Capturing the moment

This photo captures the nature of the child perfectly - the cheeky smile, the glint in the eyes.
When I first had this photo sent to me I knew it would turn out well.

The drawing is one of three portaits - a gift for a good friend, who has had them framed beautifully. It's one thing to see your drawing the moment it's finished, it's quite another thing to see it matted and framed.

A challenge in this particular drawing was the lighting. In fact the two other portraits that accompany this one were inside when their photo was taken. This one is outside.
It was very difficult to know when to stop building up the shading on the neck. The contrast between the neck and forehead seemed to great, so I may have stopped a little too soon - either than, or didn't shade the forehead and lighter parts of the face enough.

This was my first attempt at short spiky hair.
I was really unsure how to go about it. That is one of my favourite aspects of drawing - having no clue whatsoever how to make something look realistic, and experimenting until it works.

In the end I did some solid shading on all of the hair. When I was happy with the darkness of it I began with my kneadable eraser and electric eraser to lift out the graphite just where the spiky bits needed to be.