Expressive Self Portrait

General description-what did you draw and what materials did you use?

For my expressive self-portrait, I drew a photo of myself from the head to the top of the shoulders. As for materials, I used white conte crayon (used on the skin to clear it up) as well as black conte, 6B pencil (for outline), and compressed graphite.

I decided to use the grid method in order to help me plot everything out — I put my original photo through a grid and created the same grid on my paper. Using the grid made things a little easier at first, but once I got more accustomed to what I wanted and where I wanted it to go, I didn’t need the grid as much. (After all, I was drawing my face — I should know where everything is.)

I would say that the mass majority of my problems came with adding value with multiple mediums. Once I made the overall outline of the self-portrait, I was quite pleased with what I had made — it looked accurate — but once I added value using darker mediums (the black conte) it had completely changed the face and I could no longer tell that the facial expression in the drawing was like that in the reference photo.

All marks made during the planning/outlining stage are intentional, but lots of marks made during shading are not and are instead accidents that I decided to keep. I adjusted the eyes and the lips because the marks over them were too dark (there was no whiteness in the eyes, and once the lower lip was darker than the upper lip it looked like the facial expression/overall face had changed). Something that I incorporated into the drawing was the marks made in the butterfly locs (the hair); the overall way I shaded them was a mistake, but once it grew on me I decided to keep it as it was.

I spent approximately an hour planning and then 3 and a half hours working on the actual drawing (2 hours of outlining and the remainder was used for shading). I didn’t have any problems with choosing materials in the beginning — I wanted one pencil to help me do one thing, and that was outlining the self-portrait — but I may have been apprehensive when the first step was over. White conte was something I had on hand but I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to use it — I was afraid it’d make my work worse somehow. In the end, using it was one of my better ideas and served as a solution to the problem of how dark some of my shading was.