I’ll follow Stuart’s advice and post something cheerier and less morbid (mostly). So here’s a range of faces seen on a day trip to Oxford, most from the wonderful Ashmolean Museum, which I’ve posted about before. They span the whole history of portraiture, from the twenty-five thousand year old ‘Venus of Brassempouy’, through the second century CE Indian sculpture of an ascetic and a Roman Fayum mummy portrait (a brief return to the death-related), to happy faces in a lovely twentieth-century Chinese print. The final face is contemporary, seen on the train home; he’d fallen asleep…
Lexington grey in Kuretake #40 brush-pen and water-brush, water-colour, A5 – about 15 mins per face?
Mostly drawing 
Ed, I think the guy “sleeping” on the train is also dead 🙂 But you know what they say, Morpheus is Death’s little brother. The faces are great! But you know me, I love figures and “people” drawings.
He doesn’t look well does he… I too love figure drawing, but always sketches of people out and about. How do you find life-drawing classes. Useful?
Useful …. hmmm .. I really needed to think about that one. I like going there and seeing the same people I’ve been drawing with for 2 years. But I have to teach myself everything outside the class. Nothing I’ve read about in my 20 books is introduced at this class (gesture, force, line of action, perspective, bones(!), mass, cross contour). I’d say, it’s good to get a good look at a real life naked person, but the poses I get to draw are just simply too short (max. 15 minutes). It’s nice to see what materials others are using and nice to try a new tool out every few months. And my course is literally “just around the corner” from home. If you have the opportunity, and haven’t done it before, I’d say, give it a try. It’s certainly exciting!