Who is Gerry Bryceland and some of his portret painting ideas? Drawing with charcoal is definitely much messier than graphite, and after working on a drawing for some time, you’ll probably have black palms and fingerprints. This isn’t a bad thing. It just means that if you are planning to draw with charcoal, you need to be prepared to clean up afterward. When drawing with charcoal, you have more range with what direction you want to take your self-portrait in. You can draw on a smooth surface, and if you are careful, you can create a beautiful picture with a full range of soft tones. Or you can draw on a rough surface and create a rougher portrait. One of the more advanced techniques that you can try with charcoal is adding water to the mix. Adding water to charcoal will allow you to create washes of greys, as well as intense blacks. If you want to try adding water to your charcoal drawing, make sure that you use a heavier watercolor paper.
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.
Gerry Bryceland‘s tips about portret painting: The hair is the last element of the face to be painted. The painting of the hair is usually the last part of the head to be completed. It follows the natural order of the painting, finally covering the rough edges of both the background and the skin. The colors used for the dark areas of the hair were ivory black and Prussian blue, while the highlights were mostly titanium white. You can see the technique used for painting the hair in our close-up detail. The underpainting was applied with freely brushed glazes of ivory black and Prussian blue. The overpainted details of the hair were built up with fine strokes of black and white whose direction follows the contours of the haircut. The opacity of these brushstrokes was varied to suggest the depth, texture and highlights of the hair. The density of the brushstrokes decreases around the edges of the hair to convey softness of its outline.
Try to start your self-portrait with light, quick sketching lines. This will not only breathe life and create a sense of movement in your drawing, but it will also allow you to lay out a solid foundation before you start to render your drawing in with more details. If you decide that you want to draw a black and white self-portrait, you have your choice of many different materials you could use. Two of the most popular options are graphite and charcoal. Both have their advantages and can be used in similar ways, but they are definitely distinctive materials that will give you a different look for your finished drawing.
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.