christmas fayre portraits

On Saturday I spent three hours drawing portraits for a church Christmas fayre. I’m not really a portrait artist, and I did them very quickly, but the kids didn’t seem to mind, running around trying to figure out how best to spend their money. I think I drew about 25 people. I did a couple decent ones of adults, but most of the little kids had no idea how to sit still and their portraits showed about 20 expressions and head angles in one picture. (The trickiest was trying to draw a girl in full face paint!) The idea was to raise money to replace the church toilets, a couple thousand pounds needed, but I think all 20 people or so, working away and selling cakes and books and things, only pulled in about 100 quid. The toilets will have to wait a bit longer. (Any donations can go here!)

I just found some good websites:
LookyBook, a site that lets you read picture books online in full. Here’s one by Istvan Banyai and here’s what I’ve assembled on my bookshelf so far.

Thumbtack Press, a site for buying and selling prints,

and The Sartorialist; I read an interesting article in Saturday’s Guardian magazine, about this guy named Scott Schuman who goes around taking photos of well dressed people on the street for his blog. Even though he’s just walking up to people and taking their photos, he still manages to get brilliant compositions and backgrounds.