February 2019 – unicornpostbox

For Valentine’s Day this year, 14th February 2019, I decided to draw an A2 size portrait of myself and my lovely boyfriend, Howard. Please see below a collection of photographs illustrating the progression of my drawing, from start to finish. I do hope you enjoy 🙂

Drawing Howard:

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34,35,297,310.790283

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I started off my portrait by firstly drawing my boyfriend, Howard. I worked from a photograph of us both when we went for a meal in Yates, Doncaster. I traced the outline, shushhhh, lol – however, many hours were spent on the shading, trying to achieve a good likeness. As shown above, I also drew a rectangular line around the drawing to match the size of the frame I had purchased, in doing so, eventually losing a small portion of the sketch (my own fault for not checking sizes sooner, silly). Overall, I was pleased with how Howard turned out 🙂

Drawing Myself:

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The second subject I drew was myself. Because I have done quite a few self-portraits over the years, it did not take me as long to draw myself. Saying that however, I wish I had spent just a little bit more time on the fine details as I feel the drawing of myself looks more cartoonish, and less realistic than I was hoping to achieve. I definitely think the portrait of Howard is a better, more detailed sketch, nevertheless I was still quite happy overall with the final piece 🙂 I then started drawing vertical lines with a ruler, in preparation for the portrait background.

Background:

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35,35,283,296.377563

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I decided to do a colourful rainbow background as I believed this would make the grey pencil portraits distinct from the background, and both would ‘pop’ as a result. I drew vertical lines with a ruler, and coloured each strip with a different colour bright colour pencil. I also used a black fineliner pen to distinguish the colours, and the sketch, again for a ‘pop’ effect 🙂

The finished portrait:

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And here is the final framed product! It took me about a fortnight in total, a few hour blocks every day or every other day. Even though it is not the best drawing in the world, as I admit I am only an amateur artist, I think it has turned out rather well 🙂 Hope you agree?? Something this scale on A2 paper is pretty time-consuming, so I am very glad it was well appreciated 🙂 …