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The last week of the drawing class we took from Katie Gilmartin was devoted to portraits. First, another profile (my previous one, of my daughter, is a couple of posts back). I’ve drawn a lot of self-portraits over the years in a high school for the arts and then as an art major, but I’ve never drawn a profile, so I took a lot of pictures of myself in profile and drew this.

Like Katie, I find that I begin to fall in love with whatever I draw. Not the person, but the way they look. Drawing myself was healing that way. I snapped the photo, sighed at the incontrovertible evidence that I have a saggier neck than I might prefer, and then set to drawing, and soon that sag was less a violation of societal standards of beauty, and more a lovely curve with delicate shadows that I just had to capture in graphite.

Then, our assignment for the last week was a standard self-portrait.

I got to something like “finished” an hour before class and just could not bear to erase and re-draw my left (picture’s right) eye, even though it is too close in. But I may yet redraw it, and the nose, which is nicely done but a little narrower than in reality. Or just make another drawing.