PROCESS VIDEO // self portrait (Patreon)

It’s my birthday, so here’s a video of my face! 😂 It’s the full process for the self portrait that I drew last month. It’s sped up to twice the original speed, and it took me about 2 hours to paint this one.

Some things to keep in mind while watching this video:

This is a typical example of a process where I ‘sculpt’ with color. This is because I’m drawing myself from a mirror reflection and my perception of my face just keeps changing as I’m drawing! The initial sketch just doesn’t work after a while, so I end up just painting over a lot of it and really winging it as I go, taking more of a sculpting approach and trying to use the colors on the canvas as much as I can while doing so.

I also use the liquify tool quite a lot. I guess that’s the result of focusing less on construction and more on the sculpting technique. This helps me make some basic adjustments to the positioning of the features and structure of the face. I feel like liquify is always a helpful tool to use as long as you dont over-do it!

Around 36:50 minutes in, I darken the lighter tones with selective color (by tweaking the 'whites') and then I add bright highlights to the face. This is something that happens sometimes when I try to paint a lot of detail: the contrast starts to become too extreme, and it’s harder to really get the highlights to ‘pop’ because they're competing with too many lighter areas. In that case, I find it really helpful to reduce the contrast a bit and then add brighter highlights minimally. That way, they stand out a lot more, without giving an overly shiny or high contrast look to the painting!

Hope you enjoy this process video! And I really recommend doing a self portrait from a mirror reflection sometime, it’s a really fun challenge that creates super interesting results. If you do a similar exercise, be sure to share it over in the discord ~ I’d love to see it! ❤