How to paint self – Part 1

Painting a Self-Portrait

It is fairly easy to paint a self-portrait. You just sit or stand in front of a mirror with pencil, charcoal, or pastel in hand and begin to draw what you see.

You should first do a rendering in pencil or charcoal to get all the values in place such as shadow and light. It is easier to see shadow and light in black and white than in color and it can give you a map of how to finally paint your painting in oil or acrylic. I like to also think of a well-produced charcoal rendering as a painting.

Before getting started, get all your materials together that you will need for drawing your self-portrait. Once you have drawn it, you can use the drawing as your model to paint in oil or acrylic on canvas. Your final self-portrait can be any size.

You can also do a self-portrait from a photograph, but working from photographs is not as original as working from the object itself and in this case the object is you.

It is important to try to capture the personality and characterization of yourself when doing your self-portrait just as it is important to do this when doing any portrait. In the world of art, this is deemed more important than painting an exact replica. After all the camera can get an exact replica. But a camera will never capture your essence.

The best way to capture essence is to start with the eyes. As that old says goes, “the eyes are windows to the soul.” Once you have the eyes to perfection you have the whole portrait and the rest is just finishing touches.

Now you have done your self-portrait in charcoal or pencil, and you are ready to reproduce this on canvas. You can also render your portrait in pastels and get into the color immediately and this could be your final rendering.

But however there is more to working in pencil and then reproducing it on canvas. Now you will copy your drawing on your canvas in soft pencil. Map out your drawing to scale by eye if possible. If you are not good at this you can make a grid. Just draw block lines or your pencil drawing and then larger block lines on your canvas and fill in.

Make sure to ground your canvas with a coat of gesso, before you begin mapping in the details, unless you are working with an already grounded canvas. You can either stretch your own canvas or purchase canvases that have already been stretched and grounded.

When working in oil you can work almost any way you want to work. Apply your background first and work