Today I decided to take another shot at drawing myself. For some reason I thought it would go better this time. It didn’t. But surely if I can draw Tyrion and Obi-Wan I should be able to draw myself, right? Wrong. This sketch still looks nothing like me. Interestingly enough it looks nothing like me in a completely different way than the last one I did. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you which one is closer.

I spent quite a long time on this one trying to get it right. I know it doesn’t look like me at all but I can’t figure out why. I’ve corrected and redone pretty much every feature at least twice trying to get it closer but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. In the end I just had to give up. I really have no idea how to fix it and am getting tired anyway so I’ll just have to try it another time. I clearly need some more portrait drawing practice before I attempt this again though.

I was originally intending to shade my portrait this time but I’ve changed my mind. I’m still insisting on getting the line work right before I do any shading on any of my drawings. The line work on this one is far from right so there’s no way I’m going to shade it. I want to be able to get across what I’m drawing without any shading at all, then just use the shading for emphasis and to help define form. I don’t want to be relying on shading to make my subject recognizable.

I think maybe I need to get a good photo of myself for my next self portrait. Trying to draw yourself from the mirror is really difficult. Maybe using a photo would work out better. I’m not keen to try it again for a while though. Maybe I’ll give it a shot about once a month or so. My features clearly aren’t distinctive enough so I’ll need to reach the point where I can draw recognizable portraits of people with fairly ordinary features before I’ll be successful doing an accurate self portrait. That means lots more practice practice practice. So many things to work on but I’ll get there eventually.