Today I was looking forward to just drawing. I started a drawing of a beautiful Portugese blue door and its surroundings a couple of days ago, but I didn’t feel like drawing from a picture. I wanted to try drawing freely. As I’ve been doing lots of portraits lately, I decided to draw a head, and let it develop into what it wanted to be.
I started with the general shape of the head, and placed the nose and eyes into it. I added a mouth, and the coarse outline of hair. It looked like a female face, so I went with that. Also, the face was kind of round, and the eyes were quite big. The skin was a pale yellow-rose and I added reddish hair and bright green eyes. This drawing started to look like a fairy more and more, so I went with that. I added the pointy ear and the delicate rosy mouth. This fairy was not really the cute, pouting fairy, but a serious autumn fairy.
To challenge myself and play with the colours a bit more, I decided to use blue tints for the shadows. It gives the portrait a nice, not-of-this-world look. I also used rose and orange for the lines in the face, and accentuated some parts with a middle grey.
There are some things that I’m not entirely satisfied about. For example, the eyes are a bit wonky. They don’t look entirely realistic (they are not focusing on one point, I feel), and the hair is quite pencily. I was a bit too aggressive drawing the cheeks, and wasn’t able to get rid of the lines there by blending. The position of the nose is not quite right, it’s too much pointing towards the viewer. I do like it when you can still see that something is a drawing/painting (it should be believable, but if I want it to look like a photograph, I just take a photograph), but I’m still looking for the right amount of realism. Anyway, I’m still quite proud that I produced this from “nothing”, it’s much better than what I would have been able to draw a couple of weeks ago.