The growth of a painter : Gerard Bryceland? Drawing with charcoal is definitely much messier than graphite, and after working on a drawing for some time, you’ll probably have black palms and fingerprints. This isn’t a bad thing. It just means that if you are planning to draw with charcoal, you need to be prepared to clean up afterward. When drawing with charcoal, you have more range with what direction you want to take your self-portrait in. You can draw on a smooth surface, and if you are careful, you can create a beautiful picture with a full range of soft tones. Or you can draw on a rough surface and create a rougher portrait. One of the more advanced techniques that you can try with charcoal is adding water to the mix. Adding water to charcoal will allow you to create washes of greys, as well as intense blacks. If you want to try adding water to your charcoal drawing, make sure that you use a heavier watercolor paper.
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.
Gerard Bryceland‘s tips on portret painting: The White of the Eye: a dark grey glaze is mixed from scarlet red, yellow medium azo and phthalocyanine blue and lightened with opaque titanium white. This is then applied in graduated layers to render the dark tones of the white of the eye. Note how the upper eyelid casts a strong shadow across the eye while the lower eyelid registers a weaker one. These shadows create the illusion that eyeball is resting comfortably in its socket. The Iris: glazes of burnt sienna and titanium white are combined to suggest the refracted light of the brown iris. A little Prussian blue is added to darken the burnt sienna around the outer edge of the iris.
Self-Portrait Drawing Tips: Don’t obsess over creating a perfect likeness of yourself. As an artist, you should be working to express yourself, and that expression includes drawing what you feel as much as what you see. If you want a perfect copy of your face, you can take a picture for that. If you want an intriguing and thought-provoking self-portrait, then worry more about the mood of the piece rather than trying to create a photo-realistic drawing. Color can be your friend. Whoever said that a self-portrait has to be black and white? You could draw your self-portrait in graphite or charcoal, or you could be more adventurous and try colored pencils, pastels, or oil pastels. Or, you could really step your game up and try painting a self-portrait with watercolors, gouache, acrylics, or oils.
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.