Prompt No. 18: Self Portraits
Creating artwork of yourself is a great exercise no matter your skill level or how often you draw.
The prompts I provide to paid subscribers are meant to be referenced whenever a push or new inspiration is needed. There are no rules or guidelines for how to use these prompts.
As humbling and scary as it may feel to draw yourself, I can’t encourage the practice enough. I have talked many times about how there is no better way to really see something than to draw it. By looking at and taking the time to draw a subject, we see details that are missed at first glance. In fact, even an object that you have owned or spent time with for years can reveal itself to be something quite different from what you thought when you sit down to draw it. The same phenomenon happens when we draw ourselves. Now, noticing the lines and marks and curves of a piece of pottery is much easier and less emotional than noticing them as we draw our selves, but once you begin there often is a sense of separation and peace as our faces and bodies become nothing more than the perfect subject to practice drawing.
Back in 2021 I created one hundred self-portraits as part of a one-portrait-a-day project. The rules I gave myself were simple: just play, and spend any amount of time. Many of the drawings were blind