After sitting with my thoughts while my brush arrived and the base layer dried I developed the confidence to willingly risk destroying the one relatively successful self-portrait I had produced, in order to achieve the vision that I had been chasing for around 2 weeks.

I made changes to the eyes using my new brushes, making them more in line with each other and a very similar size as they are in real life, I also added darker areas to near the bridge of the nose. These small changes had a huge impact on the likeness and quality of the painting, so I continued to make the remaining changes.

Although it can be hard to see, I made some big changes to the left side of the face around the cheek area, as well as to the nose, I think more vibrant shadows helped create more variation of tones in the shadows, creating more depth.

Here I started to introduce smaller brush strokes and warmer light tones to help saturate the painting a bit more, it also helped to blend the shadow and light together as before I had a very dense area that had all the warm tones in one area of the painting.

I continued to add light tones and detail throughout the painting, adding more clarity and articulation to the facial features as well as repainting the lips with a more purple pallet to match the colour temperature of the rest of the piece, I also simplified the hair and added darker areas to the neck. I also found the neck and right cheek was too wide so I cut into this using the red tone of the background.

This is the current version of the painting however I still want to make changes to the shirt and the mouth as I think the mouth has a bit of a pout expression and the shirt hasn’t been detailed to match the delicacy of the rest of the painting. Currently, I think I have a great likeness and I’m close to the vision I had of my honest self-portrait, but there is still plenty that can go wrong…