Before painting any more of my friends I decided to try a series of self-portraits to work out the kinks of painting. I figured the stakes are low with a self-portrait since messing it up won't offend anybody or make them look ugly or whatever. (As it turns out, lower stakes are actually not a good thing for me; it's much harder for me to get into a self-portrait and really care about the outcome. I'm sure there's some sort of psychological issue there.) I decided to really take my practice one step at a time and start with grayscale paintings. The fancy art word for that is "grisaille."
It should be noted that I don't actually think most of these paintings are any good; my intent here is just to show the process I've taken in developing my skills. Discussion of paintings that are actually good will follow.
As I've gotten more experienced with portraits I've settled into a three-layer style. I do an initial sketch in charcoal and/or thinned-out burnt umber and white paint. This gives me a sort of skeleton to build off.
The second layer is made with slightly thicker, but still diluted, paint. In this layer I work out the range of lights to darks (though I usually leave off the brightest highlights until the end). Incidentally, I actually did a pretty bad job of that here, in that some of my darkest areas should really be midtones. It gives me this sort of pug face. That was one of my major problems with the color self-portrait I discussed in my last post, too; doing it in black-and-white allowed me to isolate the problem and fix it in later works.
In the final layer I use thicker paint and work out the details. In this one I was to some extent doomed from the start, because I had already messed up the values (fancy art talk for light and dark, for you non-artists) and some of the shapes in the second layer. I could have fixed them, but once I really realized what I was doing wrong it was better to just move on and do better the next time around. If you cover up everything below the eyes though, it's pretty good!
In this one I did better at making my face look like an actual round object, but I made my nose waaaay too long and still did the lighting wrong on my lips. The weird white flecks are because I did a bad job of setting up the photo and it had a lot of glare. I figured out how to fix that in later photos but I didn't feel like going back and photographing these again because they're just not good enough to be worth it.
In this one I feel like I definitely fixed the lip problem but for some reason I look like Harrison Ford. I do not look like Harrison Ford in real life, unfortunately.
This one is only two layers; about halfway through the second layer I realized I was really sick of doing self-portraits and wanted to just get it over with; also, it was starting to look like a finished work so I just added the finishing touches. I do actually think this is my best self-portrait, which goes to show that sometimes simpler is better.
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Oh yeah and there's that one on top that I wanted as my thumbnail picture. I really like the painting and I think it has some cool personality; unfortunately, it also doesn't really look like me at all.