Gerry Bryceland and the upsurge of a portrait artist

Gerry Bryceland and the ascent of an artist? Drawing with graphite is a less messy material, which is an advantage if you don’t feel like finishing a drawing, then having to spend a fair amount of time scrubbing your hands, arms, and cleaning up your work area. There are different levels of hardness available with graphite pencils, which gives you the ability to make light marks, as well as deep shadows. If you need to lay down a lot of graphite to establish shadows, or for your background, you could use powdered graphite. There is also water-soluble graphite available that you can use to create beautiful washes that can add a unique element to your self-portrait. The one main drawback of using graphite is the reflective sheen it produces in the light.

Drawing the Eyes: At the middle of the center blue line, draw two almond-shaped eyes. Did you know? Human anatomy is quite amazing. The space between the two eyes can be measured with a ‘third eye’. This is the approximate separation between the two eyes, leaving a perfect space for where your nose will be placed! With this in mind, make sure that the space between your eyes isn’t too narrow nor too wide. Getting the eyes as right as you can is very important in portrait drawing. Now, let’s fill in the other details. In the middle of each eye, draw a big, dark circle and a smaller one at the center of it. These are your irises and pupils. Add the eyelids by drawing two curved lines on top of your eyes, use the shape of your already drawn eyes as a curving guide.

Gerard Bryceland‘s recommendations on portret painting: The hair is the last element of the face to be painted. The painting of the hair is usually the last part of the head to be completed. It follows the natural order of the painting, finally covering the rough edges of both the background and the skin. The colors used for the dark areas of the hair were ivory black and Prussian blue, while the highlights were mostly titanium white. You can see the technique used for painting the hair in our close-up detail. The underpainting was applied with freely brushed glazes of ivory black and Prussian blue. The overpainted details of the hair were built up with fine strokes of black and white whose direction follows the contours of the haircut. The opacity of these brushstrokes was varied to suggest the depth, texture and highlights of the hair. The density of the brushstrokes decreases around the edges of the hair to convey softness of its outline.

You could try freehand drawing your face. This is the most straightforward approach, but that doesn’t mean it is the easiest. With this approach, you look at yourself in the mirror, or look at a photo, then simply start sketching what you see. Pay attention to the major shapes you see and pay careful attention to how your features relate to one another. You also need to pay attention to the light source, so you can render your face with realistic highlights and shadows. When using this approach, start out your drawing with light, sketchy lines, then slowly darken your drawing as you render it, but only after the initial sketch is in place.

About Gerard Bryceland: I’m Gerard Bryceland an artist based in Maidstone Kent and regularly get commissioned to do work doing paintings and portraits of people and their families. I’ve always been an artist from my childhood, I loved drawing my friends and family initially just to mess around with my friends and had a lot of fun drawing them. But as i got older it really just became a business as my friends and their families would want me to do family portraits and that type of thing. With word of mouth word gets out and before you know it you know it I’m 35 and still doing the same thing.