 I'm Janet Faden and we are going to do a project exploring value on the face and head. So with portraiture you always have a model available and that's you. So today we're going to be looking at ourselves in a mirror. I'm in front of a nice big mirror here but you can also use a hand mirror if you happen to have one at home you can use a makeup mirror propped up on books like a little compact you can even go sit in your bathroom I love to do that just sit in the bathroom in front of the mirror and draw. The other thing that's going to be really helpful for you today this project we are going to be focusing on shadows and light or value and if you have a a clamp light like this one that would be useful if you have a a bedside light or a lamp that you can use even a garage like a clamp light any of those things even a flashlight that you bungee cord to something so that it's up high into one side of you any of those things will work you just want to find a way to get a nice light source on your face and that's going to make it a lot easier to see how your face is sculpted basically by the lights and darks that fall upon it so when we're when we're talking about about value that's the artistic term for lights and darks it's it's amazing how many different shades you can find on something when a light is hitting it well and that's going to be what I'm going to ask you to do first so let's just talk about our materials and then we're going to get started by observing our faces so what I have on the table in front of me are my values and I've created these values by taking a newspaper that everybody was finished with so nobody's going to care that I ripped it up and I looked for the darks okay nice dark shades the the middle tones so places in the paper whether it's not totally dark but it's not totally light either and then the lightest areas and I made pile of each so my dark tones my middle tones and my light tones and we're going to use those to build the values of our portraits but before we do that like I said we're going to observe so I have a clean sheet of paper here you can use copy paper you can use sketchbook paper whatever you have on hand it's nice if your paper is at least eight and a half by eleven it gives you a nice large surface to play with I also have a couple of pencils semi-racers pencil sharpener and a pair of scissors so these are all things that'll come in handy oh and a glue stick so you'll definitely need one of these okay so I'm going to just start by observing myself in the mirror and I take my glasses off and I'm looking for the areas in my face that are in my head I'm going to look at this this whole thing where are the darkest darks where do I see the darkest darks well I can see um dark shadows all along um this side of my hair is very dark where my hair meets my face is very dark over here the underside of my hair my nostrils my eyeballs corners of my mouth those are areas I see some strong darks I see a strong dark here on this side of my face within my face the next value that I see after those really dark hits of my nostrils and my eyeballs I also see big shadow shapes on my on my forehead I notice when I turn my face these triangles light up so I can see these triangular areas and above them are nice shadows these um nice shadow areas in the eye sockets of my eye okay um this side of my face is shadowed and I see a big shadow falling across my torso so I'm going to take all that information and just kind of store it for a minute I've done some nice observing I kind of have an idea where the darks and the middle tones are and I'm going to think about how I'm going to lay out my composition on my page so without even picking up a pencil I'm just imagining that I'm going to probably make my face pretty large maybe show a little bit of my neck and a little bit of my shoulders so I'm just kind of imagining touching my paper with my hands to get an idea of where I'm going to go and then I'm going to take a pencil and I'm going to sketch out that same idea so a nice big oval for my head cylinder for my neck and a simple line for my shoulders I'm also going to just drop in a proportion map just to help me kind of find my way so the center line midline for my eyes fall another halfway between my eyes and my chin midline for my nose and then the midline for my mouth just to help me get set up the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to lightly sketch out those big shapes of the the shadows that we just found so the the areas where the light is making shapes so the the first thing I noticed was the the big shadow on my forehead my eye sockets slightly sketching those in one side of my nose had a nice shadow on it and then under my chin the light's falling in a diagonal across my body I'm also going to make just a rough outline for where my hair is and you don't have to be detailed at this stage because really all you're doing is giving yourself kind of a guideline for where you're going to put your values in your portrait is going to be defined by the the paper that you have cut out so I did all of these ahead of time it's kind of a nice way to get started is just to find the newspaper make some nice piles that you can work with before you start drawing and then you'll have them ready to go and you won't have to stop all right so the next step that I'm going to do is to find all of my big dark shapes and I'm going to put them in with the paper so you'll see on your screen an example of what this looks like this project takes a little bit of time so I prepared this example ahead of time so that you could get a feel for it and then I'll show you how I got there just briefly I'll take a couple of steps here so you can cut or you can tear these shapes but what I'm doing is I'm just trying to fill in the darks that I that I defined so I'm looking at this jawline where my chin is and I'm going to just tear the paper so that it makes kind of an echo of that I can refine my tear with the scissors if I feel like I want to but I'm not worrying about being perfect or exact this is a fun project to let let it happen loosely it's fun to see the darks and the light slowly start to build the face so right away even just putting in this first sheet of dark shadow can already see how just by putting in that dark I'm starting to define the face so I'm just going to keep going I'm going to continue to build this shadow like so so as I continue to build the darks I'm going to start noticing that um the dark shadows that I'm laying in come up against really subtle shades that maybe I'm not quite sure if they're a dark or a middle tone so one of the ways to kind of make things a little clearer is when you observe and you're making decisions about where to put the shadows squint your eyes like this and when I squint what happens is everything simplifies and suddenly I see you are subtleties so I can really tell ah okay so the shadow under my neck really is just a little bit lighter than the tone um behind it the shadow of my jaw here is a little bit lighter than the tone of my neck so I can start to make those decisions a little bit easier about what kind of paper to lay in so I'm just going to work on this for a couple of minutes and then I'm going to show you the next step further here with my darks and I'm going to start adding to this with some middle tones so you can see on your screen here's an example of what that starts to look like once you start getting the darks and the middle tones in together you can really start to see the face taking shape this is a project that you can definitely spend some time with so what I've done is I've gone all the way to the end at home so that I could show you what the finished what the finished portrait looks like okay um and I have it right here as well so this is this is an example of having the all of the darks in all of the middle tones in and then leaving some of the white of the paper um just as an artistic decision and also to define where the lightest light is hitting my uh my portrait my face so here the lights coming from this side um when I was at home it was doing the same thing I was lit from from this side and so you'll see that that's where I have some uh empty space that I've only defined the edge of my hair with some of the middle tone to show that the bright light is actually becoming the white of the paper so this is this is a really fun project to do with yourself or with a friend you could look at someone while they're watching tv or while they're reading a book um if you have a captive audience for a while and you could define them with value as well and what I would encourage you to do is just to observe lights and darks as much as you can you'll notice that throughout the day the way that the light hits objects or people is going to change um what you see and how they look so light is a really fun thing to observe and to pay attention to because it really defines form and helps to create to create mood and expression so have fun with it um thanks for being here and keep making stuff