I wanted to get back to the challenge of drawing people.
And in today’s Flickr explore, I saw an interesting-ish portrait. And when I clicked through, I found that the photographer specialises in portraits, and I found another portrait she’d done that I decided I wanted to try and draw. This one:
Having to draw the arms up is something I’ve never done before, so this was going to be a challenge. Only trees in the background, and no other people to draw, meant that it wasn’t going to be a painful challenge. This is what I did:
Self-criticism first: I’ve made my usual mistake of drawing foreground larger than background – here, it means that even after controlling for perspective, I may have made the poor model bulkier on her left side than the right side. I’ve also made her face much puffier than in the original.
Bright sides: I think this is the best I’ve done yet on getting eyes the right size and in line with each other. I also tried to draw an outline as it genuinely was, and not do, e.g the whole body, the whole face, and the whole shirt and then get frustrated and realise that I had to erase lines. (I did erase lines, to be clear – but then I drew them back in in different places. This wasn’t me erasing things that shouldn’t have been there at all.)
Notes: almost the whole drawing is done with a 2H, and even shading is done with a 2H. The hair, and the shadow on the left hand side, are done with 2B. I ended up not using an HB pencil at all in this one.