Self Portrait Time!

What artist can resist doing a self portrait at some point? I have done self portraits in pencil: one back in college which is lost somewhere in my mom's garage, and then another that I did a few years ago when I started up doing art again. (My first self portrait blog) At that time, I had also made an attempt at a watercolor portrait, which showed that I definitly needed more practice with watercolor portraits.
I decided to put out a challenge to the Group Watercolor Painting  community to do a self portrait, including myself. Shortly after that, while procrastinating by cleaning out my garage, I found yet another pencil self portrait that I don't even remember doing, folded and stuck into a book. The words "who are you?" on the bottom makes me think this was after college and before I had a job or knew what I was going to do with my life.
So here is my first watercolor self portrait that I am actually proud of doing. It was from a selfie took of myself as opposed to working with a mirror as I had done with my pencil drawings. My jaw looks huge because of the angle of the photo I took. I took the picture with a side light source to get some shadowing. ..and that was before I found my other self portrait. I do look much happier now!

Self Portrait

Just to challenge myself, I signed up for an annual self portrait contest put on by the Plein Aire artists of Sacramento, sponsored by Martha Esch. I had not done a self portrait since college and was not sure where to start. I sat down in front of the mirror and did a quick pencil sketch.  I was so pleased with how it turned out, I just left it alone.  I then proceeded to copy my sketch onto watercolor paper with paint.  After a few brush strokes, I realized my mistake...I had not put any sketch marks onto the paper to help with proportion and it became more of an experiment figuring out the layering of color and highlights, and not about proportion. 

Definitely something I can keep practicing on.  As for the competition of about 15 artists, I submitted my original sketch and I didn't place.  The top three artists were all acrylic paint, so my pencil sketch paled in comparison (literally!) but I got to see some really good art and had a good time, and that is one of the goals of my art-- Have fun!

Self portrait sketch scanned with computer enhanced contrast