With everything I had learned I started again, I had just completed the Will Young portrait, and the many failed self-portraits so expectations of my abilities were at an all-time low, my confidence was good as I knew id learned a lot from my failure and both of these contributed to a much more keen and careful approach, I was checking and double-checking, and finally printed off my reference image as lockdown restrictions were calming down a little bit. Rather than creating a form and changing the form by adding light and dark until I reached a likeness, I decided to measure, and mark out everything so carefully that a simple line drawing took me about 2 hours, but this was time well spent.

This was the final drawing, I didn’t feel that I had cracked the likeness, and would have continued to work on this, but I knew id properly measured everything, I made some small changes to the eyes between this and the next image but unfortunately, I forgot to photograph this change. So I started to paint based on the trust I had for my measurements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At this stage I was happy with the likeness on my painting, more so than any of the others, I knew the eyes were wrong as was trying to paint them without a small brush, so I took time to reflect on my painting while I waited for a brush I ordered to arrive, In this time I edited the saturation of my painting digitally to add a little bit more colour in to make me appear less sickly. I didn’t want too much colour but reached a point where it was as pale as I wanted it, but still had some purples and pinks in the skin tone to keep the life in it.

“Heres one I made earlier”