Drawing a self portrait

I just came back from an unplanned trip overseas to be with my mom, who was sick in the hospital. Having suffered a pulmonary embolism, she was rushed by ambulance to the emergency room, where the doctors there managed to stabilize her before she would have drowned in her own blood. My sister phoned me the next day to update me on her condition. Scared that I might not have another chance to hug her alive, I flew overseas and stayed in my hometown for 4 days to be with her and assist as much as I could. Luckily, she survived this time, such that I saw her coming back home without breading issues, but ten times more medications to take. At her age and current condition, that extra medication was expected.

I am still working on this website. To create an About page for it, I was thinking of drawing my portrait from a picture I took with my iPhone just a few hours ago. I have not drawn portraits for a few years now, as I have been busy painting landscapes and other unrelated activities. This time, it took me a couple of hours to render it believably (in the eyes of the beholder) on drawing paper. The result of my first unchecked sketch is reproduced in the image below.

Funny, as I was sketching my self-portrait, I was chatting with my mom over WhatsApp, so I could show her the progress of my work in real time. At the stage where the sketch lacked the shades, which help create the illusion of a 3D object reduced to a 2D surface, my drawing looked strongly distorted. My mom commented that the face looked too fat and that only the eyes looked familiar to her. I was able to show here the magic of shading and how the value of gray and gradations produces the illusion of 3D.

The next step is to refine my sketch by making corrections. I scanned the sketch to validate the proportions against a picture of myself taken earlier. Using the popular GIMP application, I opened the photo and the sketch scan in the same session. From the scan, I selected the face outline, scaled it to fit as a copy over the image, and copied it.

By increasing or decreasing the opacity, I can detect significant errors in the sketch and make refinements. Thus, I drew the left ear smaller than it is. The upper tip of the ear should be at the eyebrow level, and the lower tip at the nose level.