Graphite self portrait 

For the self portrait my main focus was paying attention to small details so as to make it as realistic as possible.  It was sometimes hard to look at things that I was insecure about and draw them as they were, but those small things are what make up your appearance so I tried to include them as accurately as possible. I also wanted to put some kind of feeling into my drawing which I'm not sure really happened, but for example when you look at a famous work of art you can sometimes almost see what the artist was feeling when they were doing the piece. I wanted my drawing to not just look like a statue, but to look like I was living a life and was doing something at that moment. 

I used only graphite pencil to complete this work. I started out with just a light pencil to just sketch out what was in the square, then I would go in with a softer pencil to replicated the tones shown in the photo that I was copying. In the creases and things I used a 6B and on the lighter areas I used an HB and then everything in between. I tended not to use the H pencils except for beginning sketching, and for the grid. 

To start out, I was very overwhelmed but I had to just go square by square which seemed to work well in the end.  Once I had printed out the photo, I drew a border with the same dimensions as the photo so that I could directly copy from the picture. Then I gridded them both by 1" and began to draw starting in the top left and working my way across again and again. I used a veiw finder so that I could focus on only one square without being distracted by the rest of the drawing and photo. Once I had finished it, I took a picture and I realized some things looke off, so I realized that photography was an effective method for spotting bad parts. So I repeated that several times before I was truly finished.