Today’s post is all about graphite portrait practice. I have set myself a goal of doing a self portrait each year to see how I improve over time. I haven’t spent a ton of time practicing self portraits because I get so frustrated at the early stages. These upcoming photos aren't finished portraits, but maybe I do see a bit of improvement over the one I did last year -- what do you think?
The supplies I'm using are a Strathmore toned sketch pad, My Art Tools sketch pencils and charcoals, and MARKART Professional White Charcoal pencils.
I’ll go through the process over a couple of posts. I practiced a lot of the Andrew Loomis technique, where you break the head up into a sphere and planes of the sphere, but I haven’t been very methodical about it. I mostly end up just trying to draw what I see. Here are the first two sketches.
The first one consists of simple outlines where I’m trying to get the features down in the right proportions to each other.
The second one is where I refine and start in on my shading.
Here’s one I did from last year. I actually like how my features look in this one better. But I think I’ve definitely improved in terms of the hair shading.
I’m not done yet, so I hope I can fix some of the proportion problems (it looks a bit like looking at my face through a fish-eye lens, but that could be because I’m drawing it from a photo). The photo also has really low contrast, which isn’t the greatest for portrait practice. But onward and upward.
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