Drawing someone in profile: on the plus side there’s one less eye to do, so one less thing to mess up (or two if, like me, you use the relative measurements of the eyes as the basis on which you map out the rest of the features). At the same time, the outline of the profile - the nose shape in relation to the brow, the length of the forehead, etc. - must be done precisely, or else the portrait will ring false. And this line must be drawn at some speed too, or you risk the whole thing looking dead. Tricky.
I think Melville here has come out just fine though. He looks to me like someone who’d be private difficult to know, and who contains worlds upon worlds upon worlds in his head.
For the first time in ages - perhaps ever, in this series of portraits - I used a very fine 000 brush for some additional hatching work to suggest three-dimensionality in some of the features. It’s a technique that takes me right back to the earliest days of my art training, drawing and redrawing sculptures until they gained solidity and weight on the page (and looked like they existed off of it). Back then it was all charcoal and Conté crayon (you can’t beat a 2B Conté for depth of black and unpredictability), but it works just as well in miniature too.
Fans of The Divine Comedy (the Neil Hannon group, not the fun-filled Dante tome) will recognise an echo from ‘The Booklovers’ in the text here. That one was always a favourite of mine.
The print is available in my shop.
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