I recently came across a fun portrait exchange site by Los Angeles-based illustrator and teacher Rama Hughes via Danny Gregory’s blog. It’s called The Portrait Party, and its purpose is simple and excellent: to get people drawing and sharing their artwork. You and a fellow artist pair up, either in person or using photographs, to draw each other’s portraits. You then share your portraits by posting a comment to the Portrait Party site that includes your and your partner’s name, contact info, and any comments you’d like to share. If you don’t have a face-to-face drawing buddy, the site offers a list of people who are game and have posted their contact info, some even linking to flickr accounts offering photos from which they’d like their portraits made.

If you can, I’d also recommend finding a face-to-face partner to draw. Personally, I find drawing from life very different from drawing from a photograph, because the photograph is already flattened; it’s already two-dimensional. When drawing from life, your mind has to make that leap from the 3-D object in front of you to a 2-D translation on the page. I have to constantly remind myself to believe what I’m seeing, to suspend what I “know” about how a human face is constructed and instead draw with complete attention to what is actually in front of me. It’s a great exercise that fuels my concentration in other areas of life, and leaves me with a pleasant, trancelike feeling from having actually sat and focused on one thing for a good long time—an experience that is scant in today’s busy life! That said, it can be hard to convince someone to sit still for that long. The most important thing, whether from life or from a photograph, is to just get down to drawing.

Celebrity portrait exchange: David Hockney by Lucien Freud; Lucien Freud by David Hockney

The drawings on The Portrait Party are stylistically diverse and range from the work of total beginners to professional illustrators to contributions from celebrity artists such as David Hockney and Lucien Freud. As an art educator, Rama Hughes is gifted in eliciting group participation. His commentary about the creative processes of his contributors may inspire you to try a technique you had never considered. The web has been a real boon to drawing enthusiasts, facilitating creative exchange with communities all over the world, and a middle ground between the often solitary act of drawing and the energy of a group. For all you shy artists out there, Hughes has created a welcoming community, an opportunity to get motivated by others, share your artwork, and draw a new friend you may never have met. So, find a portrait partner and get started!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Illustration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.