Extremities

Pink robin with a bit of bedding in beak.

If you can nail rendering hands, feet, or in this case, wee bird feet, then you're winning in my book. I have never been particularly good at drawing extremities. Once, way back in the 90s, when I was drawing a lot, I did get close to drawing realistic, human hands. It felt like an accomplishment.

I took a basic drawing course when I was still living in Zurich. The instructor was a local woman with talent to spare. Evey session, she'd bring in art texts from the local library relevant to the task at hand. One of our assignments was to draw a self-portrait. On that day she had brought in books showing how 'the greats' had rendered heads. I remember thumbing through a text filled with images of various human heads drawn by da Vinci. I had never thought about the size of heads before that exercise. One thing to keep in mind, she told us, was that our craniums are larger than we think they are. When creating a forehead, for example, we weren't to be shy. Also, placing the eyes nearly half-way down the face was key.

I like the results of my self-portrait even though the eyes have a bit of a 'manga' quality about them. When you think about it, the distance from the top of my head down to the bottom bit of my eye balls isn't scant. It would seem that I have a big old head and probably so do you!

C'est moi