Self Portait by Chris Downing

Hello you - I like the clothes and the background too which can sometimes ruin a SP but there's nothing wrong with your face!

Cheers Debs

Welcome to the SP club. My watercolour is no longer for view, but I shall be doing an oil in due course! As Debs says, there is nothing wrong with your face! It's got a rather nice quizzical look as opposed to the stern concentration of most SP. I like your tones, both on your face and your clothes.

This is a very good effort, especially the clothes and you have done well to brave the Cult of the Id. I stopped doing SP's when I couldn't remember who I was painting. Two suggestions for when you do another....paint your eyes so that they look at viewer, not to one side. That way, they engage with whoever looks at your work. Secondly, a minor consideration...on this scale the background could be more tonally even and of secondary importance, like your image of the guy with head covering.

Well done Chris seems like a bit of a day for doing sp's today, with Edward's appearing as well, you have done really well here, as Roger has said and you mentioned yourself your clothes e have turned out great, good strong confident work, one of these days I will have to get round to mine!

Hats off to anyone who attempts self-potraiture! The textures are interesting throughout with great skin tone. Perhaps if you accentuate the lighting, making it more directional, you might find it easier to discern the underlying bone structure. I don't actually mind the downward gaze; I'm just not sure how you brought it off technically in the mirror!

Thank you Gudrun ,Roger, Ros and Kim for all your valuable comments. Kim, this was done from a photo. I will attempt the next one using a mirror and with lighting as you suggest.

Hard work, Chris, REALLY hard work, to represent your own features; but do keep trying - oil is a very suitable medium for portraiture, because you can keep refining it for so long. Could I also suggest carbon pencil .... I was told many years ago not to use them, as they "flatter your technique": well, bugger that for a game of skittles, flattering my technique was just what I wanted! They, and conté crayon, and charcoal, teach you about the use of tone, which is perhaps a lesson you need to learn (and so do most of us: indeed I've posted some advice on that front today in relation to watercolour). The intense darks you can get with carbon pencil, charcoal, Mars Lumograph 8B pencils (the best pencil you can get) give you such huge freedom, and you can cut into them with putty rubber: they're a great preparation for painting in oil, if you learn the lessons they teach, because they make you unafraid of strong darks graduating into the mid-lights and the lightest lights. This painting is successful - I think I know what you look like, and would recognize you if you came a-knocking at my door - and all you need is more practice at just refining colours and shapes. This is especially good news, if I may say so (and who's going to stop me, eh?) because so many fall at the first hurdle, having no sense of spatial awareness, ie no idea of shape and construction. Well, you've got all that already: all you need to do is develop it.