Self Portrait time

We used photo shop to turn this:

into this:

Now comes the fun part. Drawing the contours of this picture onto a canvas. I chose a 16" x 20" canvas for this project. We started by taking a piece of paper and measuring our eye marking the measurement onto the piece of paper like a ruler. Then we measured the overall picture to see first how many "eyes" across it was then trying to find a new measurement on our canvas using our paper ruler that would correspond to the same number of "eye" measurements. My canvas "eye" measurement turned out to be roughly twice the size of my picture "eye" measurement. Once we got that determined we then decided where out starting point would be. For me, it was the eye on the left. I measured roughly where it was in the picture then put it on my canvas. From there its just a matter of drawing the contours on our canvas with charcoal. This process was a little different for me. We aren't drawing the picture but the contours of the colors. When we are done it will look like a paint by number of sorts. This is what I have after much frustration.

I am not a person that likes to draw. I find it tedious and slow. My firs art professor in college loved my drawing style and really encouraged me in it. My drawing professor loved watching my style develop and knew I hated drawing. She was incredibly encouraging as well. I still don't like drawing but I try really hard to get it perfect. After many many hours and so much frustration I finally got the contours drawn onto the canvas correctly. And I didn't get a picture of it before I started painting. Oops. I snapped one before I got too far into it. 

Here a some pictures of the progress. Once it was drawn it was pretty much just a matter of filling in the areas by color. It was paint by numbers! I did find a few drawing mistakes that I had to correct but nothing too bad. The biggest issue was mixing the colors. That was fun and I had to refer to my color wheel more than once.

I went back a few times to correct some colors that I didn't quite like. But over all I'm really happy with it. I submitted it to the student art show and I won a Talentship for it! Here is my finished and now award wining self portrait!

Working with acrylics is definitely different than working with oils. They dry fast so you can create sharper edges but there also isn't too much of a chance to blend if that is what you wanted to do. I know you can add things to the acrylics to make that happen. I may pursue that later in my art career. Right now I'll just stick to assignments.