Painting A Portrait
I’ve recently picked up acrylic painting for the first time starting in the beginning of this year back in January [January 2025 at the time of writing].
I’ve never done any painting before hand and I never really had any intentions of starting, but due to randomness and feeling like I was in a dry spell when it came to creating I decided to try something new.
Most of my work has always been in pencil with a little colored pencil and watercolor thrown in there. Painting was something that was always a little daunting to me because of how different it handles from a pencil. Pencil (graphite) you have so much more control over and can be way more direct and intentional than with a brush, at least in my opinion.
I’d had brush work practice when it came to watercolor but the property of watercolor works very differently than acrylic paint. Nonetheless I had to start somewhere.
Slowly but surely I made my way through all of the cheap canvases I had bought and found that even though being different from pencil and watercolor, acrylic is a very fast and easy thing to learn if you have color mixing knowledge to a certain degree.
Getting down to my last couple canvases I had decided I needed to do something a little different. I’d made random sceneries as well as space related paintings but I’d never done portraits before. I’d done portraits in pencil and I felt very confident in those but I’d never done an acrylic portrait.
Being inspired but the great renaissance artist and especially Vincent Van Gogh who made many self portraits of himself due to lack of models, I decided I would make a portrait of myself for the exact same reason as well as I’ve looked at myself for years so I know what I’m supposed to look like (to a degree).
Using a reference photo I started with a pencil sketch on canvas to get the basic outline almost like a stencil. It’s the same process I use when making a full portrait in pencil. This part can be tricky when it comes to getting the proportions right, especially when working on a larger scale but once everything is drawn and resembles the reference, it’s like the first big hurdle crossed and pretty much drives the rest of the process.
The next would be to start the paint. I tried doing some color blocking to trying and break down the colors easier so I could slowly build on to the face. Simple black for the beard as some simple lighter and darker browns for the skin tone. To be honest even at this point I’m the very beginning I wasn’t sure how this was gonna turn out but I could only hope for the best.
After the color blocking came adding a little more color and layering to the skin color as well as the fabric with the hat. There’s always a period at least for me in the beginning where I think the portrait or whatever it is I’m making looks like absolute garbage. I’ve learned over the years that this feeling is probably just an artist curse where you start to doubt your own skill. I feel like you start a balancing act of trying not overthink what you’re doing but still trying to be very conscientious of the things your’e doing. It almost feels like you’re at a crossroad where things can either start turning out really good or start nosediving into a fiery crash really fast. But I’ve powered through it enough to know that most of it is just in your head and it’s just a part of the process.
Little by little I started to add more detail. This is where I feel like you get over that hump of self doubt and the piece starts to come alive. More detail in the beard as well as in the skin tone. I call it the coloring book stage, which is usually my favorite because I have a pretty clear visual of where everything is going and it gives me a little more breathing room to relax and not think so much on what I’m doing.
And finally adding more and more small details and little strokes here and there I started to fill out the background to finally complete and bring the whole thing all together
Working on this little by little for about a week and a half, a couple hours here and there, the whole process took maybe around 7 and a half hours as my best guestimate as I wasn’t really concerned with timing myself more so just actually finishing it.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised and pleased with the final results and had a lot of fun with the whole thing. It challenged my artistic abilities in terms of color mixing and proportions as well as my patience to not rush through the whole thing or abandon it all together. I learned a lot I think through trial and error in trying to get things right and more so that things don’t have to be exact but more so an interpretation of what your’e seeing.
I hope in the future to be able to make more portraits and different things that challenged me in this way. Because in life and art there is no growth without challenge.
