Art, How to draw portraits, Learning how to draw, Portraits

Drawing a Portrait – Stage 6

Hi,

This post kind of wraps up the Meghan Markle picture.

If you’ve been following along, the picture had got to this:

There were a few things I wasn’t happy with, and if the truth be told, its very easy when drawing a picture to never be completely happy with it. There’s always a thought that “oh if I just adjust that slightly” but more often than not it turns to overworking the picture and potentially wrecking it, which I’ve done in the past.

Nowadays I get the picture to this point and call it a version. I know that redraws are often better than the original version, and part of this is the fact that in your mind, you are now familiar with the subject’s face structure and can manage to replicate it, but better and with less working, whilst contributing less wear to the paper which gives a smoother look.

Something else I do is leave a picture for several weeks without doing anything to it, and then view it again with ‘fresh eyes’. Issues leap out of the page at you – not necessarily things that a casual viewer would be able to detect but that nevertheless distance it from being correct.

That opens up the question of what you want at the end of the day – do you want something that is so photo-realistic that viewers think it is a photo, and in doing so remove the opportunity of an artist’s impression, or do you want something that goes past a copy of the photo and produces a new picture from the source.

When I look at my ink work, there is no way that it is even going in the direction of photo-realism but they have a ‘grab’ factor anyway, or at least to me. (Not that I’m egotistical enough to think that my pencil pictures are).

‘Grab factor’ is that certain something that makes you take a second look at a picture. I think in this visually deceptive age, that people have become unconsciously blase about what they see in art and film. What can be accomplished with digital art and CGI processing in film is light years beyond what it was 10 years ago. The recent Star Wars films use CGI for several actors who had sadly passed on, and the finished shots were great. What can be done in a fraction of the time in these formats still takes a pencil artist a long time, but the effort becomes understated because people now think that it’s easy to do.

Perhaps I’m moving in the direction of ink because it isn’t so easy to get right and it distances me from the batteries of artists doing photo-realistic pencil. Not in a ‘better’ way – just different, and to me more individual.

Anyway, back to Meghan, who now looks like this:

So what’s changed?

Ignore the fact that the left hand pic is darker – it just that I’ve balanced the light in the photo of the latest version.

A medium tone background has been added.
The hair has been darkened and has had (light) highlights added.
The edges of the hair where it meets the background, has been defined.
Stray hairs have been added.
Skin tone below the neck has been darkened.
The eyes, top eyelids and eyebrows have been overlaid with softer (darker) pencil.

I think the darker background works better.
The hair darkening was a response to my thought that in the original photo Meghan looks like she has black hair, but my stage photo made it look like she’s a brunette. I think it could still be made darker. The technique I used was to apply layers of tone over the hair, add single lines to provide some definition (but not every single hair – less is more with this).

The added tone in the background is a little rough, but the paper has had so much eraser work on it, that its chopped and far from the pristine Bristol smoothness it was in when I started.

I’m happy with this as a version. A new version might be better but to be honest I need to do something else – this picture’s now been in development a little too long.

So what do you when the picture’s finished?

Signing

It’s become ‘unfashionable’ to sign work, but there’s nothing stopping you – I always think it tells the world you drew it when they ask whether you really did.

Protecting it

Not the putting it in a mission impossible style bank, but applying lacquer to prevent it accidentally being smudged. The easiest way to do this is cheap hairspray. Good old PoundLand hairspray is perfect.

Hairspray is simply glue with perfume added, and carried in gas as you spray. You can buy expensive hairspray if you want but it’ll have more perfume in it, which may darken the picture. You can also get fancy lacquer spray in art shops or online, but its simply the hairspray without perfume and is usually expensive. Don’t spray the picture too much – it’ll take a long time to dry and may bleed what you’ve drawn especially if you’ve also used ink pens.

Displaying it

Either display it in a portfolio book – orderable online, in art shops or Staples, or frame it in a picture frame. If you buy a portfolio, and are not using hairspray to bond the pencil, don’t buy the cheapest one you see – after a while, you’ll find that unprotected pencil drawing produces a shadow on the plastic sleeves and while doing so, lightens the picture.

This is an example of a portfolio book:

If you’re putting it online, take care to add a mask on top, including the words “Copyright” and your name. That way its more difficult for people to download the image and print it off. If you want people to be doing that, they should be paying for the privilege. Sites advertising works for sale add their own masks to safeguard the picture from being downloaded as is.

Next (from you)

‘Next’ is up to you. Find something you want to draw, apply the techniques here if you want, and start discovering how to draw portraits. The more mistakes you make the better. You’ll learn what works, what doesn’t and how to apply fixes. Try to write down the process in a journal if you can, for review later, or better still stage photo your work and add notes as text. for things that have worked, things that didn’t and the techniques you’ve used.

