Self-Portrait: Stages of Creation

The process of the creation of my self-portrait was tedious and I had some difficulties along the way, however it also allowed me to develop new skills and learn to trust the process. The beginning was rough; the process of graphing stumped me and I had trouble getting used to focus on smaller parts of the drawing rather than as a whole. For my artist copy, I had a lot of trouble with graphing and making the figure proportional throughout and it became slightly distorted as I was going through each box of the graph. Another difficulty I had went through during this process was attempting to not draw the more important parts first such as my face. I began with the shading on my shirt and, at first, it was hard to replicate the artists' mark entirely but once I moved to my cat it became more apparent when to use which marks and how. I used hatching and cross hatching throughout the portrait as Raphael had done in his figure drawing.The likeness of the portrait took many tries within the nose and the eyes, it never looked quite right when I would look at it from above. However, I believe I overcame that in the end and the likeness is quite realistic and good. I had to truly think about the way I would go about doing my hair because in my reference photo, Raphael only drew short hair which did not have any resemblance to mine. I tried to incorporate his shading in my hair the best I could while also making it realistic and trying to have a likeness. I was quite happy with the end result, however if I could change anything I would attempt to create a larger contrast because it is quite light.