I did this a few months back, testing out my new Aquarelle pencils, which take a wash of water after you lay down the graphite.
It is taken from a photo of mine when I stood on one of the bridges in Cork City, Ireland some years back.
This drawing was from one of the exercises in the Draw Awesome course I took a while back, and just now got around to doing the portrait module. I used a soft 8B pencil to do shading, which started to smear (plus I need to work on my shading technique; it’s all over the place!)
Here’s the finished piece. Shading was done with Staedtler Mars Black 4B and 6B pencils, and the hair with a charcoal pencil.
Photo by Jassir Jonis on Unsplash
I’m putting aside the paints for the moment to focus on drawing faces (before I try painting them again!). I’ve just signed up for Sktchy’s 30 Faces in 30 Days (which starts in January 2024). I’m also going through the Portrait module of Draw Awesome again for additional practice. Phil Davies of Draw Awesome has some free resources, including “Faces for Artists” which is a curated collection of Unsplash images. One of those Unsplash images is below.
To draw this portrait in graphite, I used a method which Davies calls “modified tracing” where you make small marks to denote the width of the eyes (but not the height), the width of the nose, the width of the mouth, and the width & height of the face. The rest is freehand. I am using 9×12 Kraft paper by Stonehenge.
I have done initial shading, and will need to circle back to shade the hair darker, as well as adding white highlights where appropriate.
Photo by Jassir Jonis on Unsplash
Over Black Friday, I bought access to a handful of online classes at Kara Bullock Art. One was the “Terrific Trees” class by Kim VanDerHoek.
I ‘m working on painting pine trees, so I can make some Christmas cards on a Christmas tree theme. The tree on the left was painted on a 6×6 canvas panel, and is based on Kim’s class (a follow-along).
The tree on the right was painted on a 8×8 black stretched canvas. The shadow of the tree is unpainted; I’m just using the black of the canvas.
This is the finish of the older, bearded man portrait from the follow-along/demo portrait in Hashim Akib’s book Painting Portraits in Acrylic. I chose to paint his shirt as a sap green instead of the pyrrole red the teacher uses. Because I painted green over red, it looks almost black.
The shadows around his nose and lips are too purple; I need to lighten those.
I’m continuing to work on follow-along/demo portraits from Hashim Akib’s book Painting Portraits in Acrylic. Today I started work on a portrait of an older, bearded man.
As with the work done in this earlier post, I did another follow-along/demo portrait from Hashim Akib’s book Painting Portraits in Acrylic. I bought some student-grade acrylics (Amsterdam brand) since this is merely practice. The background was toned in a Quinacridone Rose (PV 19) as directed, but I drew out the figure using willow charcoal. As for the skin colors, again I followed along mostly: the primary skin colors are burnt sienna, orange (PO 73) and yellow ochre (PY 42).
I painted the folds on the scarf using a palette knife; I did not go back and add touches of a pinkish yellow white representing sparkles reflecting the light on the scarf. Maybe later.
Her lips should be pinker and darker; the top of the scarf away from her head should be darker and bluer.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 