Slef-Portrait Done

So the project is over and I have a self-portrait that needs hanging. Half of me wants to go in and scrap 2/3 of it and redo the entire thing. The other half is like ‘hell no this took forever.’. Regardless, I’m letting it go for now. I’m really happy with he lower half of my face.

As I’ve said before, noses and mouths are my first and second thing to draw, respectively.

But shall we talk about glasses? Because they are the bane of my existence. Especially with this project. I was working methodically with the inner spaces of the glasses, and I found that thinking of it like working in negative space makes sense in my brain. But. Getting these glasses to have the same shape and curve as they do in real life was the hardest thing ever. People tell me they look like them, but I’m still seeing small mistakes here and there. I ended up having to trace the shape in my sketchbook just to keep from busting an artery.

But that hair! Oh lord am I proud of it. Nell kept saying over and over to ‘draw what you see. Lights and darks.’ And I thought she was insane because there’s millions of curls on my head. So I had to take is strand by strand. I sat and did a few sketches of curls, lightening it where it bulged out and so on. I found out with my hair that you can’t be afraid of letting it blend into the black background, because that’s how it may look. But I think i’ve done a good job of it.Looking at it now, it overall looks a little asymmetrical, but I think that is due to me not measuring as much as I should have. Plus, I would like to have done more contrast in the eyes and forehead. But I think it was important to do this project. I’ve never been able to understand how artists can draw from live examples instead of pictures- there’s just too much ‘3D-ness’ to look past. But now I can. And it was hard, but worth it.