I recently decided to take up portraiture. A few weeks ago, I met a talented portrait artist at a party; we drew each other, and I started on a journey. This would lead me to learn new drawing skills and deepen my understanding of how others see the world.

From the start, I knew I wanted to tie the work to my existing artistic practice. Motivated by the fear of a blank page, I had made the decision early to work on top of prints of my works. I wanted to use liquid chalk for these drawings, an unusual medium that I discovered when drawing signs for friends’ businesses; these pens make it quick and easy to build up layers of vibrant, opaque colour. 

The first portraits I made weren’t good. I struggled with the fat nibs of the pens and the chalk wouldn’t flow across the textured paper of the digital prints. I made fat staccato marks where there should have been smooth flowing lines.  With some trial and error, I homed in on the perfect nib size (3mm) for the size of paper (A5). I only understood how I should be using these tools when I stopped using them.

I had early visions of minimalist, Jean Cocteau style, portraits; full of charm and evoking such character and life with a few simple pen strokes. However, as Picasso’s bull studies will show us, you can only really strip back an idea after you’ve mastered its fullness of form.

I worked with felt tip pens in an old sketchbook (the sketchbook is a repurposed US Navy book of tables of Azimuths of the Sun). I had to build up many layers of thick, childish scribbles to describe the faces I was drawing and bring form and life to them on the printed pages. Everything I learned with the felt tip pens informed my drawing style with the liquid chalk. I worked again with the chalks onto fresh, black and white patterns on a smoother paper, and I found the pens moved effortlessly. The studies I’d made in felt tip taught me how I could build up layers of bold expressive marks in liquid chalk.

With the technical challenges overcome I still needed to practise drawing as many faces as possible. I had already committed to portrait live drawing at two events in the next couple of days, so the breakthrough couldn’t have been more timely. I found the true magic of portraiture at these events.

With a pen and paper between myself and the new faces I met, I found that any awkwardness and social uncertainty melted away. With an excuse to stare at every inch of their face and no way for them to escape conversation, I quickly got to see who they were. The time spent drawing them helped me develop a greater understanding of their world. Even though I was still learning much about representing a likeness, I was finding instilling character into the image was an even greater challenge.

Our experience of another person is not fixed and frozen, like a photograph; people are always shifting, breathing, and our gaze is often restless. At a time when we can all easily capture another’s likeness with our phone, a portrait should reflect more than the physical.  The portrait should express how we experience others and ourselves, it should acquire a life of its own.

I’m still on the first leg of my journey into portraiture, but the last couple of weeks have helped me find the route I need to take. The conversations I’ve had and people I’ve met and drawn so far have opened my mind to how others see the world. To avoid a suffocating amount of small talk I decided to try and dive into deeper questions with the people I was drawing ( I recommend this approach at your next social event: try opening with ‘What do you think happens when you die? rather than ‘What do you do for a living?’). This helped me find more interesting conversations, which reveal the nature of their experience.

To understand ourselves and others we need to have these conversations, we need to find our common ground and what makes our lives unique. Creating and looking at portraits, representations of our selves as seen by another, can help us get a grip on who we are, how we experience others and how others experience the world.