A sketch of Josephus the historian on tracing paper using Sakura Pigma and Micron pens. I started sketching with a Winsor-Newton 2B pencil on Strathmore, but the face wasn’t coming out quite right. To correct it, I opened Google Meet – yes! – which mirror-reflects the images it presents of yourself (so you see what you normally see in a mirror and aren’t weirded out). I already had Josephus’s bust up in a Preview window, so I mirror-reflected that horizontally and compared them, trying to make fixes.
Mirror reflecting a drawing helps you see flaws in it, and that helped, but on the fine details of the face, it’s really hard for me to draw things like lips and noses as what is there, rather than what my mind caricatures, so I eventually flipped the drawing back to normal and rotated it 180, so I would not see the stereotypes and instead had to focus on the shapes.
And when I was done with all that, I decided that it was still off, and I needed to start over.
Since it’s late and I’m tired, I pulled out my tracing paper and attempted to correct the drawing by tracing over my own roughs, below. The advantage of this approach is that I can change anything, or even neglect to trace something which was done correctly on the previous level, so, best of both worlds. I think I did pretty OK, though I had not noticed that I’d exaggerated the vertical height of his nose.
Compared to the original … well, yeah, Josephus has a heck of a schnoz, but I made it like 10-15 percent too tall, and missed the straight line on the hair on the bottom back of his head.
Otherwise, a … not completely terrible rendition?
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
