In this exercise I chose Photo Booth. For the past 3 months I have had the sweetest photo booth images sitting on my desk of my dad as a child and my grandad. Once I had discovered it at my Nanna's house when looking through old photos, I instantly fell in love with this tiny row of 4 images that felt so perfect, charming, and such a beautiful moment between them.
I feel super inspired by these images, and whilst I will not use them for this exercise, their existence on my desk has definitely inspired. When seeing an exercise that looked at photo booth images, I really wanted to try draw portraits at this scale in black and white to match this of my dad and grandad. Instead, I thought I would create a mini series of self portraits. I've worked big, but never have a I worked this small, so if anything, it is out of curiosity to see what I could achieve.
To begin, I took 4 images on my phone, just silly poses to have some fun. I uploaded them to the computer where I turned them black and white and also into a photo booth strip. I printed them at real scale so I could aim to be as accurate as possible. I may then do a second version in my cartoon character style!
This would work fine!
Here are some photos of the process.
And here it is complete:
This was a fun exercise that really challenged my skills. I found it interesting working with the pencil at such a small scale. Attempting to capture a likeness, accuracy and the fine details was great practise, something I had never tried before with such a small drawing!
Hands can often be tricky to draw, so adding them to the mix at this scale was an extra challenge I wanted to explore. The results I think worked out surprisingly well. There are some areas I could look to improve, but in the end this was an experiment, and as a first attempt I am satisfied with the result. In fact, with the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year deadline extension, I was in time to be as spontaneous as the expression in a photo booth and apply with this drawing. In previous years I have only ever entered larger painted self portraits and have yet to make it to the short list. Let's see what happens with this, because why not!
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