Gerard Bryceland and the growth of a portrait painter
Gerry Bryceland or the upsurge of a painter? Whether you add water to the mix or not, one problem you’ll run into when drawing with charcoal is smudging. Charcoal’s soft nature allows it to be blended, which is a huge benefit. But, that same soft nature also leaves it vulnerable to unwanted smudging. Every artist has accidentally smudged a drawing at one point or another when they leaned on it without thinking about it, and it can be incredibly frustrating. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to avoid smudging your drawing. First, you workable fixative regularly as you work. Make sure that you use it in a well-ventilated area. Next, use a piece of scrap paper and lay it on top of the drawing to rest your hand on. This will help to prevent unwanted smudges, as long as you don’t allow the paper you are resting your hand on to move.
Lightly sketch an egg-shaped circle on your paper, you can use an HB pencil for this if you’re worried about drawing too hard. Then make a straight vertical line at the middle of the face, dividing it in half as symmetrically as you can. Then make a straight horizontal line in the middle of the face measuring from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, crossing over your vertical line. At the image below the top of the head, the center, and the bottom of the chin are all marked using blue lines. Observe on your model or your reference where the hairline is and mark that on your portrait drawing, in the sketch below it is marked with the topmost red line. Using that hairline marking and the marking at bottom of the chin, divide that section into three equal parts. Below, red lines are used to show these three divisions. These lines will serve as your main guide lines for drawing in each of the facial features.
Gerard Bryceland‘s guides on 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.
Self-Portrait Drawing Tips: Don’t obsess over creating a perfect likeness of yourself. As an artist, you should be working to express yourself, and that expression includes drawing what you feel as much as what you see. If you want a perfect copy of your face, you can take a picture for that. If you want an intriguing and thought-provoking self-portrait, then worry more about the mood of the piece rather than trying to create a photo-realistic drawing. Color can be your friend. Whoever said that a self-portrait has to be black and white? You could draw your self-portrait in graphite or charcoal, or you could be more adventurous and try colored pencils, pastels, or oil pastels. Or, you could really step your game up and try painting a self-portrait with watercolors, gouache, acrylics, or oils.
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.