SMILE Pt. 1

Smile demonstrates some of my portrait work, captured in the field (I wasn’t actually in a literal field - it was more often than not in one of the dozens of cafés near where I live), in my trusty red Moleskine sketchbook, and then translated in ProCreate on my iPad.

It was during 2020, when Covid was beginning to take it’s grip on the world.

Because many people were wearing masks, it became hard to capture their true likeness, with their mouths covered with a random array of patterns. So, like any sensible artist, I just started leaving the mouths out completely, often truncating their faces to create these bizarre looking weirdos. Sometimes they ended up looking quite cartoony, sometimes slightly more serious.

Either way, it started what has become an obsession with sitting drawing people in cafés, without bothering to give them mouths.

I mean, who needs a voice these days anyway, right?