Portrait Painting & Progress Pics

Hi there! Happy Sunday!

Recently I took a few days off of work to catch up on art work, and decided to use some of that extra time to do a painting. I've been yearning to do a self portrait for a long while now, but haven't been able to justify the time away from comics/stickers/etc. Back when I was in middle school and high school, I would do self portraits as studies all the time to improve my drawing/painting skills. There's something so soothing about letting your creative decision making brain idle for a while and just replicating a reference. The finished product isn't anything special in my opinion, but I do feel like I proved to myself I can still paint when I want to!

I took some progress pictures as I made it. These are definitely more capable of satisfying curiosity rather than being instructive. I'm a drawer at heart (rather than a painter) and I'm relatively new to gouache, so I lack enough confidence in my technique to explain it in depth. But! Here we go anyhow!

Here was the original reference picture, taken on my 30th birthday. I made a bunch of chicken wings and I thought it'd be funny to pose with one (it was). I also put some lilies in the background for some more color/interest.

A light wash of transparent gouache over my pencil sketch to establish areas of color + shadow:

Laying in rough shadows, starting with the dress. This may have been my favorite stage of the painting tbh. I sort of liked how the face looked with just the pencil sketch and a quick splash of gouache, and I was happy with the structure and texture in the dress. Later on, I spilled a bunch of seltzer on the dress and had to repair the area. OOPS.

Next I moved onto the background, starting with the lilies. I honestly hate painting flowers; theres way too many overlapping organic planes of subtle color that are difficult to parse. I try to keep things loose and relatively undefined so as not to get bogged down in the details:

 A rough start on the face/skin. I also tried adding some lighter gray texture to the bricks in the background and hated it. At this point I reached the "ugly stage" of every painting that makes you want to scrap the whole thing. If you've ever painted, you probably know what I'm talking about.

 Nevertheless we persist! Adding more definition to the face/hair:

Between this shot and the last I added succulents to the lower half, spilled a bunch of seltzer on my dress, and did my best to fix it.

At this point we're basically finished, but these finishing touches take the longest. I spend a lot of time smoothing transitions between colors, fixing various details, and adding highlights and accent lines:

And we're done! Wanna see my extremely disorganized palette?

I hope that was fun for you to see! I'd love to do more painting again soon and keep improving 🌼