This mornings zoom was an opportunity to practice more self portraits. I realized towards the end of the zoom that I hadn’t turned on the lights and the curtains were mostly closed. When I held my painting up to the computer screen to share my progress with the group, it looked way different than while I was working. I decided not to worry too much about that and I’ll revisit it later, adding glazes over the colors to make it look more like what I was going for. In the mean time, I took a picture of the WIP and used that for a Reflected Light Self Portrait. I thought it looked recognizable as me.

I used a reference photo from my phone and ‘sketched’ it out in a light purple before going in with the rest of the colors. I’m about 50-50 when it comes to sketching first with a pencil. The nice thing about using watercolor is not having to go back and erase all the pencil (often I skip this, and if you look closely you’ll see my pencil outline.)

I think it’s good to practice self portraits- you know your subject won’t get upset if it doesn’t look like them (or too much like them, lol.) Maybe I’ll do a few each season this year. Winter now, then spring summer and fall. And now I have an idea for next week’s zoom- A wintery self portrait!

Have you ever drawn your self portrait?