Okay, so the eyes. Another little lesson for me. One of the great things about drawing on the iPad is you can quickly zoom in and out on details, just by ‘pinching’. It’s great for doing fiddly bits. But if you try zooming in on elements of a face, interesting things happen. Your frame of reference goes out of whack. That’s why this girl’s left eye is a bit wonky. (And you should have seen the first attempt.) I zoomed in so I had the other eye, the nose, the frame of her headscarf. And it seemed to me I was drawing the second eye in good proportion and relative distance from the rest.  But when I zoomed out, her eye had slipped disturbingly awry. Even now, as I say, it’s out of whack.  You need the whole face to know if one part of it is even vaguely right. Faces are not simply collections of features. They create a whole that reacts badly to being broken up. I think that’s rather lovely as a thought. (I neglected to jot a note on this one: it was on the Tube today – 13/2/12.)

Okay, so the eyes. Another little lesson for me.

One of the great things about drawing on the iPad is you can quickly zoom in and out on details, just by ‘pinching’. It’s great for doing fiddly bits.

But if you try zooming in on elements of a face, interesting things happen. Your frame of reference goes out of whack. That’s why this girl’s left eye is a bit wonky. (And you should have seen the first attempt.)

I zoomed in so I had the other eye, the nose, the frame of her headscarf. And it seemed to me I was drawing the second eye in good proportion and relative distance from the rest. 

But when I zoomed out, her eye had slipped disturbingly awry. Even now, as I say, it’s out of whack. 

You need the whole face to know if one part of it is even vaguely right. Faces are not simply collections of features. They create a whole that reacts badly to being broken up. I think that’s rather lovely as a thought.

(I neglected to jot a note on this one: it was on the Tube today – 13/2/12.)

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