The growth of a painter : Gerry Bryceland? Drawing with graphite is a less messy material, which is an advantage if you don’t feel like finishing a drawing, then having to spend a fair amount of time scrubbing your hands, arms, and cleaning up your work area. There are different levels of hardness available with graphite pencils, which gives you the ability to make light marks, as well as deep shadows. If you need to lay down a lot of graphite to establish shadows, or for your background, you could use powdered graphite. There is also water-soluble graphite available that you can use to create beautiful washes that can add a unique element to your self-portrait. The one main drawback of using graphite is the reflective sheen it produces in the light.
Drawing The Nose: From the inner corners of your eyes, draw two straight lines going down up to the third red guide line, it’s also the level of where the bottom of your ears are. These are the marking points for your nose. Begin drawing the nose while being careful to stay within those lines! The tip of the noise is usually rounded, so once you reach that point, draw a very light circle to serve as a shaping guide. Sketch two small oblongs with tips tapering (almost like teardrops but curved) towards the center very lightly under the tip of your nose on both sides. These will be the nostrils. Pay close attention to the size and shape of your nostrils, make sure that the holes you draw are not too big nor too small. Unless of course that is what you can clearly observe on your model or reference. When not done carefully, it could ruin the proportion of your portrait drawing.
Gerard Bryceland‘s guides about portret painting: The light tones are applied in a glaze of titanium white to enhance the existing form and to add some texture by suggesting traces of perspiration or oily skin. Note also how the form of the lips is completed with skin tones before any color is added to redden them. A variety of small brushstrokes, stippling and smudging is also used for the light tones. Refining the tone, color and texture is the final stage of painting the skin. Warmer scarlet and naphthol crimson are carefully stippled as thin glazes to suggest the blush of the cheeks, lips and subtle variations in the complexion. The dark and light tones applied in the first two stages are finally heightened for dramatic effect by increasing their contrast and smoothing out any irregularities in their paint surface.
Use the grid method. The grid method is a technique that has been used by artists for generations. It’s simple, effective, and can allow you to get a likeness of your subject very quickly. How does it work? For this approach, you’ll need a photo. Take your photo and use a ruler to draw a grid with evenly spaced lines. Then copy that same grid to your drawing paper, adjusting it for size when needed, but always keeping the number of grid squares the same, and keeping the proportions of each grid square the same. Then you simply copy what you see in each grid of your photo to the corresponding square on your drawing. Use a projector or a lightbox. Is this method a bit of a cheat? That depends on who you ask. Artists have been using various techniques to trace their subject for centuries. One way to look at this approach is that using a projector or a lightbox is simply another tool. If you use this approach, you should focus on only sketching out a light outline on your paper, then render out the forms, highlights, and shadows.
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.