The rise of a portrait painter : Gerry Bryceland? Whether you add water to the mix or not, one problem you’ll run into when drawing with charcoal is smudging. Charcoal’s soft nature allows it to be blended, which is a huge benefit. But, that same soft nature also leaves it vulnerable to unwanted smudging. Every artist has accidentally smudged a drawing at one point or another when they leaned on it without thinking about it, and it can be incredibly frustrating. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to avoid smudging your drawing. First, you workable fixative regularly as you work. Make sure that you use it in a well-ventilated area. Next, use a piece of scrap paper and lay it on top of the drawing to rest your hand on. This will help to prevent unwanted smudges, as long as you don’t allow the paper you are resting your hand on to move.
Before starting, here’s a personal tip: Place a mirror in front of you and look closely at your own facial features as you draw your portrait. Why, you ask? Your face is the most familiar face you know, you see it every day of your life and have unknowingly practically memorized all the vital details, so much so that you more or less know if you’re getting the proportions right or not. Now, you’re ready to start! The important thing to keep in mind in this first step is to have a good sense of the space on your paper where you plan on drawing your face, so that you can plot out the optimum placement of your subject that will make for a good composition. There’s nothing more frustrating than spending so much time perfecting your drawing, and then belatedly realizing that you ran out of space.
Gerard Bryceland‘s advices on portret painting: Facial hair like eyebrows and eye lashes are usually the same color as the hair on the head, but they are painted more delicately with the smallest brushes. The underpainting in these areas is simply a darker shade of skin tone. The soft texture of the hair on the eyebrows and eye lashes is slowly built up with delicate strokes of a thinly mixed ivory black. It is very easy to overdo these features, so you should start by applying a few strokes, then stopping to check the effect. Apply a few more, then stop and check again. Continue this process until you achieve the satisfactory density of hair for the eyebrows and eye lashes. It is often better to omit the lower eye lashes which tend to obscure the the tone and consequently the form of the lower eye lid.
How To Draw An Accurate Self-Portrait? Drawing a human face is one of the most challenging artistic endeavors. There is nothing that people are more familiar with than the human face, so if you draw a human face that isn’t proportionate, or that has anything else wrong with it, people will notice. Drawing a human face that has a recognizable likeness is even more challenging since every face is unique. If you are drawing a portrait capturing a likeness is very challenging, and for many artists, it’s even more challenging when it’s their own face they are drawing. Fortunately, there are many different techniques that you can try employing to capture a realistic likeness of your face.
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.