In February I started drawing portraits of people I found on TikTok. I, along with many others, have lost hours to the addictive clock app. Realizing this I wanted to see if I could do something to also be productive. There is such a great variety of styles presented on the app that inspired me to draw portraits. Portraits are my favorite thing to draw so I was very excited to start this project, especially since I was practicing a new art style.

With these portraits, I wanted to explore and practice the different positions and styles of each one. I started with @thathunterchick for the way that they sat and played the guitar. Then @dyebones because he embodies a well-dressed character of some anime. I ended up taking a long break due to personal reasons going on, but today I was able to complete one that I have working little by little on. This portrait of @soupytime and their frog was a really fun and interesting one to draw because the frog is a stuffed animal with an already cartoon-like form. All the portraits were challenging in their own way but with this one, I struggled due to the fact I do not draw in a very cartoon style.

The way that I draw these portraits is, I do a light sketch then clean up the lines darkening them to make it easier to trace through a lightbox on cardstock, and lastly scan that image to the computer to finish it in photoshop. For the sketch, it is the typical way on how I draw my realistic portraits, but with this style, it gets a bit messy lining on top of those lines. To fix that I use the lightbox, which I use slightly differently; I first use a pencil to finalize the look of the portrait then going in with liner pens instead of just tracing the sketch with the pens. I prefer to add in the shapes and clean any pencil that is stuck using photoshop. Using photoshop gives me the ability to move the shapes around and change colors easily making it a lot smoother and faster in the finished piece. I found that this way is the best to achieve the look I am going for this particular style.

These are really fun to draw and a great way to practice different styles and forms from what I normally draw. I am not sure how often I will be able to do these TikTok portraits but I do have a list of those that I would love to draw.

Thank you for reading, stay strange.