Meet Gerard Bryceland and some of his painting opinions? While drawing from life with a self-portrait involves using a mirror, and it is challenging, it’s also a challenge that is definitely worth taking. Many artists will tell you that there’s nothing quite like drawing from life, so even though drawing while looking in a mirror might be difficult, it’s quite rewarding. One thing you can do to make the process a bit easier on yourself is to take a backup photo. Once you have your pose in the mirror down, take out your phone and take a quick picture. You can use this as a guide to ensure that your light source doesn’t change and to help you capture little details that may not show up in the mirror. Sometimes less is more. But that’s not always the case when you are drawing a self-portrait. You could draw a minimalist self-portrait, and it could turn out amazing. But if you want to do a highly detailed self-portrait, you are going to have to spend some more time and effort on the process.
Lightly sketch an egg-shaped circle on your paper, you can use an HB pencil for this if you’re worried about drawing too hard. Then make a straight vertical line at the middle of the face, dividing it in half as symmetrically as you can. Then make a straight horizontal line in the middle of the face measuring from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, crossing over your vertical line. At the image below the top of the head, the center, and the bottom of the chin are all marked using blue lines. Observe on your model or your reference where the hairline is and mark that on your portrait drawing, in the sketch below it is marked with the topmost red line. Using that hairline marking and the marking at bottom of the chin, divide that section into three equal parts. Below, red lines are used to show these three divisions. These lines will serve as your main guide lines for drawing in each of the facial features.
Gerry Bryceland‘s recommendations on portret painting: The eyes are the most important detail of a portrait and it is essential that you paint them first. They are the focal point of the face and the feature that brings the image to life. If, at the outset, you can suggest that spark of vitality which the eyes bring to a portrait, you will establish a strong foundation for the work, which in turn, will give you the confidence to tackle the other features of the face. There are a few key elements that you need to capture in painting an eye: the solidity of the eyeball and surrounding eyelids, the luminosity of the iris, the depth of the pupil, and the reflected highlight on the surface of the eye.
How To Draw An Accurate Self-Portrait? Drawing a human face is one of the most challenging artistic endeavors. There is nothing that people are more familiar with than the human face, so if you draw a human face that isn’t proportionate, or that has anything else wrong with it, people will notice. Drawing a human face that has a recognizable likeness is even more challenging since every face is unique. If you are drawing a portrait capturing a likeness is very challenging, and for many artists, it’s even more challenging when it’s their own face they are drawing. Fortunately, there are many different techniques that you can try employing to capture a realistic likeness of your face.
About Gerard Bryceland: I’m Gerard Bryceland an artist based in Maidstone Kent and regularly get commissioned to do work doing paintings and portraits of people and their families. I’ve always been an artist from my childhood, I loved drawing my friends and family initially just to mess around with my friends and had a lot of fun drawing them. But as i got older it really just became a business as my friends and their families would want me to do family portraits and that type of thing. With word of mouth word gets out and before you know it you know it I’m 35 and still doing the same thing.