Porthos
When sitting down to draw, if I start with an idea in mind, I will usually begin with a skeleton sketch of the figure first, boxes and circles and messy lines as I build up the pose and weight and so on.
However, on those frequent occasions when I’m uninspired and can’t think of anything to draw, the first thing I start with is a line. Quite a small, short line. Sometimes crooked, sometimes straight, sometimes a little bent at the end. I decide whether that line looks like a nose, or the line of a brow, or the outline of a neck, or the edge of a noble jaw. Then I add other lines around it, adding features little by little, till I build up a face.
Once I have the face, I continue adding my favourite parts: hair, clothes, refining their features, finding their character along the way.Sometimes it’s a disaster from start to finish and I have to scrap the whole thing…!
For the piece I’m about to share, however, it all went quite smoothly, and I tried to turn it into Porthos from The Three Musketeers. He’s a jolly fellow (though a few lines went wrong in his face, so he became a less-than-portly Porthos).
Porthos has always been the Musketeer that I remember easiest, and therefore he is my favourite (besides, I’m very fond of comic relief characters).
That’s all I have for this week. Thanks for reading!
xx The Inky Baroness
I love it. As soon as I saw him, before even reading the post, I knew he had to be a musketeer!
What if I told you that Porthos isn't supposed to be 'portly' at all? (And therefore you have made a most splendid rendition. 10/10.) In the book, Porthos is described as "of great height and haughty countenance" but straight after Aramis is described as "a stout man," so I'm going to guess that the two get conflated. Meanwhile Porthos is based off of the real life Isaac de *Porthau.* I wasn't able to find much on whether or not either of the names suggest 'portly' as they do in English, but it is definitely a misnomer according to Dumas' description. There are lots of depictions of Porthos being the heaviest-set of the lot (namely the 1993 film adaptation, for recent memory) with more recent adaptations going for the giant-of-a-man idea. Personally, this is my favorite illustration of Porthos!