Charcoal Portrait

Reference Photo

Charcoal Portrait

(I wasn’t here for portrait in sketchbook or for portrait with proportion)

How much did you know about drawing portraits before we started? I knew a little bit about drawing portraits and proportion as I took a few drawing classes in middle school and I was really passionate about drawing people for a year or two.
What process did you go through to produce this piece? I first took the reference photo and used that to trace my image out onto the cardboard with the projector. Once I had the initial sketch, I spaced out the different values, like where I would need super lights and super darks. I first added the midtones, placing those along where the lighter shadows would be, places like my eyebrow, my nose, and my chin. I added all of the detail in my eye at once, to avoid messing it up by moving all over it. Once I did that, I went to the very dark spots, to the left of my eye, under my chin and my nostrils. I added the lights and found that the white was way too bright, so I went in and added some more midtones before finishing up with the final details of the highlights and my eyebrows and eyelashes.
In what ways have you gotten better at this kind of work? In what ways can you improve?
How do you feel about this piece of work? What parts of it do you particularly like? Dislike? Why? What did/do you enjoy about this piece or work? I feel like my skills in using charcoal have gotten better over the course of this project. I also learned about the different types of charcoal and how they functioned in the process of making my piece. I don’t particularly like this piece, I feel I could have picked a better reference photo, but I also just don’t enjoy drawing myself. Overall, I think I did well on the piece in the sense that it looks like the reference photo and that it has the same details and values.
Did you do your work the way other people did theirs? In what ways did you do it differently? In what ways was your work or process similar? I think everyone mostly followed the same process of outlining and then adding the different values, but some people had much more realistic styles than others, while I feel like mine was different because of the perspective of the image, so there was a lot of depth I had to add into certain aspects of my portrait.
What’s the one thing that you have seen in your classmates’ work or process that you would like to try in your next piece? I like how Shay used a lot of highlight and detail, even on the background and other objects that weren’t the focus. Other people used a lot darker pictures, so their piece was very focused on the shadows and midtones of the portrait, I like how those turned out too.
How do artists create detailed portraits expressing the personality of the person that is drawn? They focus on the facial expressions and minor details of the faces. Small changes in details like the way a cheek is shaped can make the difference of a smile to just a neutral face. Eyebrows and where the eyes are looking can also make a big difference.