Self Portraits

Neither of these portraits are finished, but that's not going to stop me from writing!

On the left is an observed self portrait, done by looking at myself in the mirror.  To start, I used basic proportions to place all of the main features.  Eyes are halfway down the head, and the width of them is such that five go across.  Halfway down again is the space between the nose and mouth.  The corners of the mouth matched up to somewhere in my eyes.  The height of my ears would have been from the top of my eyes to the bottom of my nose, but because of my hair, they weren't visible.

Because I was working more on the second self portrait, I didn't get to finish this one.  Using my actual reflection as a reference was challenging, because I wasn't constantly still, and I had actually gotten a haircut at one point.  However, if I had finished it entirely, I believe that my placement of the facial features would have made a good foundation for an accurate final portrait.

On the right is the second self portrait, done using the grid technique.  I drew a grid over a printed photograph of myself (which was edited to be in grayscale and have a limited number of values), and a corresponding grid of the same size on a blank sheet of paper.  By making a window with pieces of scrap paper, I could focus on one square at a time, and draw only what I saw in it.

This portrait was much more finished and looked much more realistic than the first one.  The easiest parts were areas where the hair was pretty much solid black, and the more challenging squares were in the face proper and the top of the hair (hence why they aren't completely finished yet).  Although it does look pretty good, and have all the shading and the range of values, (besides the empty squares) there's some places where white space is visible as lines between the squares.  I wasn't working on them as I went along, so I only did a few before I had to go photograph the drawing at its current stage.

I like to draw myself, especially in a stylized way.  These portraits weren't so stylized, but even so, I managed an ok job.