A wise colored pencil artist taught me to NEVER draw a face smaller than an egg. I’ve passed that on to my drawing students. It is tricky enough to capture a likeness correctly with photos or people that you can actually see and measure. Try doing it when you can’t see the details. Worse, try doing it when you can’t see the details on the photo AND the size of the drawn face is smaller than an egg, and there are TWO of these microscopic faces in the pictures.
A friend brought me this photo and asked me to draw it for her. I’ve shot it holding it in my hand so you can see how small it is, and how small the people are, and how truly miniature the faces are:
Then she said, “I enlarged it for you in case that will help,” and she gave me this:
Blurry and pixelated is how the tiny faces appear in this enlargement. Notice that the enlarged faces are perhaps about the size of my thumbnail now. (I have chunky hands, but even my thumbnail is no where near the size of an egg.)
She said that her daughter, a long time drawing student of mine, begged her to not bring this to me or be crazy enough to ask me to draw it. She didn’t listen to her daughter, whose advice was based on years of listening to me.
I like me a good challenge. Because this lady and I are friends, I told her I’d try. What does friendship have to do with it? The ability to communicate honestly is EVERYTHING when drawing or painting commissioned art. EVERYTHING. Besides, she flattered me by saying, “I figured if anyone would be able to do this, it would be you.”
Flattery often succeeds in getting me to try things that I know are crazy-hard (unless it involves the possibility of bodily injury).
The plan was to get it laid out and then shade in the faces. If she didn’t like the faces, I could just stop without having invested hours and hours. “No harm, no foul” seems to be the appropriate cliche’ for this approach.
I told my drawing students. There were guffaws, gasps of horror, looks of incomprehension, several “but you always say to never draw a face smaller than an egg”, and maybe a couple of screams.
Here is what I did to show the customer:
Blurry and small, just like the photo. Lacking in detail, it is hoped that the angle of the heads and the suggestions of features will bring to mind the correct little humans.
What did the customer, the mother of my long-term drawing student, the friend with whom I must have honest communication say about it?
More will be revealed in the fullness of time. . .
