A Horrible Turn of Fate Took the Life of Marvin D. Lord

" On february 2 1945, foul weather cancelled the following day's mission over Berlin. With his commander's approval, B-17 pilot Manny Klette went to London to see his girlfriend. But the weather broke, and the mission was back on. Lord, who was eager to go, took Klette's place as pilot and was shot down; he was killed along with Klette's entire crew. Lord's photograph is part of a collection by the late Army Air Forces Photographer Gerald R. Massie of Jefferson City, Missouri."

-National Geographic, Vol. 3, No. 185, March 1994, pg. 94

Less than perfect, but all said it turned out well. After months experimentation and practice, I feel like I'm finally starting to enroach on a finishing style that I'm comforable showing to editors, art directors, and reps worldwide. This one was done of the carboard backing of my current sketchbook, 17x14, using watercolour pencils softened and blended with washes of white acrylic, and then gone over with line work in a deep blue acrylic ink. The Neutral density of the brown backing board helped tone down the intensity of the colours which adds alot of depth to the image. It was copied from a National geographic, which isn't exactly high style, and the underlying drawing was done while I was half asleep at three in morning, randomly, thus explaining the generally distorted nature of his mouth and chin. But the eyes are right, so it looks like the person I'm drawing. The two hundred hours or so I've spent drawing faces from my perch at the cafe, out of papers and magazines, and the bi-weekly figurative drawing sessions, since January, are slowly starting to pay off. Drawing a face is easy, but capturing someone's character, and the emotional nuance that goes with it, is very fussy. It's even harder to paint the thing without blowing it.

The problem with faces is that we have a whole section of our brain dedicated to recognizing them- if the tiniest thing is out of proportion or at the wrong angle, it blows it entirely. Whatever, I'm progressing. By midsummer I hope to have a proper porfolio put together.