2014 Self Portrait

This is officially my first ever self portrait.  I knew it was a good idea to wait until I had some working knowledge of art before I attempted this.  Unlike the other black-and-white portraits I've done recently, I tried what's called a modified digital dry brush technique.   I used the airbrush in Paint Tool SAI with extremely low density (or Flow, as it's known in Photoshop) and just brushed in the general values before going into the finer details.  It was a lot of fun and I managed to complete the whole thing start-to-finish in about 4 hours.

In addition to learning a new technique, I learned a lot about my face that I just don't get by looking in the mirror.  You may notice I'm a bit crooked.  My nose is actually broken, so it pulls the center of my lips to one side, and that's why the right side of my mouth looks longer than the other side.  The top of my right eye also droops, and features a very prominent vein (so prominent that I didn't feel right about leaving it out).  In short, my face has a lot of character.