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.

Oscar

One of the darkest pictures I've drawn. I'm quite amazed at what an HB lead can acheive.

In the reference photo Oscar was lying on a bed of straw - so I feel I copped out somewhat in just drawing a smudged grey surface!

Oscar's chest and legs took quite a long time, as I really wanted the correct effect (hey, that rhymes!) of the direction of the fur and changing of one colour to the next. I also concentrated on individual stands of hair, not just a mass of solid colour.

The original photo was taken with a flash. Hence the ligher parts of Oscar's face actually are darker hairs reflecting the light from the camera. His face is dark brown and black, but that is not how it appears in the drawing due to this. In future drawings I will have to be careful of this - the pitfalls of greyscaling and grey lead pencil drawing!

The outlining of Oscar was a big challenge. His right ear was full of very obscure shapes that made no sense whatsoever.

With just about all my drawings, the outline always looks out of place, or on the weird side - until the shading is complete and you can step back and see why the outlining was the way it was after all. It's a good feeling.

Details, details...

It's amazing how hard work often pays off.

After drawing this picture, I have had second thoughts about any reference photo with highly detailed clothing.
But when I look at this picture its the stripy jumper that makes this picture so spectacular - the folds in the fabric, the fine details.

This was one of those pictures where I thought I had finished. The background was completed, every stripe accounted for (*phew!*), but comparing my drawing to the reference photo, I noticed that there was something amiss in the eyes.

Double checking, I discovered that the pupils were about 1mm smaller than what they should be.
Something so small, I thought, won't matter - I'll leave it.
But I couldn't just leave it there. After making the change, everything snapped into proportion a whole lot better.

Amazing how the details are so important.

I was surprised at how much shading (and dark shading at that) I had to do with her blond hair - in looking at the top of her head, there is more dark than light.

Out of all of my portaits that I've drawn, this has been the one that has taken the longest.
It's also the drawing that I've found the most difficult to part with - knowing how much was put into it.

Princess

When I told my sister-in-law that I'd draw a picture of her choice for her birthday, I had a sneaking suspicion it would be Princess, her dog.
I was feeling a bit nervous about this, as drawing people had been my only focus up to this stage.

The fear is that there is just so much fur and hair, how can I possibly do it all.

What makes the face of an animal (especially a very furry one like Princess) easier than a person is that if some of the fur is out of place, or the shading isn't 100%, or whatever - it really isn't going to make that much of a difference. Whereas if I was drawing a person and drew the nose off centre, or shaded the cheek incorrectly, the whole face may not be recognisable.

A challenge with this particular reference photo was that Princesses face was in perfect focus, but the rest of her was out of focus.

I had absolutely no idea how to draw something that is blurry. Do I just squint and give it my best shot?

I soon found that if I applied the same method of "draw what you see", it all turned out fine.

Mr Bean

Drawing the way I do is a matter of zooming in and getting every line in the right spot, every shade correct in relation to every other shade, working from whole to part and part to whole.

Sometimes I wonder if it can actually be classified 'art' when I'm essentially copying another picture, without putting my spin or interpretation on it. Hmm...

It's amazing how lost in a drawing I can become. Our clock on the mantle piece dongs every half hour and hour - it seems that only five minutes goes by and the clock is at it again.

In starting out my venture of drawing, I made sure that I used a range of pencil hardnesses - 6H, to F, all the way to a 9B.

Something interesting has taken place and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it...

I've abandoned all of the above pencils, and now use only one:

It's a Papermate Pacer with 0.5mm HB leads.

When I first completed the picture of Mr Bean below, I was quite surprised at the range of shades I could achieve with just an HB pencil.



Granted, I can't get the same dark as an 8B or 9B, but it's not bad. I have found that with a 6B or above there is often a shine in the graphite at various angles. With the pacer there is none. 

I enjoyed drawing this picture very much, although his tweed jacket had me pulling my hair out. I just couldn't get the exact effect that I wanted. In the reference photo, portions of the jacket were out of focus, or seemingly inconsistent with the shade beside it. I resigned myself to the thought that good enough was going to have to be good enough.

What's funny is that when I finished the drawing, the one thing most people pointed out what how realistic they thought the jacket looked.

Something is not right...

Here is a drawing I did in 2007.
If you were to choose one thing that struck you as out of place, or not so realistic, what would it be?

It seems quite funny now, picturing me holding a fork with my left hand - keeping as still as I could - all the while trying to outline and shade the picture with my right hand! Not an easy task.

Once again, this method is where I covered the whole page with graphite and erased to achieve the lighter shades and white.

Now back to my initial question: what is out of place? What makes this picture defy realism?
By this stage I had learnt a lot about drawing what I see, but I hadn't yet caught on to the fact that solid lines are few and far between on basically anything you look at.

Look at the outlines of the fingers and finger nails. The dark lines define the shape of the hand well enough, but in real life - they're just not there!

The trick is to either get rid of the line all together, and have two different shades meet, or shade up to the line, thus eradicating it.

Four months of practice

Below are two pictures drawn from the same reference photo, four months apart.
Note the subtle differences - the detail that for some reason I didn't 'see' the first time I drew: the intricacies of the iris, the veins and skin tones. Even the shape of the eye is different in the two pictures.
The second eye jumps off the page, and looks a whole lot more three dimensional than the first.

By the time I drew the second eye, I had purchased some better quality paper. I think that makes a big difference.

I use Arches 300 hot press watercolour paper. Since then I've gotten a few more types to experiment with, but when drawing pictures for others I know I can rely on Arches.