Thursday, August 6, 2009

David Kassan's "Portrait Anatomicae"

Figurative artist David Jon Kassan sets the realism bar high with his richly drawn portraits and paintings. His attention to surface and structure is translated into traditional figure studies as well as work that combines abstraction and figuration.

His self-published "Portrait Anatomicae" is a teaching aid for drawing the human head (with and without muscle, skin and personality), and my students have found it to be an extremely helpful resource. Kassan also provides an excellent benchmark by which to measure realism, i.e., "You want it to look 'real?' Keep going."

Portrait Anatomicae is $10 (USD) and is downloadable from his website at http://www.davidkassan.com/drawings.shtml .

Also worth seeing is a time-lapse video of a three-hour portrait session by Kassan, collapsed into eight minutes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84s3I-1SZHo

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