So to really kick start this art blog, I decided that doing a 30 Day challenge would be something good to hone my skills with original work. For the start the challenge was to do a self portrait. Trying to capture myself in all of my new hair color glory was interesting. Mostly because I do not take a lot of pictures of myself. In fact, my archive of ‘selfies’ is very low compared to most.
[“Portrait of a Faerie” July 16, 2017 in SAI Tools & Photoshop]
I didn’t want to linger and obsess over details because we can all be a little guilty of vanity when it comes to immortalizing yourself in a still image. I wanted the details to be clean but not too messy. I painted this halfway in to watching 27 Dresses. Secret revealed! I’m a Rom Com queen and have been watching so many lately while I paint. It’s my new thing to do.
Back to the painting at hand. I’m not a very colorful person, so having unnatural hair like this suddenly speaks volumes about my drastic change. I love it!
This portrait took roughly an hour to paint? It might’ve been a little longer as I kept stopping to take breaks or get invested in the movie. Standard setting brushes in SAI Tools. I always like starting there first when it comes to work on pieces sometimes because of the blending. It’s less of a pain than having to finagle brush settings or scroll through my loaded brushes to find the right blending one. I use Photoshop to get more details in the picture to really make it pop and add more depth. As well as smooth out some of the blending so it looks a little more natural and less like a vector image.
-M
Inside My Enchanted Mind 
Excellent art…. you have a great talent!! 😀 I would love to be able to do faces, I’ve stuck to safe subjects like flower and trees! Have you got any tips for starting out on faces? By the way, I love the lilac hair… gorgeous! Is your hair really that colour?
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Thank you so much for the wonderful comment! I can completely relate to sticking with ‘safe subjects’ when it comes to drawing. When I started out drawing traditionally my top ‘DO NOT DRAW’ things were using colors, hands and feet. My old art in middle school-high school reflected it because I was always perplexed by it. Faces were the safe space for me because I do spend a lot of time observing people and their body language.
The one thing you have to keep in mind when drawing faces is symmetry can go out the window as one half of a person’s face isn’t always proportioned to the other half. You also want to take into count shading in areas to bring it to life as well as where the light is hitting the face. The book ‘Facial Expressions’ is a really good place to start because it houses so much reference material of people from various ages, weights, genders, races, etc in motion. Start off when copying pictures of people. Choose a medium you feel comfortable with. I started off doing charcoal portraits and really worked at it translate it to a digital format. So start with the basics of a pencil and also manage your time. Give yourself little tests to start off if you’re not feeling fully confident in drawing a face. Practice drawing and eye in different positions, lips and noses. Ears I will admit can be the most frustrating because of the curves in them and the way they are positioned/sized on someone’s head.
And yes! My hair is really this color lol. I wanted to be bolder and more confident so I took a leap and changed my hair color to something that wasn’t a natural tone for once.
I hope the info I provided was helpful! I will try to do a facial drawing tutorial if it helps 🙂
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