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When Nell announced that we would be drawing portraits of ourselves I almost had a heart attack! Besides the fact that I had never looked at myself for more than a few minutes, I did not think I had the skills to draw any live object- especially not myself. Nell seemed confident in our ability to complete the assignment as intsructed but I was not as certain. The instructions alone made me realise that I would need divine grace and a different mindset to effectively start and complete the assignment.

We were instructed to grind a piece of black chalk on a square palette and apply the powder residue on an A2 white piece of paper using tissue paper until the A2 paper is completely covered by black powder. To draw the self portrait we would have to use a malleable eraser and if a mistake occurs, one would have to use the tissue paper to reapply the powder chalk. We were warned that we would be spending a lot of time on this assignment but I would never have guessed the true meaning of this until I started.

After spending 3 hours on the nose alone, the reality of the time consuming nature of the project started setting in. I would often find myself trying to reconcile what I know my face looked like to what I was actually looking at in the mirror. I thought I knew what I looked like until I started drawing. My main problem was trying to show colour in ‘black and white’, value judgement is definately not easy especially when trying to figure out how dark or light brown should be in a black and white portrait. Every time I found myself confused or frustrated Nell’s words would begin ringing in my brain ‘Draw what you see not what you think you see’. After a while I began doing just as she advised. I started drawing what I saw…in the hope that I was seeing correctly!