Fun Fact Friday: The Etruscans and Portraits
I’m still talking about the Etruscans (they are my favorite ancient civilization after all). And this might just be the thing I find most interesting about them!
The Etruscans broke away from the generic style of drawing portraits used by the Egyptians and Greeks and began portraying individualized detail of their subjects. Here’s an article that shows some examples of Etruscan tomb paintings.
Since a good share of my current supporters haven’t been on my lifelong art journey through the last few decades, this seems like a great time to mention that I’ve been known to draw a portrait or two over the years.
In all seriousness, a lot of my very early work was portraits. When I was a kid I was dragged to all kinds of sporting events. After getting completely bored, I would start to draw the things I saw around me. Usually this meant drawing the people I saw in the stands or the players. Later in high school I would draw pencil sketches from photos of friends (or their daughter in this instance. Apologies for the low quality pictures, cameras were not what they are today back in 2001.)
Much later as an adult, I was lucky in that my employer offered free college courses on any subject to the employees. After taking all the available classes related to my job that I hadn’t already taken, I started taking a couple art courses. One of them was a portrait class where I learned how to draw from live models using pastels.
We had a lot of fun coming up with a different character and mood for each drawing. These two are two of my favorites to come out of that class, and also are both of the same model. Both are part of my personal collection awaiting wall space to be properly displayed (they’re both quite large).
Another drawing I did just for fun using only one yellow and one purple colored pencil based on a woman I saw in a magazine. I had a lot of fun with the shadows and highlights and enjoyed the challenge of using only two pencils.
I hope you enjoyed dipping into some of my past portraits as well as learning something interesting about my favorite ancient civilization!
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