Here is another portrait of a family friend done in pencil on an A4 size sheet of paper. It took around 10 hours in total to complete.

Click here to view the progress of this drawing.

I started with the same approach as my previous drawings and began the piece with a draft layout to get the proportion roughly in and then carefully add in the details later.

Since the portrait showed more of the front of the face; I’d decided to go in a slightly different approach with the shading and chosen to shade by following the contours of the face, this seem to be the appropriate option as it gave more depth and dimension to the facial features.

Capturing his expression was slightly more work than the previous portrait as his smile is much subtle, so getting the creases around the mouth to look right was important.

With hindsight, there’s still some issues with the proportion of the head, I think it needs to be about 5% wider as the general shape of his head is more rounder. His left ear needs to be stretched lower by about 3% as well.

Overall, I am very pleased with the outcome of this piece, it has turned out better than I’ve expected and has been a good drawing experience.

Tags: Pencil, Portrait.

Here is a portrait of a family friend done in pencil. I used a photo of him that I took with the 20D as the reference image, the photo had good outdoor lighting and good facial expression so it was perfect for practicing portrait drawing.

The portrait is within the size of an A4 paper. It took about 8 hours to do, about 2 hours of it were spent at the initial layout stage; making sure the proportion looked right before I went in adding the details.

Click here to view the progress of this drawing.

After getting the outline sorted, I’ve begun focusing on the main features of his face; starting with the eyes and then working down to the nose and mouth.

The hair was done at a later stage and took just over an hour to do. I tried to avoid investing too much time in adding each and every single strand of hair perfectly in and concentrated more on the hair as a whole; getting the main highlights and dark tones in.

Overall, I am pleased with the finished piece, it’s by far the best portrait on paper that I’ve done to date. I think I’ve got most of his facial features looking right and his expression done fairly convincingly.

With hindsight, I think the eyes are slightly enlarged compared to the reference photo; about 5-10% too big and also I think the shading technique could be improved a little.

I’m really satisfied with how the hair turned out, I initially thought it would be a lot of work; but it was actually fairly straight forward in the end.

Tags: Pencil, Portrait.

Here is a traditional pencil drawing of a dragon ornament. It’s been many years since I’ve done an observational drawing on pencil; so I wanted to see where I am now with my drawing skills.

I’ve chosen to draw this ornament as it’s sentimental and looked interesting to draw on paper. The image took around 6 hours to do and it’s roughly the size of an A6 paper. I used a 0.5 leaded pencil and a good old eraser.

I’ve never been a natural at traditional drawing so it took a while to get the general shape looking right, after a few trials and errors (and lots of rubbing out) I was fairly satisfied with the outline and begun shading in the different tones of the metal surface.

I tried to give the outline depth and variation by applying heavier and lighter strokes, this can be seen particularly on the dragon’s head.

The trickiest part of the dragon was drawing the scales on the body, it was difficult trying to keep them all uniformed and angled at the same time.

After finishing the piece; the image was scanned and imported into Photoshop for image resizing. I’ve avoided major touch up of the image as I wanted to keep it mainly as a traditional pencil drawing with no digital manipulation. The only things added were levels, curves, desaturation and vignette to present the work better.

I’ve experimented with the image and created an inverted version of it which appears to have more depth to the subject. Click here to see the inverted version.

I am fairly pleased with the result considering it’s been awhile since I’ve done an observational drawing in this medium. There are still some issues with the angle and proportion of the dragon but I think generally it’s looks fairly close to the actual object.

This piece is an improvement to all the pencil drawings that I’ve attempted, I believe it’s down to the experiences I have from looking at people’s work and doing 3D and illustration work. My observational skill has improved over the years so I’m better at spotting mistakes and correcting them now.

Tags: Pencil.