Next from me

Next from me is a long overdue commission for one of my friends, and on here a tutorial on pop-art picture drawing. If you fancy seeing that, I look forward to sharing the process with you next time, or at the least the first stages, of a colour pop-art picture of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman.

This is an example of a pop-art picture of the farewell scene in Casablanca:

If this makes no sense at all, IMDB reviews the multi Oscar winning film here.

If you’re working on your own pictures it would be great to know how they’re turning out. If you have comments, questions etc, or would like to ‘like’ this article or follow it so you don’t miss the next one, you should be able to find buttons on screen to let you do this.

NB: The LIKE and FOLLOW buttons and links are hidden (a bit). If you click the button with the three horizontal lines at the top of the blog, you should then see them.

Thanks for reading this, best of luck with your drawing and I look forward to seeing you next time.

All the best. Ian.

Art, How to draw portraits, Learning how to draw, Portraits

Drawing a Portrait – Stage 5

Hi,

If you’ve been following this series, you’ll have seen how to draw a portrait of Meghan Markle to the stage shown below:

This blog takes things a little further.

So, what’s changed?

Her hair and eyebrows have been more clearly defined and shine has been added.
Blemishes have been added.
Her teeth have been lightened.
Tone has been applied to the area below the left side of her lower lip and centre of the chin.
Material shadowing has been added to the shirt.

Hair definition

I’m not so good at free drawing hair but find that to make it look right, less is actually more. I feel that if you define every strand it complicates the picture and makes it look forced. They key is to get the hair tonally correct – light where it’s light and dark where it’s dark.

The light should follow the contours of the hair – where it’s closer to (you) it should be lighter. If you think of it as the crest of waves at sea, that’s where the lightest area is.

As an example, in the shock of hair close to the right cheek, the hair bows out above her eye. The fastest way to apply the light is to draw the hair in and then pull it out with a manual fine tipped eraser using a lot of pressure at the peak (or centre) and lessening as you move away in each direction so that the lighter area fades away slowly.

You may find this easier if you start off by drawing the lines in gently with a harder pencil so the lines are light, then go over the lines with a softer pencil. Keep doing this until you’re happy with the tone when compared to the photo.

Overall, I’m struggling with darkening down the hair enough – Meghan’s hair is very dark and here it looks mid toned, so if I did the picture again I’d concentrate on making the hair darker straight away.

Tearing

This picture has been drawn on what is called Bristol paper. It has an almost photographic paper feel to it’s surface. A problem with ultra smooth paper like this is that it can get ‘tired’ – overwork it too much (like trying to make the hair darker after a lot of work has been done) can tear the paper, and there’s nothing you can do once that’s done. You get similar damage over a wider area if you’ve gradually worn away the surface, which you can do by drawing pencil in, then erasing and so on.

Torn or worn paper has more heavily grained paper at the surface and it accepts pencil a lot more readily – if you try to add tone when you have a tear or worn area, it’ll look markedly more distinct where this is, and you’ll struggle to apply a uniform tone.

2nd Attempt is often better

The more you work paper with damage the worse it gets. I prefer to just stop working a picture when this happens and redraw the picture from fresh. This sounds catastrophic but it can be very helpful. If you redo a picture you’re likely to get a much better picture second time because your mind remembers the structure of the original and the mistakes you made, a little like knowing where potholes are in roads you use all the time when you’re driving.

Blemishes

It is alleged that Oliver Cromwell once instructed an artist to paint him ‘warts and all’ but there appears to be little actual historical proof that he actually said it. Its a little like the alleged quote by President Bush that the french have no word for entrepreneurialism. Probably never happened. Blemishes are a two edged sword – include them and the sitter will ask what they are as if the artist has invented them. Leave them out and the painting can be criticised as being unrealistic. I err on the side of adding them but kindly so they’re not too unflattering. I was once asked by a customer why they had a mark in the picture which they weren’t aware of (but was clearly there) – that took some talking I can tell you.

Teeth

Look at any photo where light is harsh and teeth will be defined to the point where the gaps look too much. Fine with a tiger – not so good with people. I had added light and dark tones to each tooth (like the facets of a diamond where faces close to you look lighter, a tooth is not flat and their facets closest to the light will shine really bright.

This is actually how light reflects off of teeth, but it doesn’t work if you try to simulate it in a picture.

This doesn’t tend to occur so dramatically with people who’ve had surgical tooth lightening. The more flattering fix for this is to pull out pencil all but a trace of the edges of the teeth, to the point where the gaps almost disappear – be careful to only do this in the centre 2/3rds, otherwise it’ll look like they’re wearing a rugby mouth guard!

