Every year I make a Valentine’s Day card on the computer. It always has a self-portrait on it, and it always looks like an old-school comics cover, featuring myself as the as-yet-unknown superhero “Crusader for Love”. I started making these cards in 2004 and have kept it up every year since. When I began, I took a picture of myself and photoshopped it to look more comic-y, but for the past couple of years I have drawn my portraits instead, and then scanned them in and colored them in Photoshop. (I just realized I don’t have Photoshop anymore, so I don’t know what I’ll do when I get to the coloring and editing phase. Oh well — cross that bridge, etc.)
This year, since I am really trying to be a full-time artist and am actively working to improve my drawing (and secretly longing to get really good at portraits), I decided to make a cover that showcases my drawing, with a srs-bsns (“serious business,” if you don’t speak lolcat) self-portrait that will show everyone what I’ve been up to and where my priorities now lie. The problem is, of course, that I’m as yet still a very unaccomplished portraitist, and as everyone knows, self-portraits are especially difficult. I’ve been doing a little bit of practice recently, but everything looked terribly amateurish and dreadful until today.
Today, I first gave it a few tries without looking at the mirror, and then I looked at the wall mirror — not the little cosmetic mirror I usually use — to see where I’d messed up. This was very helpful, because it had the purpose of correcting my perceptions rather than just my lines. Then, I really tried to do one from the mirror, and it came out looking more strikingly like me than any previous self-portrait I’ve ever done.
I used my favorite 2B graphite pencil for everything, but switched to 3H pencil for the eyes. And oh, the eyes! I worked on those alone for maybe half an hour, erasing and trying again and erasing and trying again. They’re still the part that least resembles me; when I erase them completely, the drawing really looks a lot like me.
I also tried photocopying the drawing — it didn’t come out very neatly — and shading it, and that came out okay too, though my pencil technique still needs a lot of improvement.
Erik pointed out that I should really work bigger, and it’s true. This drawing took up about three-quarters of a page in my Moleskine, which is already much bigger than I normally like to work, but there’s no reason to limit myself to a little Moleskine when I have enormous 16″-by-24″ sketch pads at my disposal. And, as Erik says, drawing small lets me fudge in ways that drawing big doesn’t. So maybe that will be tomorrow’s task — to try another self-portrait, a big one this time.
In general, I am very pleased with this portrait, though, because it shows that a) I don’t completely suck (which is what I always fear), and b) that I could be a pretty good graphic novelist if I drew my comics in this style. Both very very heartening thoughts.
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