Each morning at Signal studio, I start the day with a self-portrait in a dedicated sketchbook. The medium that I decide to use in my sketch entirely depends on my mood that particular day. I enjoy doing this daily exercise as a warm-up and have a variety of media from which to choose. I am surprised that I didn't blog more about my daily self-portraits while at Signal studio in previous years, but I dedicated a post to them in 2017 and two posts in 2020 (here & here). Last week I included a selfie in my post about starting this year's residency, here. For posts about this residency in previous years (since 2017) just do a search for Signal Arts Centre within this blog.
Generally I do a fairly straightforward selfie, but this day I must have felt like the hand was a "sigh" gesture and included it! I think the sketch was done with a 6B pencil.
On this day, I limited myself to three colours from the cake watercolour tray and used a fine black pen for the drawing.
When I do a selfie exercise, I tend not to correct mistakes or labour over the drawing, so what happens happens. In this one, drawn with a soft charcoal pencil, I did not observe the correct distance from my bottom lip and ended up showing myself as having a weaker chin than I do. But really it is a little disconcerting that my staring eyes give me the grim look of Myra Hindley...
I enjoy using watercolour pencils for a sketch, dipping the pencil directly into water, leaving it dry or using a wet brush to spread the colour a bit.
By limiting my watercolour palette I can block in an image quickly and then define it afterwards with a fine pen.
A soft pencil is always nice to sketch with.
And sometimes using a soft pencil compels me to work a little longer on the sketch. I remember that day I was wearing my NASA t-shirt, so that the end result of me feeling like a crew member of the Enterprise was no suprise. Could I be Captain?
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