It really has been a long time since I’ve posted. It’s definitely hard to keep up with everything. But I thought I’d post my last project for one of my classes last term, which was fun and turned out kind of cool. I had to do a realistic portrait of somebody and then another version with exaggerated features, and I chose to do my niece. These were both done in acrylic.
Here’s the realistic one:
Now, this has some problems (her eyes and mouth are too small, for instance), but it’s overall a little better than I expected it to be.
For the second one, I decided to exaggerate her eyes. I’m not a big fan of this style, as I prefer sticking closely to realism for people. (I say that, but I also do like stylized art. So maybe it’s just I feel more comfortable with realism for myself, at least at this point.) For some reason, they wanted us to make this portrait textured, so we were supposed to do a base layer of modeling paste with some extra texture added in. I put on 6 pieces of watercolor paper and then did a couple layers of modeling paste over it. Here is what it looked like at that stage:
Then, also for unclear reasons to me, we were supposed to first paint a black silhouette with a background before starting the actual portrait. This is that stage:
So finally, I got to doing the actual drawing. I used white conte to transfer the drawing since it was on black, and that work reasonably well. I also played with the background a bit. Here is the final version:
Overall, I liked both of them and feel like I am slowly getting better at acrylics.