Potion #3 - Exotic Faces 🤗

Patrick - I'm really enjoying the lessons or 'potions' of this course. I've always admired your use of gesture and following along with your, what I would describe as more loose, methods is really helping me keep from being rigid and too stiff. I've been learning the Atelier methods in tandem with your stuff and it has really helped keep me balanced. The yin and yang, so to speak. :) Hope to see a course on the male fantasy figure soon!!

I really appreciate all the insights into how subtle changes in the structure of the face communicates so much, especially how they dovetail into expressing common themes or tropes like "beauty and the beast." It's amazing how these timeless ideas can be tweaked and played with by experimenting with different facial elements, like a square feminine jaw in the older, embittered woman queen's portrait. Thank you, Master Patrick, for making these associations, so often unstated and unconscious, clear to us apprentices! Before I began viewing this course, I never thought to try sketching with charcoal, although I had worked with the medium before to render trompe-l'oeil style work from photographs in an art studio, but it never involved such graceful fluidity of strokes. I tried using a digital charcoal brush to spontaneously create a character from imagination, and I'm grateful for the how gentle the pressure is on my hands. My art study so far has concentrated on getting the forms right (anatomically, proportionally, and in perspective), so I haven't focused much on shading, but I wanted to share my attempt to get some thoughts on how to improve. Thank you in advance for your thoughts, community!

Great tips in this lesson, tried my best to draw the face with more of a gestural approach looking forward to trying to develop these concepts more.

This one started out rough for me, as faces have always been a harder aspect of the human form for me to wrap my head around, but I think that after the second or third try, I finally got things going in a way that matched with the fantastic concepts presented in this lesson. Really liked how some of the later faces turned out!