Bust of Andrea Palladio
10th June 2025
In: Art
Pencil drawing of a bust which I believe to be Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio.
This was an exercise in sight-size drawing from a photograph (approximately A4 size on Bristol board paper) and it was a lot harder than I imagined! I had to constantly reshape the features despite being able to map across dimensions with a proportional divider (set at 1:1). When completed, I overlayed the drawing on to the photograph to see where I had made errors. This showed that I had foreshortened the nose - a small error that had a knock-on impact for the other facial features…
The enjoyable part of the drawing was the shading which I did with an HB pencil sharpened to expose a length of lead and sandpapered to refine the point. Having never sharpened a pencil in this way before, I was surprised how it changed the way I held the pencil and the level of control that could be achieved.
This was the final result:
This was an exercise in sight-size drawing from a photograph (approximately A4 size on Bristol board paper) and it was a lot harder than I imagined! I had to constantly reshape the features despite being able to map across dimensions with a proportional divider (set at 1:1). When completed, I overlayed the drawing on to the photograph to see where I had made errors. This showed that I had foreshortened the nose - a small error that had a knock-on impact for the other facial features…
The enjoyable part of the drawing was the shading which I did with an HB pencil sharpened to expose a length of lead and sandpapered to refine the point. Having never sharpened a pencil in this way before, I was surprised how it changed the way I held the pencil and the level of control that could be achieved.
This was the final result: