Time Capsules

For my self portrait I tried to break my old habit of accidentally cartooning what is meant to be realistic art. For example, last year I accidentally turned a realistic portrait of myself into what looked like a cartoon politician. When I look at this self portrait I can still kind of see a little bit of cartoon in it, even though that’s not what I was going for at all. My face in the drawing looks a bit bored. I tried to portray this intentionally because in the past it’s often how I’ve felt about school (not in art class though). I made this using only pencils. I didn’t take the time to border it and didn’t add any color because that's the only way I’ve ever drawn a self portrait. I drew it by using the regular template for a human skull, an oval shape with a plus on it, and also used some techniques I learned last year regarding how to place the ears and eyes. The process I used is pretty standard for self portraits. I used the mirror to get a lot of the features right, and then used my knowledge of how to draw a face for the general shape. Despite this, I still feel that it came out a little “cartoony.” In the end I tried to add some contrast by shading one side of my face. My hope was to show where light was hitting my face as you’d see in a well lit photograph. Although the mirror was somewhat helpful, I still found it difficult to make my portrait truly look like me. Since I would like to get better at this I hope to spend more time working on drawing faces and people.