The ascent of a painter : Gerry Bryceland? Drawing with charcoal is definitely much messier than graphite, and after working on a drawing for some time, you’ll probably have black palms and fingerprints. This isn’t a bad thing. It just means that if you are planning to draw with charcoal, you need to be prepared to clean up afterward. When drawing with charcoal, you have more range with what direction you want to take your self-portrait in. You can draw on a smooth surface, and if you are careful, you can create a beautiful picture with a full range of soft tones. Or you can draw on a rough surface and create a rougher portrait. One of the more advanced techniques that you can try with charcoal is adding water to the mix. Adding water to charcoal will allow you to create washes of greys, as well as intense blacks. If you want to try adding water to your charcoal drawing, make sure that you use a heavier watercolor paper.
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.
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.
You could try freehand drawing your face. This is the most straightforward approach, but that doesn’t mean it is the easiest. With this approach, you look at yourself in the mirror, or look at a photo, then simply start sketching what you see. Pay attention to the major shapes you see and pay careful attention to how your features relate to one another. You also need to pay attention to the light source, so you can render your face with realistic highlights and shadows. When using this approach, start out your drawing with light, sketchy lines, then slowly darken your drawing as you render it, but only after the initial sketch is in place.
About Gerard 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.