Reflection Portrait

When I was in North Carolina visiting my mother in February of this year, I drew myself in the mirror every night just to keep my hand in. The pandemic was creeping closer, but no one was masked or as freaked out as we all became just a couple of weeks after I got back to New York. The portraits got more and more pensive as the news got worse and worse. Here’s one of them in pencil:

Then I inked the pencil drawing:

I wanted to try to create the illusion of a reflection in the mirror, so I scanned the drawing when I got home and put it into Photoshop, added some background mirror color and some spatter to try to make it look like the mirror was wet and covered with condensation:

And finally, I printed it out onto Rives BFK, and painted some Daler Rowney Pro White on it to make the reflection, both with spatter and also with a brush. I used Copic markers to put the shadow behind the head and shoulders:

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