And so, my colored pencils adventure continues. As I mentioned before, I am on a quest to be a better traditional artist - using colored pencils as media. It is undoubtedly a struggle to me still, but I want to think that I am slowly getting the hang of it.

Drawing my self-portrait

I therefore put myself to a test - draw myself. Draw a self-portrait. Help you put a face to my name. And below is the result.

Me

I know, I have really big eyes. They are the common target of ridicule among me and my friends. I have a huge helipad of a forehead. I have eyebags; in my defense, though, the reference picture was taken when I had no sleep at all (I was cramming my thesis manuscript). 

So there you have it. A picture of me... not too accurate, but my parents said the drawing certainly looked like me at least.

The drawing process

I'm slowly getting used to actually posting the processes involved when I draw. It's pretty fun, if I think about it. And it makes me more involved with the piece.

I'm all about that base. (If you didn't get this reference, then I'm sorry. 😂) As always, I begin with base sketches - the skeleton of the whole drawing and the main features involved. They are usually very, very lightly drawn, so I had to adjust the contrasting and lighting for you to at least see the lines. 

Colors! My favorite part as of late - colors! I always begin with the eyes, then the rest of the face. I have very limited colors, so I had to mix in layers upon layers of peach, pink, yellow-orange, black, brown... depending on how I saw the use fits.

Those strings... er, hair. Then the hair. The hair. My most hated part to draw. I began to really zoom in on my reference picture just to at least get a good semblance of my hair. I began the hair by drawing the most prominent strands or smth. It's pretty hard to explain.

More layers... like, more. I hated seeing the white spaces which meant I somehow missed spots in coloring. I sharpened my pencils again and added layers of colors to fill in the white spaces. It's a technique I learned while finding ways to, yeah, fill in those white spaces. 😂 Also, I try to make small circular strokes to avoid those stringy lines in the drawing.

SBD payout will be for my friend

Help send my friend Nathan @mysupermando to Sydney, Australia by upvoting this post. He has been accepted to attend the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) conference in Sydney. At the moment, he still doesn't have enough to send himself to the said conference, and to help him somehow, I decided to donate the SBD payout of this post. 

On the other hand, you can also just contact him directly here at steemit @mysupermando if you wish to help him, too. He'll appreciate any help he can get.