Graphite Self Portrait

I drew a self-portrait of myself, as well as a segmented value strip, on the left. I decided to draw a rainbow for my value strip because I thought it was a good idea to include my 10 values in a row, and a rainbow I think fits well with that. While shading the values, I built my skill of shading and adding contrast. For the self-portrait, I definitely learned how to shade better, especially where the sun lit up my face and where I needed to build shadows on the edges of my face. Drawing the hair, I built contrast and added the highlights where I needed them, trying to get a clear representation of myself. Of course, though, creating my self-portrait, I only had to draw square by square, which made it easier.

The materials that I used while making this self-portrait included graphite on drawing paper. I mainly used HB for the self-portrait, but I also used 2B, 4B and, 2H for the hair, my eyes and, my shirt. When I created my segment value strip, I used all the values of graphite I could. From using 4H for the first segment of the rainbow to using a 6B graphite pencil for the last row of the rainbow.

The process of creating my self-portrait took many steps. For the first step, I had a choice between taking a picture of myself or finding a picture I had already taken, so I decided to take a picture of myself. After that, I gridded out my reference picture of myself and the drawing paper I would use. Additionally, I began to sketch 1-inch squares one by one starting in the top left corner. This process took some time since I had to fill in 70 squares. The project wasn't too difficult though because I was just matching square by square with the photocopy version. So, the entire time I was drawing this, I made sure each square lined up and the drawing looked somewhat similar.