Helllooo my lovelies welcome back, and if you didn’t watch my last video, happy new
year!
Hope 2016 ended well for you all and I can only wish you the best of luck and happiness
for 2017.
I’m feeling really positive, I think it’s gonna be a year of personal development, achieving
more goals, new experiences, all that good stuff.
I’m also just in a good mood because this painting, that ended up taking me two days
to film, turned out way better than I could have expected and I’m really starting to
feel like this sketchbook project is paying off in the way that I hoped it would.
Feeling so much more confident but I’m also just having a lot of fun with my art again.
Right so I decided to take quite a careful, considered approach with this one so I started
out with quite a detailed sketch with a few areas of shadow and contour outlined as well.
I kind of had the idea that i would start with the darker areas and work my way to the
light like I did in my earlier portrait studies but that didn’t really work on this scale
I think and I found myself just wanting to blend and add detail so I ended up working
my way around the face in small chunks, just making sure to let each area blend seamlessly
into the next.
I went for a black and white portrait a) because I haven’t done anything like that in a while,
and in the comments of my last sketchbook video I got a suggestion to go monochromatic,
and also b) I wanted to make life a bit easier for myself, so not have to be too accurate
with colour, shades of grey are just that little bit simpler.
One thing I did find a little bit challenging is how gouache dries a slightly different
shade to the colour it is when it’s applied so I found a lot of this painting turned out
darker than I expected but not to the point that I think it had a huge effect on the final
product.
Umm one thing I think helped a lot with the realism of this one is that I added loads
of little details, the really thin lines of the wrinkles and the odd little dot or spot
or pore on his skin which just gave it all more texture and helped to disguise areas
of blending that weren’t totally smooth.
You might have noticed from my sketches that I’ve been really loving adding random dots
here and there to my drawings, I don’t know why but I just think it makes things look
a bit more dynamic, it just kind of finishes it off for me.
How I approached the hair was starting with dark areas and then blending into a medium
grey before adding a few sharper highlights and that worked pretty well I think.
I did the same with his eyebrows and his moustache a little bit later on.
Umm I was really worried about the eyes because for some reason eyes I draw or paint never
look right but it turns out that painting most of the eye and leaving very little white
actually looks pretty realistic.
So after I did the ears and the chin, I was really eager to get the painting finished
and I felt like there wasn’t too much left to do but you can’t tell in this video but
it was really starting to get dark and I didn’t wanna rush it.
It’s really hard filming in the winter because it just feels like you only get a few hours
of sunlight.
So yeah this is the next day.
This is two days later actually, which is today, hence why the video is going up so
much later then I’d planned.
And it turned out the rest of it wasn’t gonna be a walk in the park like I thought
it would be.
I thought I’d finished the hard bit and the rest would be done in an hour or so but
for whatever reason, the neck was such a struggle, I guess cos I just don’t know a lot about
the structure of a neck and all the ligaments or whatever those lines are, but yeah it took
me a while to make sense of it, which I guess just goes to show how worthwhile it is to
learn your anatomy.
But yeah by this point I was getting a bit tired of it, like the fun part was over and
I just wanted to be finished so to be honest I probably rushed it a little towards the
end but I’m still really happy with the outcome.
Anyway, I’m gonna leave it at that.
Enjoy the rest of the video.
Thank you so much from watching and I’ll see you all in the next one!
Bye!