Drawing Older Faces

As I've talked about before, I've been working on faces.  My artwork has always been geometric or abstract - never people or animals.

So I've been drawing faces - really cute, pretty faces.  However, a few minutes ago, I was perusing etsy.com and on their blog, there was a video, The Pixel Painter.  Hal Lasko is a 97 year old gentlemen who has, due to his macular degeneration, discovered a different way to paint.

My grandfather has macular degeneration so I have seen, first hand, how debilitating it can be.  My grandfather has described it to me as a big, blurry, black ball in the middle of your vision.  He can see shadows in the ball and see a little more clearly around the edges.

A few years ago, Mr. Lasko's grandchildren gave him a computer and showed him how to use Microsoft Paint.  Now he creates beautiful paintings on the computer.

But, back to faces.  When the video started, Mr. Lasko's face filled the screen and I was immediately intrigued by the sagging skin under his eyes. (hey, he's 97 years old, what do you expect).  I hit pause, grabbed a pencil and drew the outline of his eyes and the sags.  Then I moved on to the nose with the deep crevasses and the wrinkles around the mouth.  I had never drawn a real person before.  The sketch took about 3 or 4 minutes and even kind of looks like him.   I'm sure that people that know him would think the drawing looks nothing like him, but too bad...it's my first real person.  This guy's face is so interesting to me that I'm going to try to find a better image that I can pause in the video so that I can really try to capture him

This was a great, little drawing exercise for me this evening.  Thank you Hal Lasko!

Peace,
Cyndi