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:
34,35,291,307.027954
34,35,297,310.790283
34,35,294,312.409424
34,35,293,306.927307
35,35,303,319.700989
36,35,299,312.174927
34,35,305,326.310089
33,35,301,316.461182
34,35,300,313.718994
34,35,299,315.713959
34,35,300,316.491394
34,35,299,314.048401
35,35,308,327.215942
35,35,309,327.763123
34,35,310,323.834839
35,35,311,329.342834
34,35,311,327.951599
33,35,303,320.586365
54,35,304,318.511658
34,35,303,320.770538
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:
35,35,281,294.743683
36,35,262,273.308472
34,35,285,296.731995
34,35,301,317.895142
34,35,315,329.289307
34,35,296,317.642395
34,35,280,291.953064
34,35,300,315.415833
35,35,310,321.960541
35,35,280,293.073090
34,35,279,293.490540
35,35,269,288.904968
35,35,265,283.530762
35,35,273,297.573822
34,35,277,294.766052
35,35,286,303.614990
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:
34,35,291,308.752167
35,35,303,315.638763
34,35,293,307.199768
35,35,283,296.377563
34,35,296,321.286469
35,35,299,328.704956
39,35,302,322.900146
34,35,306,323.131653
27,35,295,318.188965
34,35,293,319.505493
34,35,276,293.129150
34,35,275,290.682068
35,35,290,309.490112
35,35,304,324.290161
26,35,294,318.037201
35,35,298,322.029297
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:
31,32,334,363.250916
19,31,331,364.746246
32,32,335,360.231262
33,33,336,356.314392
30,31,334,367.460693
29,31,336,366.531006
33,31,332,365.632385
30,31,334,368.344208
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 🙂 …
Above is the portrait gift wrapped up ready to be opened Valentine’s Day…
And this is Howard opening his portrait present on Valentine’s Day…
It was definitely worth it for seeing such a happy, smiling boyfriend, hehe 🙂 🙂
Thank you so much for reading / viewing!
Keep a look out for more UnicornPostbox art blog posts coming soon!
Peace and love, Lauren xx
(Please visit my Facebook page ‘UnicornPostbox’ to ‘like’ and ‘follow’)
© 2019 Lauren Parr / http://www.unicornpostbox.wordpress.com
unicornpostbox 
You must be logged in to post a comment.