Mario12

Again, a piece on Mario Maurer for the first quarter of 2014. He seems to be my only subject for the past few years… but then again, I’d been doing only one piece per year so far, out of busy-ness or sheer laziness… can’t tell. Hope I can muster enough determination to keep the passion alive for more works to come this year.

Overall, I’m happy with the outcome, especially the skin tone but I’m not totally satisfied with this piece… not being humble or anything. I actually struggled with the decision whether to stop or continue working on it for quite some time. I don’t know about other artists, if I continued on… my biggest fear would be that I may ruin the drawing. That would be a disaster.My biggest failure is that I didn’t manage to capture the emotion… the sheepish smile and the mildly squinting left eye that actually captured my eye and led me to draw it in the first place.

To me, the biggest challenge of portrait drawing is how well an artist can capture the emotions of the subject and put in it drawing that separates mediocre art from masterpieces. I’m least concerned with getting my drawings to be the exact replica of the original picture, we have scanner and photostat machines for that… they may look real, but lifeless. This is also the first time that I left the background in the rough to make the subject stand out. I also experimented with some bubbles to make the whole piece dreamy (guess it didn’t work)…haha.

Well, like life… there are bound to be imperfections. I guess we just need to learn to live with it. Life without imperfection is not perfect, likewise, art without imperfection is not real. Having said that, my quest for perfection in art CONTINUES…