Self Portrait in coloured pencil

Friday 13 July 2018

Arthur


Arthur 

I have finished Arthur except for tidying up the left edge. Because I am painting on canvas, I am taking the paint over the edge so I don't have to frame it. The portrait is resting on that edge while the other three edges dry. I am using quick dry medium but I still have to wait a couple of days for it to dry well.

It is interesting to see a photo of a painting because something often pops out that doesn’t show in the painting. I notice that in this photo, his eye on the right is a bit too light, so I have darkened it since. 

There are a number of ways to get a new look at a painting to see what is wrong with it. An easy one is to look at it upside down. It isn't always convenient to turn a painting upside down of course, but it is easy to look at it in a mirror. I keep a hand mirror nearby. 

My usual fault is getting angles wrong.  The mirror shows if I have got things lined up right. But it isn't perfect for portraits because faces are not symmetrical. If you draw a line through the eyes and another through the mouth, they are not parallel. Everybody has one eye higher than the other. It isn’t usually noticeable and it is common to tidy up portraits and make them symmetrical. I wasn’t satisfied with that. I challenged myself to depict the asymmetry in such a way that the portrait looked more like the person and not as if I had messed up and done a bad drawing.

I mentioned my disability in my last post about buying the saddle stool. One of my problems is that I have no awareness of the angle of my head, which means it is impossible for me to measure angles by holding up a pencil. So I square up my reference photos and my canvas or paper to match. But I don’t square up evenly. I start by taking a line through the eyes, then I draw parallel lines wherever I fancy putting one. It is easy to do on image apps with layers because I just duplicate the layers and move the lines where I think they would be useful. Then I turn a line 90 degrees and add perpendicular lines in the same way. 
If I didn’t have an app that will do it, I could do it with a set square. 

Talking of the saddle stool, it is working out better than I expected. I am no longer in pain when I sit, and I can walk when I stand up. 


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