Looking at Faces - Exercise: Self-Portrait

I began this exercise by completing three self-portraits in charcoal (below – in the order I did them) to practice angles and forms.

This one’s not very good!  The right side of the face isn’t too bad but the eye and the angles on the left side are wrong.  The lips are also too big. 

The second one is better but the face is slightly too broad and the jaw is too wide.  As with drawing myself as a figure, I am struggling to get the distance needed (i) to be able to see myself clearly in the mirror while (ii) being able to accurately measure proportions using the usual pencil technique.  So, I began to think about how I could solve this technical problem and came up with the idea of gridding the mirror!  I did this by using a plain sheet of acetate which I gridded up with a marker pen and then stuck over the mirror so I could still see my reflection.  When I had the angle I wanted to draw “set” in the mirror on that grid, I also marked diagonals around the eyes, mouth and nose so I could more accurately gauge lines and angles.

I then gridded up my paper and used this to transfer my image onto the page.  As you can see from the drawing below, this worked much better.  There are still some issues here – the angle of the eyes is slightly wrong (the right eye should be higher) and the lips are not right (again the angle is slightly wrong), but overall I found this method a much more straightforward way of drawing a complicated face.

As I was pleased with this drawing, I decided to base my first self-portrait on this.   I chose to use a prepared oil painting paper that had a fairly small, close weave texture, as I felt this would give a smoother finish than using my normal canvas paper. 

I used a dilute raw umber background which would dry quickly and gridded up the canvas to transfer the image in pencil, including the main shadow areas.

I roughly blocked in the main tonal areas using the umber to give me a background to work from and then began painting my portrait in a grisaille.  I decided to do this because I felt it was important to practice getting the features and planes of the face in a tonal way without having to worry about colour (I read in an article that apprentices to studios to the masters had to practice in grey scale for two years before being allowed to use colour!). 

I mixed my grey using Burnt Umber and Prussian Blue, and then created a grey scale to work from with the addition of Titanium White.

This is the first layer of the painting.  I made a conscious effort not to apply too much paint to the brush and canvas to avoid blending the tones too much.

Here I am have just added the darker shades to get the shaping to the face and neck.  At this point I added the black jumper to give me my darkest tone and to balance the rest of the portrait.

I used a medium and small filbert brush to apply the paint, using a soft brush to blend the edges together.

At the next sitting I applied further tonal layers, especially around the cheek bone and jaw line and worked on the nose and neck further.

At this point, I decided that both the lips and eyes were not correct – I needed to lower the lips slightly and raise the right eye and eyebrow. 

So, once this was dry, I blocked them out in order to repaint.  You can also see in the painting below where I have decided the head is too narrow and marked where it should be on the background.

Finished painting after changing the lips and eyes.  I have also darkened the hair, added the final shadows and highlights and lifted the ear slightly. 

I decided to leave the background a rough umber to contrast against the grey and add a little warmth to the painting.

Assessment

I am pleased with my paint handling on this piece as I thought quite carefully about how I was going to approach the subject and did so with a methodical approach to the tonal range (nb my camera seems to have lightened the face somewhat because of the contrast between the black and white – need to learn how to counteract this in photography!).

In respect of the face itself – I am pleased with the bone structure of the face and the shading applied, the same with the neck area and reflected light.  The nose (which I thought I would have problems with) is OK as is the ear.  The lips are not perfect (still have not got the horizontal curvature quite correct). 

I have shown this to a few friends and all have said that it does resemble me.    A problem I seem to have is that I can get one side more of less right, but never both sides at the same time!!  The right eyebrow is too curved and the outer edge is a little too low. 

I am pleased that concentrating on the tones has worked here as it has given me a good basis to work from – probably next moving on to a limited colour palette.  I think having the umber ground also works well, even in a greyscale painting, because you can see the warmth coming through in a number of areas.