Realistic Self Portrait 

The main focus for my realistic self-portrait was to draw exactly what I saw in each square of my photo. In some parts of the photo only drawing the one square was too difficult so I looked at a bigger portion of my face. I had a hard time making the shadows dark enough and my face ended up looking too light. 

For the whole piece, I used two pencils. I used an HB and a 4B pencil.  For the lighter spots/highlights, I just used a cap eraser and I erased lines for the lighter pieces of hair. 

This piece turned out so much better than I expected it to in the beginning. When only a portion of my face was drawn I did not know how m=the rest of it was going to turn out and in my head, I kept repeating to myself to just trust the process. And in the end, it turned out looking almost exactly like the photo, I'm super happy it looked natural. I was worried the grid lines would show through but thankfully they didn't and it mostly looks pretty evened out.