I’d forgotten about this and the teeth looked overworked – hopefully you’ll think they look better now.

Tone

The more time you spend away from a picture under development, the more you’ll notice where detail is incorrect – its kind of an ongoing process right up to the last minute. I’ve pulled tone out of Meghan’s cheeks because they looked like rouge had been applied. I didn’t see this until I’d spent some time away from the picture.

To fix this I completely rubbed out what was there and re-applied it. Bristol paper will allow you to do this if you haven’t applied too much pressure with the original pencil. Courser paper may not be as forgiving.

Material shadowing

Shadowing has been added to the shirt to make it look more three dimensional. Be careful how much you define clothing – overdo it and the viewer’s attention is pulled away from the face. If you want to show off the clothes that’s fine, but if you want the wow factor in your picture to be the subject’s face, don’t go overboard on the clothes.

Next Time

Completing the picture including:

Knowing when to stop.
Signing.
How to protect it.
How to store it.
Precautions to take when putting it online.
What you do next.

Also what I’m looking at doing next.

The next post was going to be ready 16th of February but I’m making significant changes to the picture and I don’t think it will be completed now until Saturday 23rd of February so I’ll update the blog then.

This is one of my methods for doing a picture – it may not work for you and if you have methods you think work better for you, please share.

Thank you for reading, best of luck with your project(s), and if you’ve like what you’ve read please hit the like button. Happy to hear your views whether its praise or critique.

Tarrah for now!

Art, How to draw portraits, Learning how to draw

Drawing a Portrait – Stage 4

Hi and welcome back to my series of articles showing that it’s not as difficult as you might think to draw a portrait. The header image is from Tim Wright on Unsplash.

This article is stage 4 in my portrait process and is going to show:

How to complete the mouth.
How to start on the eyes, ears and hair.
What blending stumps and tortillions are and how you can use them to improve your pictures
How to find a local art club (and what you can expect from it).

Completing the mouth

This is where we’d got to:

Tidy up any differences in the teeth to the source picture.

Once this is complete, you need to add catch-lights in two areas. One is on the top of the right hand side of the top lip, together with a thin horizontal line below it. To do this use a zero eraser if you have one or use the edge of a standard eraser.

Below this, on the bottom lip, you’re going to remove small vertical strokes to show the vertical catch-lights there.

How to start on the eyes, ears and hair

Eyes

This is where we’d got to last time with the eyes:

This is my rough procedure for this:

Confirm that the Irises are the correct size and in the right place. You should be able to pull out what you’ve got already and redraw if necessary.
Reshape the contour of the eyes closer to that in the source photo if its a little out.
Draw in the Irises and the much darker pupil areas. Be careful when drawing these, and pupils in particular, that you draw in what you see and not what you think should be there.
Sketch in the contours of the catchlights reflected in the pupils. I think in this case, that these are Studio flood lamps or light from windows.
Darken the pupil area surrounding the catchlights.
Draw in the upper and lower eyelid lines and define them further with tone.
Draw in the main dark eyelash areas and then add the single eyelashes above and below – the lower ones are shorter and fairer.
Add eyebrows, trying to keep as best you can to the direction and density of the source photo.
Add catchlights on the top of the bottom eyelid, below the pupil. Draw them in lightly and then pull the pencil inside them out with your eraser.
Add the darker edges of the Irises. NB: These are not solidly bordered lines on the inside – they feather in to the rest of the iris, so try to represent this, but don’t overdo it.

NB: Adding catch-lights to the eyes is just about impossible using a standard eraser. An electric eraser, similar to the one shown below will allow you to pull out reasonably small areas on the paper.

Used quickly and accurately it will allow you to define the catchlights easily, although it can be a little difficult to control how much area it removes so you may have to shade back in afterwards around the correct size of the catchlight. NB: Be careful you don’t overdo use of the electric eraser because it will easily chew up the paper if applied for too long or too harshly.

An alternative that I once used was to paint the catch-lights in with a dirty shade of white. This gives you full control of the catch-lights but once applied cannot be removed. A purist might argue that this is an unnecessary embellishment and that you should be able to do the catch-lights without resorting to using mixed media. (On the one portrait I used it on, they kind of looked artificial within the sea of pencil).

These are before and after shots of the process described above:

Here you can see there are multiple lines above and below the eye. Above, the first line is the area where the eyelid folds back into as it is opened. The second line below it is a line formed by compression of the eyelid.

The lines below the eye are formed as the skin below the eye similarly compresses as you open your eye. If you want to see how these lines are formed, look in a mirror and (obviously) keeping one eye open, look at the other one as you open and close your eye.

