Gridded value self portrait

For this project we were told to create a gridded self portrait drawing using a picture we took of ourselves to copy grid for grid and our knowledge from drawing our value scales. I used lead pencils (2B, B, ..), a tortillion, erasers, and a view finder to create my piece. I decided to go from top to bottom while drawing each grid. I was constantly looking back and forth from the original photo to my drawing. I didn't think I was going to be able to make it look realistic but once I did the first grid I continued on and eventually finished the first quarter of the drawing. After figuring out how to create different values and correctly draw a grid I kept going. I was able to finish after hours of drawing.

I used value, form, and texture to create unity with in my piece and to create an emphasis on the shape of my face (shadows, highlights). Value was probably the biggest contribute to this piece. I spent a long time trying to get the shadows and highlights correct.

Theres not really a story that goes along with this piece. Since I had a mask on I tried to make it less boring and made my eyes look big and almost surprised in the original photo. I thought it would be more interesting then just having my eyes relaxed. This relates to my life as it's a portrait of myself where I'm simply sitting in art class. I am proudest of the hair and how realistic I was able to make it. I am proud of how the different values flow in my piece. I also believe the mask came out very nicely. I struggled with the shaping of certain things. For example my eyes and top of my nose. I also had trouble with the actual grids. I think the sizing of the grids on my photo and drawing were slightly different. I thought that I could work around this but it became a bigger problem towards the end and I had to draw some things off from what the grid had in it. I feel like I did overcome this struggle by drawing the grids slightly off as it would've look distorted. Overall I think my drawing looks pretty accurate and similar to the photo but there could be a few changes - the shading and values out did the proportions in this piece of artwork.