Self Portrait Progress 2020

Alrighty – I’m doing it again. I know I shared an artistic progress post about two months ago but I think my style is starting to change again and I thought I’d share.

So here I am, redrawing my Instagram profile picture. I’m wearing my plaid shirt in this one, though after I drew it, it kind of looked like Christmas pajamas.

As usual, I’m still struggling to get backgrounds right – so here’s a pic. without the background. Now that I’m sharing this picture here, I feel like I still want to change things. Maybe I’d experiment with colored lines rather than strong black lines. Maybe I’d make the face a little rounder, so it doesn’t look as long.

But as a whole, I’m actually pretty happy with it.

I tried to give myself some subtle freckles, and make my dimple show with a little half smile. I tried to give my hair that crazy mix of fluffy and straight and curly, and it’s that weird shade of brown that can’t quite decide what color it is (brown? red? blonde? who knows?). And I tried to make it seem like my eyes were more of a gray than blue because, like my hair, my eyes seem to look different in different light.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what a difference color and shading make – here’s the line art for it. I guess if you feel like coloring it yourself, you could.

And here’s the picture that makes me the happiest – it’s the side by side. I love seeing how things change over time.

• In the first profile picture, everything was so simple – flat colors, round shapes, and pretty much no shading.
• About three months later, I used an expression reference to trace a face. I added my hair and glasses and minimal shading and figured that was good enough.
• Three months after that, I experimented with going lineless for a time – and I liked it, sort of. But the hair shape hadn’t changed much. I added some shading, but didn’t really understand it – so it was all over the place.

Then for several months, I just took a break from drawing. It took me a while to get back into it, and I drew sporadically throughout 2020. Over a year later, I drew this profile picture. My hair has some wilder shapes to it. My shoulders actually have a shape now rather than a circular blob. I actually gave details to my shirt. My glasses now have a glasses shape rather than just squares or circles. And though I still struggle with shading, I did try to give more depth to my drawing.

I still have a ways to go before I feel comfortable with my style, but I like the direction I’m going. If this is where I’m at two years after starting, then I’m excited to see where I’ll be two years from now.