A Wry Smile

Eventually this blog will be my platform to experiment and try out all sorts of new things in different media. However, portraits are my first love - and my bread and butter - so in the first place I plan to share my latest portrait drawings and tell a bit of their story.

A Wry Smile, Pastel Pencil on Strathmore Paper
Size 40cm x 30cm (mount size 50cm x 40cm)
£250 / $350

Here, the photograph very clearly showed a man with an asymmetric smile. This gives a huge amount of character and adds humour to the face, and definitely never something I would try to disguise. As we get older our faces become less symmetric and in many ways make us more endearing. In fact, this always puts me in mind of one of the most beautiful literary quotes ever:

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” Roald Dahl, The Twits.

However, just as you've learnt to draw a mouth so it looks 'right', now it seems we have to draw a mouth that's off-centre. How can that ever look right? I find the trick is to observe all the other features very carefully. If a mouth is raised a lot more on one side than the other, then this is invariably because the muscle of that cheek is contracted more than the other. This will cause several clues that you should see in the sitter/photograph and can then be used in your drawing as clues to the viewer. eg, one eye more closed, a crease and increased volume in the contracted cheek, facial hair pushed higher up on the elevated side.
There's only one way to learn to create a believable asymmetric mouth and I'm afraid, that's good old-fashioned practice, but I hope that my tips will help you achieve your goal just a little bit quicker. The above pastel pencil drawing can be purchased for $350 and as with all my portrait drawings it will be mounted (matted) to a size of 50cm by 40cm.