Drawing Fast; Drawing Slow

Fast Drawing:  General 314 pencil. 4" x 6"; Oye is dus a punim?

Facial muscles are mostly relaxed in portraiture.  Teethy grins are out.  Mona Lisa smile is the norm.
I like going for the stretch.  This fast draw caught my impression and calerified what interested me about the expression on my face.   I was interested in what the facial muscles can  do.  They can pucker. They can distort.  In a 'funny face' such as this, I can see where they are and what movement they are capable of.  I can see volume.  I am interest in those things, for if you know what muscle is where and how it can stretch and distort, you gain a better handle on our everyday expressions that reveal what we are thinking and feeling.  Expressions add incredible interest to a portrait.

.Slow Drawing.  Slow drawing allows  deeper investigation.

While fast draws last usually fifteen to thirty or forty minutes,  slow draws take longer than an hour or two.  Especially when pencil is the medium..  Drawing realistically and slowly, I see how the facial muscles interact with one another to give me such a grotesque expression--an expression that interests  me far more than the traditional Mona Lisa,  The Mona Lisa smile tells the viewer nothing.  It is secretive.  It supposedly makes the viewer wonder what she's thinking about, but this viewer lost interest in the painting in a matter of minutes and walked on.  This punim  (Yiddish meaning face), tells me what she's thinking and makes me wonder what's the rest of the story? What is she looking at that make her have such a reaction.  Lively expressions enliven portraits.  They make them more than a record of a person's existence and what they normally looked like, .

So draw fast to get your first impression; draw slow to understand it.  This work is still in progress.  The mouth and chin area are currently of interest.