Exercise 4 Self Portrait

One of the experimental sketches I did
before embarking on the self portrait painting.
This one is done in oils.

On playing around with light, mid tone and dark backgrounds the one with the most contrast and impact was the midtone. This contrasts with the both the shadow side and the light side of my head when I half close my eyes. I did several sketches to prepare for this, they were very experimental - mostly taken from Emily Ball's book.
To make a convincing representation though, I will have to try an follow the next steps in a more formal exacting way than the sketches up to now as this is the impression I get from the brief  - at least to attempt somewhere near accurate proportions and tonal range. So, I tried sketching out certain individual facial features such as the eyes, nose and mouth just to become more familiar with them. It's surprising when  under close scrutiny, how many little nuances I spotted, that would otherwise go unnoticed.
 I decided to base my own palette one that Goya used for portraits, consisting of black, white, an earth red and yellow ochre. I would have like to use Burnt Sienna, but didn't have any so instead mixed cadmium red and burnt umber. The ground is a warm mid tone of cadmium red and burnt umber.
As I was afraid to jump straight in with paint, I started sketching the features in lightly with pencil. As I was doing this I moved away once of twice and had to try and gauge by sight what position my head was in beforehand - this was awkward and it's part of the reason my mouth kept moving around. Then, not before time I suddenly remembered from portraits on my drawing course, that I had put a couple of marks on the mirror and lined them up something on my face. The process was a bit more straightforward after that.
During the process of the painting my appearance changed from
something akin to the mad look of Salvador Dali after I had only the darks filled in, to a much inferior version of a Boticelli.

Self portrait - acrylics

Some of the problems I encountered were: 1. I had to maneouvre all the furniture in my small space to a position where I could hang a fabric behind me for the background. This meant I didn't have a lot of space in front of my easel to stand back and check things from a distance. Instead I moved the painting to where I could do that every now and again.
2. Setting up a mirror: my only other easel is a table easel and though not too big, it was a wall mirror and heavy, so I placed it on the easel on a large box on a table top to obtain the right height.
3. Light: to light one side of the face, I began with natural light, but this kept on changin, so I changed to a combination of artificail and natural light. Because I continued into the evening after the natural light had faded this added to the confusion. I tried to stick to the basic tones I put down at first but it wasn't easy.