Self Portrait

I was really dreading this project because people are literally one of my least favorite things to draw ever... I hate it. No matter how hard I try I feel like I can never get the proportions right; one eye is always a little bigger than the other or the lips aren't the right size, something is always off. I think I spent three or so days on just a practice drawing then another three days just drawing the outline on the final. I kept drawing and then redrawing different parts just to make sure I got them right or as close as I possibly could. I worked on the dress first probably because it was the easiest part of the whole project. Next I started on the hair and it was very time consuming. Since I wanted to do almost everything in black and white colored pencil it took a lot of layering to get the different values in the hair. I had originally wanted it to look really smooth but as I layered the colored pencil it had a really cool texture to it that I really liked, it looked like strands of hair which made that part look much more realistic, so I left it. It took hours and hours to finish the hair I felt like it was never ending. Once I finally finished the hair I moved on to the face. I had decided in the beginning that I wanted to add some color so it wasn't all black and white. When we first came up with idea for this project it was close to Halloween so I wanted it to be somewhat Halloween inspired. I ended up going with a vampire like theme so I was going to make my eyes bright red and have blood dripping from my mouth. Next was the part I was dreading the most, the face. First I drew the eyes and my glasses and I started shading with the colored pencils from the bottom of my glasses up. Then I drew the nose and shaded from there to the spot where my mouth was supposed to be. I practiced a bunch with the mouth but I could never get it right so I ended up asking McKayla how she does it and she ended up showing me how to make it look like actually lips. So then I drew lips that actually looked like lips and finally finished shading the rest of the face. Getting the values in the face was a lot harder than I thought because you had to make it lighter than the hair but not lose the different values that are there. Finally I got to the part with color. I practiced a bit with the watercolors before I started on the actually project. The watercolor really added the color I wanted and draws your eyes toward the eyes, which is exactly the effect I wanted.