This is the only self-portrait I’ve ever done. It is from a nice memory I have of taking a trip to Hokkaido with my then-girlfriend (now wife) between contract jobs. If you’ve never been, I strongly recommend Hokkaido in late summer — beautiful people, delicious food, lovely driving.
As with other images, these progress from raw images of the pencil sketch to some image work in gimp to blend lines, smudge things up, etc.
After some chunky background removal…
After some closer line cropping…
Touch up the outline just a bit more…
Now to start on the line removal and smudging…
Forgot the darn letters. Working around written text is not easy sometimes.
Now to brighten things up a bit.
And done!
This one came out better than some other attempts I’ve made — hence the only self-portrait that survives. I’ve never tried a real portrait-style sketch of myself. Its not like the world is missing out on anything.
Below are a bunch of in-progress screenshots of this image as I edited it. Nothing magical, its more a testament to the amount of time I had on my hands when I did this — I didn’t have a Wacom tablet or anything. Actually, I don’t think I ever had a mouse. If I remember correctly I did all this editing using a touchpad.
If I did have a Wacom tablet I would probably still draw some. But meh, the world is just chock full of supremely gifted and properly trained artists. I only did these because they were fun.
