A few weeks into semester two of school, our art teacher started to get us ready to make a self portrait for our first formal project. We spent double periods in class studying the facial features – eyes, nose, mouth.

My classmates bemoaned our new course, stating that it’s “boring” and “highkey stressful lmao”, which to some extent, I had to agree with. Drawing features in class, compared to our previous music composition/music history class with a lovely woman named Ms. Beaudry, art studio was bland. However, it was still a graded class, so of course we couldn’t complain too much.

After a week or two, we had a spread of facial features done. These are shown below:

I feel like, despite having drawn for quite some time, the practice was helpful. I hadn’t studied the facial features since approximately five years ago, not formally at least; it got me back into the mindset of improving my fundamentals before moving on to bigger, more complicated composition pieces.

(That’s actually what I’m doing right now! I’m studying a lot of figure drawings, just because I feel like it’s a skill I need to brush up on. I’m also figuring out my own unique art style for drawing characters, because I want to try dabbling in the fanart community. There’s a lot of talented artists there and I really want to be under their influence, so that my taste skyrockets. And you can’t really draw cartoon characters realistically all the time… so yeah. I feel like I can only start creating an art style when my sense of character is really on point, because that’s how I can understand movement, which is deeply tied with a character’s personality, and that’s why I’m doing studies!)

Shortly after our facial features assignment, we started thinking about our portraits. I didn’t want to do any typical portrait, because I felt like that would be giving myself an easy way out (and probably a way too easy A), so I tried to think up some things. I debated on going outside in the early morning to get a reference photo with fancy lighting, but unfortunately the sun decided to stay in the clouds that day (despite Google having claimed the morning to be perfectly sunny and clear). But I kept thinking about lighting and perspective, and eventually I had looked at my own mirror and gone “huh….”—

That resulted in this oddly trippy black and white photo that I personally really like.

(Looking at it now, my result is not entirely accurate… I wasn’t able to capture the mood of it, and the lighting, properly. My rendition is too bright. However, it’s too late to change that, so I’ll leave it as is and save the lesson for my next piece.)

I first started out with a very rough sketch. I was working on regular printer-sized cardstock, which is larger than my previous pieces, so I underestimated the proportions and drew a little too large. That was okay, though— I just needed my full face in the image. I didn’t need all of the reference.

Then I started shading in the face. I faced a few difficulties, mainly shading the nose (which I had unknowingly drawn very, very crooked) and also making the shadows as smooth as possible. The larger the canvas, the more noticeable the ticks; so I was very nitpicky as how the gray tones blended into each other.

In the reference image, the light comes from almost straight above, which means I had to create some sort of contrast – highlights and dark shadows would create this effect well. Unfortunately, I think I didn’t quite nail this aspect; I tried to make all the “normal” lighted skin (skin without notable shadows or highlights) the color of the paper for extra contrast, but that ended up negating all the highlights on my nose and forehead.

Below is the first image I took of my progress; I had just started shading in my hair, which would be a very dark layered graphite, because the image shows my hair as almost purely black. I started the hair by going over with a light graphite dust before shading in with 3B or 5B pencil, before finally going over it in 8B. Even after all these tones, the shade is way too light to match to the original reference, but this isn’t really something I can fix unless I use charcoal. I personally don’t have any on me, and not nearly enough experience to confidently put in down, so I just stuck with what I had.

After that, I just kept working. The hand took a little longer to shade in; the number of values on it were complex, and due to my limited experience with shading in hands, I couldn’t reference what I already know about the hand’s structure. I just had to follow the reference as well as I could.

The clothing sleeve— I actually found that really fun to do! I don’t know, I guess I just have a thing for fabric 🙂 I was also drawing some fabric today and it really fascinated me. I think I might do some studies dedicated to it… and maybe I’ll post those too.

I approached clothing the same way I would skin; first I defined the shadows with a few lines, then shaded them in lightly with graphite dust, and started using various pencils for the different values. Overall turned out pretty great, maybe one of the highlights of the drawing!

After standing with the drawing in front of a mirror (a good tip to see if your drawing looks good even flipped around), I finally noticed how off the nose was… ugh. I had to erase some of my careful shading, but it turned out alright in the end.

Below is my second progress image, with one hand shaded in, the face, the hair, and the clothing!

It was smooth sailing after I fixed it. I did a short Instagram live stream where I did the background and touched up the hand, and that was about it.

However, this self portrait is actually no longer completely accurate— I decided to chop off a good section of my hair a few days after I started drawing, and now I have bangs and two side fringe things. I recently took another reference image, this time I’m in a bathroom and, rather funnily, soaked in water— it’ll be a good challenge, methinks.