About Face

Learning Fine Art Drawing and Painting Techniques by way of Theatrical Makeup Study and Application

A blank sheet of paper is daunting to any artist.  It’s two dimensional and full of endless possibility.  This may sound exciting, but lets face it – although we might think we want something that offers us countless choices, it is natural for us to become exhaustedly overwhelmed by such a task, and to obsess over what to fill the paper with rather than just doing it.  Taking that piece of paper and replacing it with something more familiar, something that offers fewer options for the artist, we are removing the blank page anxiety from the moment and giving way to real development of artistic skill and aesthetic comprehension.  The human face is an excellent alternative.  We are, psychologically speaking, experts in seeing and reading faces.  In fact, there’s an entire physical portion of our brain designed to do just that!  Unlike a sheet of paper, our faces are three dimensional, and are set in a fixed form that can be accentuated and altered with color and prosthetics.  What we attempt to do when we paint or draw is integrate our third dimensional world into the flat space of the canvas.  By beginning the study of shape and space in our more tangible world, we can begin to fully see and understand the real nature of things.  We can feel and touch what we wish to draw, and connect the position of the object in space to the way the light reveals its shape and contours to our eye.   

They key to this concept is to put down the pencil and brush and begin by applying color to the face with our hands.  It is no coincidence we’ve all begun our exploration of art through finger painting as children; we are creatures that learn best by both touch and sight!  From there we pick up the brush and apply the learned techniques from our fingers to a tool that offers an array of differently shaped and sized strokes. From the face, we finally move onto the paper and transpose the lines and shapes in which we’ve become quite familiar with by first pencil, then pastel, and finally paint.

Many art classes begin by exploring simple shapes like spheres, cones, and pyramids.  The face, like most three-dimensional objects, includes many of these basic shapes melded together.   Once the face is mastered, you will discover that rendering these simple shapes will come easily and naturally, as if you’d known how to draw them all along!  From there, these more complicated objects that involve multiple basic shapes will be much easier to accomplish.

As this class starts from the very beginning of basic color/shape theory, it is suitable for both children and adults alike.  It is an excellent course for those who are interested in learning fine art and those who are fascinated by theatrical/everyday makeup application.  It gets people involved with each other rather than banishing them to their one little sheet of paper – they are, after all, getting very well acquainted with each other’s faces.