Seven Days of Portraits – Day 6

Armed and dangerous with a white CarbOthello pencil, I thought it was time to try another 3/4 view. I kept all the other factors the same – dark board, mix of pastels. And away I went.

Using the pencil helped enormously – I could actually see my guidelines, and what’s more the eraser worked on them too where necessary. Great stuff.

To my surprise this portrait worked out quite well. The pastels gave a good skin tone, and technically I was learning to handle them much more adeptly, and to combine the very soft pastels with the harder Contes where finer detail was needed. Although the expression on the face is rather worried and intense, it did turn out to have a bit of me in it. I felt that with the new board and pastels, and a huge amount of focus, I’d made a great leap forward. What a relief.

Seven Days of Portraits – Day 5

I’m back, and armed with 3 new flesh-coloured pastels and some lovely dark blue/grey mountboard. Oh yes. Just looking at the board made me itch to get started.

What I didn’t consider was that I wouldn’t be able to see the pencil outline on the dark board. So I spent quite a long time adjusting my position to try to get the light to shine onto the graphite to give me a chance at getting features in the right place. It wasn’t really enough though, and I knew I was going to need a better solution.

Once I got going, the new Reeves skintone pastels worked a treat, and went on beautifully, blending where necessary with the Conte pastels. This time I’d scraped my hair right back so that I could actually see the shape of my face properly. It did help somewhat, and revealed the contrasts in light and shade that were produced by sitting alongside the kitchen window.

In summary, this was a better effort, but still looked like someone else, not me. I couldn’t stop now, maybe the next one would be the one?

Seven Days of Portraits – Day 4

Day four, and back for more punishment. I dug out another piece of spare mount board, and having re-read Betty Edwards last night, tried again, face-on. I truly did try to do the measurements…it just turned out that the picture looked nothing like me, but like some poor (much younger, still intense) soul with mumps.

It’s so hard to see the truth while drawing, and to identify where things aren’t going right. If this had been an object, I would have turned the picture upside down to try to discover what exactly was wrong. But it wasn’t until I’d finished and left the picture that I realised the multitude of dimensions which aren’t right in this one – nose too long, eyes too far apart, face too round… it’s a long list. Plus, no bright blue jumpers in future.

So, I vowed next time to observe more and worry less about what the guidelines in the book say. On the up-side, I also decided I really needed some better, flesh-coloured soft pastels and different board. So off to the art shop – hurray!

Seven Days of Portraits – Day 3

It was time to try a different view. I set up the mirror for a 3/4 view, and worked quite quickly, this time on a smooth board. Time spent was again under an hour. I was getting somewhat more accurate with proportion, partly just through repeated looking and intense focus – which you can definitely see in the expression. Peering out of the corner of your eyes at yourself can become very tiresome. It also turns out that getting your eyes to look as if they are pointing in the same direction can be really difficult.

From this one I took that the smooth board provides a really good surface for working the pastels, even those which are relatively hard like the Contes.

Seven Days of Portraits – Day 2

I just had to try the self portrait again, to see if I could improve. This time I took some advice and found a piece of leftover mount board to sketch on; I didn’t worry too much at the time that it was a sludgy green. That, it turned out, was a mistake.

Overnight I’d done some reading about portraits, mostly from Betty Edwards’ book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I’d been impressed by the way she managed, in just 5 days, to get her pupils from producing childish pictures to credible self-portraits. How hard could it be?

Betty gives a lot of useful advice about proportion and relationship between one area of the head and another. I used these techniques in my next picture. They did help, but the portrait I produced looked extremely cross and still didn’t look like me. In fact my son dubbed it Shrek princess, partly due to the green background which shows through the pastels (lesson learned).

I was encouraged that at least the board was a better surface than the heavily textured paper I had previously used, but decided that next time I would choose an even smoother card. And maybe not focus quite so much on the jowls…

Seven Days of Portraits – Day 1

So, it’s been a shocking 30 years since my last self-portrait. And for good reason. They are hard. However, recently I decided to man-up and have a go at drawing people. The first one had to be a self-portrait, as I’m the only person who will sit still whenever I ask.

I chose to work in pastels as they give good colour coverage with minimum mess and are a good stepping stone from the way graphite handles, towards blending like paint. Also, they give a soft-looking result on the paper, which is sympathetic to portraiture.

My first sketch in pastels was little more than that – 40 minutes, not much observation in truth. All the proportions were wrong, it didn’t look like me, and the paper was nasty, lumpy and scratchy (despite being sold as pastel paper). The Conte pastels I was using were quite hard, and didn’t blend the way I’d hoped. Yet, in that brief session I learned quite a lot about what hadn’t gone right. What’s more, it didn’t deter me from trying again. Onwards and upwards…

Read the blog to see how the work developed.