#13 – Draw a self portrait

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while but it always scared me… It is difficult to stare in a mirror or look at a photo of yourself for an extended period of time and draw or paint yourself without picking apart all of your flaws (both physical flaws of yourself and also flaws in your drawing skills in that your drawing doesn’t look enough like you as you wish it would).

Earlier this year my friend Erin took some really awesome photos of me (thanks again!) and some of them were in black and white… so finally having a worthy portrait to draw from motivated me to suck it up and attempt it LOL.

After sketching the outline I decided that I didn’t want to do a typical pencil portrait as I normally would. I have recently discovered an artist named Sylvia Ji whose work I am absolutely in love with, especially her paintings based on the Mexican Day of the Dead Catrinas, and was inspired. Most of her work is acrylic on board, but considering that I am not much of a painter and have never painted on anything other than canvas, I decided to stay within my comfort zone and do a colour portrait using pencil crayons. Yep I busted out my PrismaColors that I have had since Grade 7 LOL. And after having used a much superior pencil crayon recently (thanks to my art teacher, Terrence) I think I agree with him that I need to upgrade in quality if I want to continue using this medium!

I really like how it turned out and may continue similar works… I have not decided what to do next yet… however, to sell a piece of my art is another item on my list – anyone interested?? :)

Here is a slideshow of the evolution of my self portrait: