Self-Portrait

An expressive way to do self portrait

This is a 30-minute self-portrait. I did it by putting a mirror in front of me.

This 30-min was done with a 3-min, 5-min warm up and two 20-mins to look and think closer. Regardless of how many minutes, each drawing allows me to determine what to keep, what not to keep, what to change in the next one and finally drive to a more organized piece.

For example, the first 3 minutes on A4 sketchbook determined that A4 paper is too small for me to express. I particularly wanted to include my hand in the drawing. I switched to A3 for the 5 minutes and I found that two hands are too much to include. My decision was made at this point to have my head and one hand in my self-portrait.

When moving on to the 20 minutes, I took a minute to think: I felt that I needed to be more relaxed and don’t worry too much…it’s just charcoal drawing on a piece of paper. Nothing is going to hurt. I then tested a different way to draw portrait where I darken the whole page and rubber off white area. That is, using both charcoal and rubber as my drawing tool. I wanted to be expressive rather than measured. The two 20 minutes were the opportunities to collect mentally what I wanted to keep in the final 30 minutes.

By keeping my intention from the very beginning, to make an expressive self-portrait, I created the below piece. I like how I rubbered off the highlights, the directions of the rubbing, and how lights/darks were handled.