The growth of a portrait painter : Gerard Bryceland

Gerry Bryceland and the growth of an artist? Some artists prefer to draw from a photograph, while other artists prefer to draw from life. Which approach is better? As with anything else related to art, it’s a matter of personal preference. Should every artist who draws the human figure spend time drawing from a live model? Absolutely. Does that mean that drawing from life is better than drawing from a photograph? Absolutely not. It’s all a matter of your personal preference. When you are drawing a self-portrait from a mirror, there are some issues that you are going to have to overcome. Namely, you are going to have to either get very good at replicating your pose, or you are going to have to learn how to draw without having a model that has a perfect pose every time. When you are drawing from a mirror, you are looking into a mirror, moving, and drawing. That means that your reference is moving, which is challenging.

Drawing the Eyes: At the middle of the center blue line, draw two almond-shaped eyes. Did you know? Human anatomy is quite amazing. The space between the two eyes can be measured with a ‘third eye’. This is the approximate separation between the two eyes, leaving a perfect space for where your nose will be placed! With this in mind, make sure that the space between your eyes isn’t too narrow nor too wide. Getting the eyes as right as you can is very important in portrait drawing. Now, let’s fill in the other details. In the middle of each eye, draw a big, dark circle and a smaller one at the center of it. These are your irises and pupils. Add the eyelids by drawing two curved lines on top of your eyes, use the shape of your already drawn eyes as a curving guide.

Gerard Bryceland‘s tips on portret painting: The light tones are applied in a glaze of titanium white to enhance the existing form and to add some texture by suggesting traces of perspiration or oily skin. Note also how the form of the lips is completed with skin tones before any color is added to redden them. A variety of small brushstrokes, stippling and smudging is also used for the light tones. Refining the tone, color and texture is the final stage of painting the skin. Warmer scarlet and naphthol crimson are carefully stippled as thin glazes to suggest the blush of the cheeks, lips and subtle variations in the complexion. The dark and light tones applied in the first two stages are finally heightened for dramatic effect by increasing their contrast and smoothing out any irregularities in their paint surface.

How To Draw An Accurate Self-Portrait? Drawing a human face is one of the most challenging artistic endeavors. There is nothing that people are more familiar with than the human face, so if you draw a human face that isn’t proportionate, or that has anything else wrong with it, people will notice. Drawing a human face that has a recognizable likeness is even more challenging since every face is unique. If you are drawing a portrait capturing a likeness is very challenging, and for many artists, it’s even more challenging when it’s their own face they are drawing. Fortunately, there are many different techniques that you can try employing to capture a realistic likeness of your face.

About Gerard Bryceland: I’m Gerard Bryceland an artist based in Maidstone Kent and regularly get commissioned to do work doing paintings and portraits of people and their families. I’ve always been an artist from my childhood, I loved drawing my friends and family initially just to mess around with my friends and had a lot of fun drawing them. But as i got older it really just became a business as my friends and their families would want me to do family portraits and that type of thing. With word of mouth word gets out and before you know it you know it I’m 35 and still doing the same thing.