Drawing Challenge #Day 21

So finally I reached the last challenge of the 21 Day Drawing Challenge. Okay, okay, let’s not dwell on the fact that it took me a year to complete a “21 Day” challenge. The important thing is that I’ve completed it, right? Let me just drop the “Day” aspect and say the 21st (and last) challenge was to draw a self-portrait. You know, just like Van Gogh here.

We could take a selfie and use that as our reference for the drawing. The drawing didn’t have to be realistic; we could render it in the style we chose. Basically, we had the artistic license to do whatever we wanted.

I thought about the previous challenges, and the two styles that I’d enjoyed drawing most was realistic and cartoon style. So, I thought I would use one of these styles for my self-portrait. My preferred style was realistic, and I started out with that in mind. However, as it turned out, my self-portrait ended up as a cross between realistic and cartoon, sort of like a caricature.

I’m not exactly sure what went wrong. Maybe I drew my face a bit more elongated than it actually is. And I made out my eyes to be bigger than they are….hmm.

Here’s the reference image for comparison. What do you think?

I’m happy that this course has come to an end. A lot more drawing courses are available online, and I’ve enrolled myself on a couple of them, including one for digital drawings. One problem I faced in this course was that there was less focus on teaching and more on setting challenges (The name of the course makes that clear so it’s entirely my fault that I expected something different.) On the positive side, I do have a better idea now of what I am looking for and the areas in which I need to improve.

I’ll keep sharing my (slow and steady) progress in teaching myself to draw. Stay tuned.

Published by Leena T Pandey

I have been reading voraciously since the age of five when I first discovered the joys of reading. I would lap up anything in print. Unrolling an emptied newspaper cone with one hand, stuffing roasted peanuts in my mouth with the other, all the while devouring the printed content on the cone with my eyes, was one of my first experiences in hedonistic pleasure. In fact, sometimes I feel that I am on an adventurous journey through the secret dreamworld of other people's imaginations, interspersed with occasional visits to my own life to attend events like graduation, first job, marriage, and so on. As a true-blue reader, I think I am uniquely qualified to comment on and critique other people's works of labour. I can tell exactly what puts the average reader to sleep, what sets their pulse racing, and what has them salivating for more. Write to me at leenatpandey@gmail.com. View more posts