
This is the first pencil outline. Ade the glasses look too big. I am finding now that glasses actually make things harder, as opposed to easier, They make it harder to paint eyes faithfully because they introduce this intermediation between the shape of the face, and the eyes, via the shape of the glasses, and the position of the eyes within those glasses

When I finished this drawing, I realized that this guy does not look like my father in important ways. First, this guy is chubby. Second, he looks self-content, which my father is not. Third, he looks "precious" in a way that "sissies" might look like (Tunisiois? my wife won't like this :-)), but my father is anything but. He is humble, as solid as rock, and not self-indulgent in the least. Thus, I "fixed it" in the actual painting where I added "character" to the face (perhaps too much, changing the "self-contented" attitude to sadness.

The eyes are a bit too big, and if I could remove the sadness, this would be great. My father was not a sad person, he was bit self-conscious/anxious in a nice, non-neurotic way, but generally a happy person

This is the first pencil outline. Ade the glasses look too big. I am finding now that glasses actually make things harder, as opposed to easier, They make it harder to paint eyes faithfully because they introduce this intermediation between the shape of the face, and the eyes, via the shape of the glasses, and the position of the eyes within those glasses
A SERIES
Obbaya
Wow. Now we are getting into deep stuff. A portrait of my father, mostly from a "recent" picture (a few years). There isn't really much to read into it. Whichever character the painting has is not a result of deep something coming out in the painting. It is mostly the consequence of good or bad drawing strokes. But let us just say that my father has a couple of characteristics that make him "easy" to paint in a distinguishable way: 1) eye glasses, 2) his very personal way of wearing his "kabbous", i.e. the Tunisian hat (a contraption of Turkish origin), and 3) some very characteristic wrinkles, specially in his neck and under his chin. One of my siblings said that he looked sad. That was not the intent. His eyes are probably too big--a typical beginner's mistake. And he is made to look more chubby that he was (he was chubby in his youth, when he was diagnosed with blood pressure in his late forties/early fifties, got disciplined about his eating habits in ways that only he could, and lost quite a bit of weight).