The rise of a painter : Gerry Bryceland? If you are going to try to execute a highly detailed self-portrait, the prep work you do before putting pencil to paper is very important. Art may be spontaneous and creative, but there are times when you have to take a more methodical approach. When your goal is to draw a highly detailed self-portrait, this is one of those times. Start out by getting your lighting set up. Good lighting can mean the difference between a boring looking portrait and a fantastic looking portrait. Try something different here, set up dynamic lighting that illuminates one half of your face and not the other. Or have a strong light source that comes from above that casts shadows under your nose and neck, and darkens your eyes. What you are going for is something out of the ordinary that will give your self-portrait a unique and exciting look.
Drawing The Eyebrows: On top of the eyes, draw your desired shape of eyebrows. Eyebrow shapes vary from person to person and come in all shapes and sizes, so you can freely explore this if you want. If you prefer to copy from a reference, observe your model, or look closely in the mirror (if you are your own reference) to closely copy the shape of the eyebrows. A typical eyebrow would be slightly arched in the end and tapering into fine points. It usually starts alongside the inside corner of your eyes, but you can easily adjust this depending on each person’s individual proportions. Pay close attention to the thickness and thinness of your eyebrows. Later on, it will be easier to fill this in with individual hair strands, you can draw some now if it helps you visualize it.
Gerry Bryceland‘s advices on portret painting: The hair is the last element of the face to be painted. The painting of the hair is usually the last part of the head to be completed. It follows the natural order of the painting, finally covering the rough edges of both the background and the skin. The colors used for the dark areas of the hair were ivory black and Prussian blue, while the highlights were mostly titanium white. You can see the technique used for painting the hair in our close-up detail. The underpainting was applied with freely brushed glazes of ivory black and Prussian blue. The overpainted details of the hair were built up with fine strokes of black and white whose direction follows the contours of the haircut. The opacity of these brushstrokes was varied to suggest the depth, texture and highlights of the hair. The density of the brushstrokes decreases around the edges of the hair to convey softness of its outline.
Try to start your self-portrait with light, quick sketching lines. This will not only breathe life and create a sense of movement in your drawing, but it will also allow you to lay out a solid foundation before you start to render your drawing in with more details. If you decide that you want to draw a black and white self-portrait, you have your choice of many different materials you could use. Two of the most popular options are graphite and charcoal. Both have their advantages and can be used in similar ways, but they are definitely distinctive materials that will give you a different look for your finished drawing.
About Gerry Bryceland: I’m Gerard Bryceland an artist based in Maidstone Kent and regularly get commissioned to do work doing paintings and portraits of people and their families. I’ve always been an artist from my childhood, I loved drawing my friends and family initially just to mess around with my friends and had a lot of fun drawing them. But as i got older it really just became a business as my friends and their families would want me to do family portraits and that type of thing. With word of mouth word gets out and before you know it you know it I’m 35 and still doing the same thing.
