Painting 1; Assignment 3, Self Portrait

Exercise Self Portrait

In this exercise we were required to do our self portraits with head and shoulders.

Below are my works as self portraits. Both of them I did using my Derwent Graphic 9B-H soft graphite pencils, HB for general lines and 7B for enhancing yes and other facial features. The left self portrait resembles me more comparing to the right one. For the right one I think I did a too big forehead. I picked up the angle of my face for the self portrait as it was on the left photo because I liked a complex shape of my nose which is quite prominent on my narrow face. I think I do quite well picking up different facial features in their detail. My main challenge so far is bringing right general proportions of the face and placing the features correctly.

My another self portrait work I did using my set of soft pastels by Sennelier and a special pastel paper by Sennelier. I decided to go with pastels because on the photo below I was wearing a bright red winter jacket and a white beret, what made the whole general look as a quite playful and intense. While working on this self portrait, as a result on concentrating on colours and mood, I spontaneously came to a quite bright image of “A Girl with a make up”. It was not difficult to work on hair, jacket and general features of the face. A most challenging part was to use pastels to work properly on the face making it live and not flat. After setting up the facial features on the face and making a good contour of the face I started making a facial colour using the pastel with a lighter colour than paper`s shade. Intuitively I started to follow make up applying rules – bringing out with a light shade a T -zone of the face. That was surely a good way to bring some volume and elegance for the face.I used several shades for the cheeks, making them look tender and rosy. I struggled a bit ( you can see below ) with nose and a space between the eyes, but I corrected it with the light shade pastel and repainted again. Below is my work in progress.