In case you weren’t aware, bags under your eyes are common as you age. With ageing, the tissues around your eyes, including some of the muscles supporting your eyelids, weaken. Then fat that normally helps support the eyes can then move into the lower eyelids, causing the lids to appear puffy. Thanks to the Mayo Clinic for that information by the way. If this interests you, have a look at this BBC article for more information.

Hair

Hair doesn’t have to be defined strand by strand. To understand the impossibility of this, I remember watching a science fiction CGI film called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. To reproduce the heroines hair they built a computer model with 60,000 hair strands. It looked superb but can you imagine trying to do this?

Luckily you don’t have to – all you have to do is give the impression of strands.

The first thing you do is use a 2D pencil to darken the hair area. Once you’ve done this, go over it again with an HB pencil. If you have a blending stump use this, or failing that a cotton bud and smooth the pencil that you’ve applied. Warning: Don’t be tempted to smooth the pencil with your fingers. The key reason is that using your fingers transfers oil within your skin on to the paper surface. Once oil is in the paper, it can make drawing on the surface unpredictable and can ruin a picture.

Once you’ve covered the hair surface, look at the source photo and establish which are the brighter areas – a method that helps you to see these is to squint.

Use your eraser and pull out these areas. The images below show before and after doing this:

I’ve gone a stage further with the after image by adding in some of the really dark areas as well.

Ears

To start with, simply outline the ear with a 2B pencil, where it meets the hair. In the source, there’s a block of darker hair beside the ear. Add this in as shown below:

I’ve added a little bit of tone to show the more shaded areas of the ear, but mainly I’ve added the dark area beside it, which makes the ear stand out. NB: There may not be such a stark comparison with every portrait source picture.

Overall

Adding all this up, we’re left with the changes shown below:

Some further changes I’ve added and which aren’t mentioned above are as follows:

I’ve started drawing some lines going in to the light areas in the hair.
I’ve added tone in to help define the cheeks, forehead and chin surfaces.
I’ve darkened the neck area.
Added a little more detail to the hair components.
Used a tortillion to smooth the tonal areas – more on that below.

Just in case you were wondering … the portrait is being drawn on white paper, despite what it might look like above, which is how my phone’s camera represents it.

What blending stumps and Tortillions are and how you can use them to improve your pictures

Tortillions are rolls of paper, fashioned to points. Blending stumps look quite similar but are made from tightly spun cotton. You can use them to gently blend pencil so that there’s a smooth transition between pencil and surrounding unmarked paper. They can also be ‘loaded up’ with pencil and used on their own to add tone, rather than drawing it in directly.

These are examples of Tortillions:

Be careful how you use them – its possible to go over the top and blend everything, which starts to make it look like the person in the portrait has loads of makeup on. Everyone uses these differently but I find that they’re useful for blending in harshly defined areas of tone.

If a tortillion is too heavily loaded with graphite, wipe it off on another piece of paper before using it – its better to under apply than over apply. Use rubbing paper to restore a clean surface, or wipe the end of the stump on clean paper until no marks are made. NB: You can use the point for very focused blending.

I tend to load up one end with graphite for application of new areas of tone and use the other for blending – to save these getting mixed up I wrap an elastic band around the loaded end.

How to find a local art club

Local art clubs advertise in art magazines and local free magazines, and of course can be found on the internet. I just used ‘Local Art Clubs’ and returned loads of sites, an example of which is shown below:

SAA magazine holds a section which details local art clubs and organisations – other art magazines off the shelf hold similar.

Clubs bring together a variety of talents of artists, mainly hobbyists who meet each week to draw their own work in company, and have the opportunity to discuss all things art and chinwag at the same time, or just focus on their pictures and enjoy the company.

They often have demonstration nights by prominent artists, organise shared exhibitions to showcase club member’s work and arrange visits to areas to draw on site or view art collections.

They’ll usually be a subscription which covers hall hire, newsletter stationary etc. Sometimes clubs also charge a modest fee for attendance to cover refreshments and help with hall hire cost.

Some clubs are quiet ones with members focusing on their work and chatting in tea break, or you’ll get some that are more socially focused where you seem to chat half the night at, not necessarily get so much done, but enjoy the experience nevertheless. Its down to personal taste.

Next time …

I hope that this has been helpful, and that the articles are inspiring you to draw your own picture. Next time will be focused on how to:

Continue the hair
Draw the shirt in
Add freckling
Add further tone and highlighting to the face
Adding catch-lights to the teeth
Establish what the background should be
Use a neat technique to check your picture

It would be great to know how your pictures are turning out. If you have comments, questions etc, or would like to ‘like’ this article or follow it so you don’t miss the next one, you should be able to find buttons on screen to let you do this.