She recently mentioned on my Facebook page that she loves pencil drawings, which is good because graphite was my medium of choice when drawing a portrait sons Titus and Micah (see this week's TBT) back in 2009. Well, in 2012, they had a little girl, Aven, who is now no longer represented in the kids' portrait. I'm guessing you are seeing where I am going with this...
Adding all this info together, I decided to remedy the situation with a pencil drawing of Aven for Amy's birthday! I took some process photos as I worked, and thought I'd walk you through them.
First, here is the final piece:
Now for the process:
Both Amy and husband Dan have been taking some beautiful photographs with some vintage cameras they've picked up. I found one that Dan took of Aven that I thought was precious–I love the messiness of her hair.
So then I gridded the photo off, as I do with all portraits, and sketched it onto my bristol paper. (No photo for this step.)
After I finished the sketch, I took out my 9H pencil and went to work. For those of you who may be less familiar with the graphite scale, 9H is the lightest/hardest graphite lead I have.
You know, it wouldn't hurt to just show you quickly. For those interested, this is the HB graphite scale.
As you can see, the leads range from hard to soft, and as you move toward softer leads, your ability to make darker lines increases. So for example, if you use a 10H pencil and try to get your darkest darks in a drawing, you will only frustrate yourself. Likewise if you are using a 10B pencil and trying to make soft, thin lines, you may shed a tear or two. Because the B range of pencils are softer, you are more likely to have to sharpen them more often and replace them more frequently. A "normal" pencil (#2 in school, for scantrons) is an HB which is right at the center and the base of this scale. For beginners, there is really no need to get pencils that run the full gamut, and I do not have a pencil for each increment because one step doesn't make a huge difference. The pressure you use can also make up for those in-between steps. I only have the evens (6H, 4H, 4H, HB, 2B...) and then I have a 9H and 9B (I have never seen 10H or 10B in stores.)
So enough with the graphite lesson for the day. Like I said, I picked up my lightest pencil, and began the actual drawing. Because I used an HB pencil for the sketch (not necessary, I actually just used a mechanical pencil because I hadn't gotten my pencils out) I had to erase the sketched lines before I drew back in with the hard-lead pencil. Why do this? Because when you sketch, you tend to draw in lines that may or may not actually exist as lines in the final drawing (outlines if you will, boundaries) and they will be distracting if left in.
Here's an example; I erased the sketched lines around her mouth and nose...
...before I went back in with my pencil. This is also a good example to show that even with my lightest/hardest lead pencil, I was still able to create a range of lights and darks. The inside of her mouth, however, was the darkest dark I could achieve with that particular pencil.
Then I took the 9H to the majority of the rest of the piece, focusing primarily on the face. As you'll see, this is something I almost always do in a portrait that I do not do with my landscapes and still lifes. (Yes, apparently the plural of still life isn't still "lives" but "lifes".) Because a portrait is so high pressure, and the importance of getting a likeness is so high, I usually grid off the canvas or paper to get proportions, and I usually begin with the face. Nothing is worse than painting almost everything and the face ends up all wrong. Better it go wrong at the beginning so you can start over, right?
Then I moved to a softer pencil and continued adding shadow and darkening places I had already hit with the 9H. This process is also helpful because the darker the pencil line, the harder it is to erase, so if you make a mistake, or something looks off, you can try to fix it as you go, or erase it with relative ease, and move on.
Moving on to her hair as well.
Eraser time! Now I took an eraser, rubbed it on a clean sheet of paper to clean it off, and also to form the best point I could, then went in and added the hairs over her face.
At this point, I wanted to work on the background to make sure I had some of the tones on her face correct. Tone is the lightness or darkness of a color. One of the most important things to remember when painting or drawing is to find and capture the lightest light and the darkest dark, then the in-between tones are easier to place.
Starting her clothes. I love the stripes and polka dots! I started again with the 9H and worked my way up.
Finally, after getting her clothes and most of the background the way I liked it, I took the eraser, cleaned it again (I needed to do this repeatedly because I was removing so much lead) and worked in her "fly aways".
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