Self Portrait Drawing - In Pencil and Charcoal

Hi everyone sharing with you a fairly recent pencil and charcoal drawing self portrait. I wanted to practice drawing portraits from life and there isn't always someone who will sit still long enough so I usually end up practicing by drawing myself. It is a pretty useful exercise that you can learn a lot from and you can see how your styles change over time.

The drawing was done looking at the mirror in one process with no breaks so unfortunately do not have any process photos. It can be quite difficult to look in a mirror and draw what you see. My process involves a few rough lines for the general outline and then add more details as I progress the drawing. It can be a bit of a leap of faith in getting the proportions accurately but with practice it becomes intuitive and with less effort.

This was one of my drawings during the process but the quality is quite blurry.

It took be about 1.5 - 2 hours to complete. The initial sketch did not take long maybe 10 minutes however, adding shading and details increased the time. I tried to follow what I have learned in previous exercises by following the contours of my face as I was drawing however, I did not want it to become too rigid and that's where gesture drawing comes in. I wanted my drawing to be expressive compared to previous portraits I have done when drawing from an image that can look a bit lifeless.

Here are some close ups of the portrait.

When drawing it requires a lot of concentration to get right so I end up looking quite serious.

The paper quality comes through a bit on this one so next time I will draw with higher quality paper. Once the pencil drawing was complete I go over the darkest parts with charcoal and a rubber for the highlights to create a greater variation in tones

This is the way the finished piece turned out.

Thanks for checking out my post and for your support! :)

--Ian