yeah, kind of agonized whether to share or not, as I’m far from happy with the results. this is my self-portrait; done carefully from a reference using the grid method.
but you know . this just MIGHT be one of my most intense drawings and I did in fact really try very hard to do it! by that measure alone I suppose it must be considered a success.
also it “taught” a lot of little lessons about drawings
Getting beyond resemblance means a LOT of accuracy! even a grid (which I obviously used) didn’t make it accurate enough.
the Glasses particularly was a place where there was insufficient accuracy. clearly I needed to scrutinize much more closely what its exact shape was. as Matt often says in his demo’s; you get very Exact shapes by sketching Loose; and then finding the most exact line at every place
Shading problems still plague me. In fact i could still me making small amounts of improvement in various places by scrutinizig shading. every time you darken an area of a drawing; you are lightening other places of contrast; so there’s a immense amount of shading to be done.
the demands of accuracy in the key facial features are HUGE; the eyes, nose and mouth get a huge amount of focus in a portrait.
lastly; its probably universally true that one could spend many many years working on portraits and still routinely miss the strict demands of drawing a portrait. So I probably ought to try to be happier about this n00b effort than I am.
Truthfully though, I don’t think I’m passionate enough about portraits to work through all the tough issues of perfecting portrait drawings.
the point was to tackle something truly hard; get some kind of resemblance and prove to myself that I’m willing to tackle nearly all kind of subject matter.