Portrait of Zoe

BallFiend's drawings are almost always very technical, usually they are aerial views of pipes with various marbles or other objects rolling around in them. Or cross-sections of plumbing...

BallFiend's drawing of the bathroom sink in cross-section, done in early-2012.

He almost always draws in pen or texta and usually only uses one colour, occasionally two or three.

So I was amazed to discover this picture whilst going through BallFiend's school bag yesterday afternoon (during the daily check for important school notices):

"Zoe", portrait by BallFiend, 24 October 2012.

He said proudly: "It's a 'self-portrait of Zoe". Zoe is a girl in his prep class and someone who he has become quite friendly with recently.

We showed it to DeepSpice when he got home, and after some discussion, DeepSpice established that this wasn't actually a self-portrait and that BallFiend was in fact the artist. BallFiend assured us he drew it all himself... though I do wonder if he worked on it with Zoe - the eyes and nose are very much in BallFiend's own style, but I've never seen him draw a mouth/teeth, or a Sun, and he's never done sky and grass like that before.

The picture is also interesting because he rarely even does any representative drawings and I reckon I can count on one hand the number of times BallFiend has drawn a representation of a person that he knows!

There was the time he drew Gran, back when he was 3-and-a-half. Then there was this picture he did of "Mum and me":

"Mum and me" by BallFiend, 28 May 2012.

There is also this picture he drew on Mother's Day earlier this year, while we were dining out, but it was just a face, not of anyone in particular:

A face, by BallFiend, 13 May 2012.

These pictures show how he has been focusing on how to represent facial features (it took The Librarian, with her fine art background, to point this out to me!)

It's lovely to see all BallFiend's thinking about how to represent a face come together into a whole drawing. It's also great to see BallFiend developing new friendships. I just hope Zoe doesn't take having a green nose and yellow teeth the wrong way!

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