Portraits

I have always avoided doing portraits because I was seriously bad at them but I wanted to push myself to do something outside of my comfort zone and I was in this mood where I wanted to draw something verses painting. At the time, I was seeing a lot of really cool portrait drawings on my Instagram and so I asked myself why I couldn’t at least try to do one too. I had gotten a portable projector for Christmas in the hope that I could make doing murals easier in the future. Turns out it makes doing portraits much easier too. My next question was who to draw and who might actually like to have a portrait of themselves. I decided to do the people in my wedding and make it their gift from me.

This left me with another decision I needed to decide on. Was I going to just do portraits or were they going to be more? And if they are more, what would I add to them? This ended up being somewhat harder than the actual portraits were to do because I wanted them to be representative of the people that I was doing the portraits for. One of the people I did, I decided to just leave it as a normal portrait mostly because I believed that this person would appreciate a portrait of themselves the most. The other two I added a little more that just made them feel more like the people I was drawing. Below are the outcomes of my attempts at portraits in at least four years.

Through this whole process, I continued to push myself way outside of my comfort zone and with each portrait, I was continuously proud and shocked at how well they turned out. That is not to say that I could not still get better and improve my skills and there is something to be said for really clear and crisp photos, which I found out during this process. Now that I know that I can successfully do portraits, I feel like that has opened up more opportunities for me and while it is still not the thing that I love doing like I like creating nature scene, it also means that I can potentially combine the two instead of avoiding one type of art. I think this experience has made me a better artist and I am going to continue to push myself to create things I have never touched before and not being afraid of creating something bad.