Beautiful Josephine is about 18 months old in this drawing. Her mother, a dear friend, commissioned the drawing as a surprise for her husband (Can you imagine the surprise!). Drawing young children poses several challenges, the first of which is true of any drawing but especially with a child: draw with your eye, not with your mind! Their proportions will easily boggle the mind: the head dwarfs the torso, the face is enormous compared with the hands, the eyes are outlandishly large by any standards. Your mind or rather your concept of correct proportion will most often mislead you. Only the eye can be trusted, not our interpretation of what we see.
The second challenge is fat! Children are rounded with fat from their cheeks to their fingers. Drawing these round features in like crossing a vast ocean with no islands or landmarks to navigate from. The islands that are absent are bones, or rather bones near enough to the surface of the skin that we can really tangibly see how they influence structure. That cheek is an ocean of plump curve, like a plum but so much more complicated.
And yet, is anything more satisfying than the likeness of a beloved young face, mid-motion, emerging from the flat page? Well, I can think of one thing, which is the flood of emotion all those drawing hours create in the one moment when a parent sees the drawing of their child. Making fathers cry has become one of my specialties.