Painting the Human Head: A Humbling Experience

To celebrate the first day of school today (my LAST first day of school)... I decided to post my work from LAST semester! whoops.  I'm a little late.  But the reason I even want to post them still is not just to show you what I worked on for 3 month but I learned a very valuable lesson!

I would suggest to everyone that sometime in their life/schooling career they should take a class at something that is really hard for them or they really struggle at.  That's exactly what I decided to do last semester.  In all aspects of art the hardest thing for me is drawing a realistic rendering of the human head that has a likeness to the model or intended head.  it's HARD!  And I've always struggled and really just don't enjoy drawing/painting heads because of that.  Well there is a class at BYU that's entitled, "Painting the Human Head."  And yes since the first time hearing about that class I thought it would be such a hard class.  So this last semester I was all done with my art classes and wasn't required to take any more art classes.  But I knew that class would help me a lot in the area I struggled most with.  So I let go of my pride and registered for this class which I knew would have a bunch of brilliant artists also taking the class that I knew were very talented at drawing human heads.

I struggled!!  It was hard!!  Some of the heads I painted looked like aliens and had very deformed features. BUT some actually looked pretty good!  I learned in a very real sense the truthfulness of the scripture, "And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness.  I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me;  for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them."  As we have a desire to improve our weaknesses the Lord will help us!  I know he helped me a lot in this class (along with my amazing professor Brother Barrett) and I wouldn't quite say heads are my "strength" yet, but if I keep working I know they can become that way.

So enough talking... here's the good, the bad, and the ugly;)

This was the painting I did the very first day of class

This was the painting I did the very last day of class!

And here are all the paintings in between 

(in no particular order)

This was painted with a palette knife only (just an experiment)

and there you have it:)