Realistic Self Portrait

Artist statement

The main idea that has guided this artwork was to draw a realistic self portrait that resembles my baby picture almost exactly. For this assignment you could pick a picture of you either a current day picture or an old picture of yourself. I choose to draw an old picture of myself. The picture I choose was of me smiling around the age of 3-4. The picture was in color but I changed it to a black and white picture.

This artwork was made with simple graphite pencils, a rule, tortillions, all on pastel paper. The first thing I did to create my art was draw a grid of 7x9 one inch squares using my ruler. After doing this both on my picture and my drawing paper I started to copy the values in each square from my photo onto my drawing paper. To match the values I used my graphite value strip to make sure my photo would match in tones to my drawings. After matching the first square I went row by row until I finished.

This drawing was mostly simple to create with the exception of one thing. The one thing that was very difficult was trying to figure out where my hair was separated from my forehead. This was difficult because I had to find the correct tones to not make my forehead and hair blend together. I eventually figured it out by making my hair lighter so they looked like too different things not blended together.