Realistic Self Portrait

Purpose:

• To use the correct facial proportions to draw yourself as accurately as you can;

• To draw the individual features, eyes, nose, mouth in a convincing 3D way;

• To use graphite and a stomp to show value changes and dimension.

I noticed throughout the making of this self portrait that the way I draw people is in a very unrealistic and the way I approach drawing a face isn't the best, by outlining all of the features, especially the mouth, nose, and cheekbones. My final is a lot more shaded and the face looks a lot more 3d, plus the hair is shaded exactly where the lighter parts of my hair are, and it shows exactly where the light in the photo is coming from. Overall I learned that when drawing the nose I should only draw the bottom lightly, then the rest I should just shade in to show the shape of it. This is the same for the cheekbones and where the eye socket is, I shouldn't sketch the actual shape of it but rather just shading it a little depending on where the light source is, and not making it too obvious because it won't look realistic. 

One concept I learned when making this was to not sketch out features like the nose fully and to only draw the bottom half of the nose because the rest will be defined by the shading to show the dimension of it. In my first drawing I also very darkly drew the bottom of the nose which will cause it to look unrealistic and make it easy to smudge. The nose is not the darkest feature on the face, and in my first drawing I made this mistake, but in my final I made sure to only use shading to show the nose, and not make it too dark.

Another concept I learned was that I should draw the hair in chunks to separate it since actual hair does behave this way and separates itself. Hair doesn't just stay all together in one peice, and it would also make it harder for myself to shade the whole head of hair together if I didn't separate it into parts. After I separated it I shaded in each piece one by one, making sure to pay attention to the ombre effect my hair has, going from dark at the roots to getting lighter, especially because the light shining on me in the picture brought out the lighter parts of my hair even more. I worked hard to pull out these light pieces since my hair is closer to the lighter side. In the first drawing I did the hair seems to be all in one part, and is very flat and thin with no dimension. I added wispy pieces coming off of my hair in my final and made sure the shading shown the dimension my hair has.

Lastly I learned that In my pre-instructional the face looks very flat, though I tried to pull out the features by outlining the cheekbones and eye sockets. This made my face look unrealistic and made it look a different shape than my actual face is, and I realised that I also drew out the cheekbones to be too big. My plan for the first one was to sketch the parts that needed the most shading, but if I would have done that, I wouldn't of had the shading in the right spots, since in my final one side of my face has almost no shading, especially at the cheekbones and eye sockets. Though my pre-instructional self portrait isn't finished, my technique before wasn't a good place to start drawing the features by just outlining them; the best way to start is to create the features with very light sketching and then shade it in to pull them out in a 3d looking way.