My Assignment - Abstracting faces!

In my assignment to play this week I chose to play around with abstracting faces. I have found this particularly difficult in the past. To represent a face with as few lines as possible is not easy. I didn't want them to look like cartoons or caricatures so I didn't think about other versions I've seen but I looked at pictures of people in magazines. I would try one face and then have several ideas from that, and when I would run out of ideas I'd look for a different type of face and start over. Here are the first ones I did.

 I used a canvas board and acrylic paint so I had to keep going and couldn't make corrections. After saving this picture of my playing I thought about how I could use these for digital pieces. I could even make stamps of facial features on PhotoShop!

 I think noses are difficult too so I made some faces. Then I wanted to practice trying to paint me so I could do a self portrait. I looked at a Family Portrait picture and tried to paint me with as few lines as possible. I found the width, shape and tone of the line all make a difference. It's not easy trying to make it look like myself - and not funny!

 This was a great play assignment. I was able to learn from doing and better understand how to paint a face in an Abstract Expression type style.