Self Portrait

So. Self portrait. I had a lot of trepidation about starting this one, since I accidentally gave myself a black eye last Friday night...

At about this stage I realized that it wasn't only my eye that's swollen, oh no, it's the entire right side of my face. Incredibly hard to draw it right: since it doesn't match with the other side but it's not dramatically swollen, it just looks lopsided!! Grrrr.

I gave up at this point. It kind of looked like me, but it was definitely off. A big part of it was definitely the swelling, but I couldn't explain it all away with that excuse. So I put it away and slept on it for a few hours.

Ah, the wonders of fresh eyes! I went back last night and spent about an hour tweaking it; I shortened/narrowed the jaw a lot, which was the main issue, plus some small edits to the eyes and hair. It's much much much better but, um.... it's still not right. I'm done working on it at the moment though...