Natalie’s Mom told me that they did some copies of this portrait and then get color versions of it. What a great idea!

Proportion Theory may sound complicated and confusing at first but we got so beautiful portrait and Natalie is only 8 years old!