Hot painting tricks by Gerry Bryceland
Gerard Bryceland and the ascent of a painter? 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.
Lightly sketch an egg-shaped circle on your paper, you can use an HB pencil for this if you’re worried about drawing too hard. Then make a straight vertical line at the middle of the face, dividing it in half as symmetrically as you can. Then make a straight horizontal line in the middle of the face measuring from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, crossing over your vertical line. At the image below the top of the head, the center, and the bottom of the chin are all marked using blue lines. Observe on your model or your reference where the hairline is and mark that on your portrait drawing, in the sketch below it is marked with the topmost red line. Using that hairline marking and the marking at bottom of the chin, divide that section into three equal parts. Below, red lines are used to show these three divisions. These lines will serve as your main guide lines for drawing in each of the facial features.
Gerry Bryceland‘s advices about portret painting: The overall balance between the eyes is a key element in achieving any likeness. You should build up the painting of both eyes at the same time in order to capture the balance between them. This essential relationship is far more difficult to achieve if you bring one eye to a state of completion and then start on the other. A variety of small brushstrokes using stippling (paint applied in dots) and smudging techniques is used throughout the painting of the skin. Stippling gives you the greatest control over the distribution of color when applying paint over larger areas such as the cheeks.
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.