Erika

We practiced drawing noses in my Drawing Faces class for Sketchbook Skool’s Spark programme this week. I love drawing noses and hate drawing mouths (because I find them so difficult to get right) so drawing Erika’s nose and mouth here was both a joy and a struggle! We focused on finding the roundness in these features to help us draw them well and it was a lot of fun.

I usually play around with the drawings a little after class, adding finishing touches when I have more time. But this week I have builders putting in new windows and I had to pack all my art materials away straight after my class, so I had to finish my drawing entirely in Procreate. So all the finishing touches are added with digital Copic and coloured pencil brushes.

208 faces

Every time I finish drawing a face from the Museum by Sktchy app I upload the portrait into a 13 square grid in the collage app Pic Stitch. When that grid is full I upload it into a 16 square grid. I have a collection of these grids now recording all my portraits over the years since I joined Sktchy. This is my latest grid, finished this week, which contains 208 portraits completed over the past year.

Thank you so much to all 208 muses, without whom I would have no inspiration, and to everyone at Sktchy who keeps the app running so efficiently. 🙏❤️

Angie

This is Angie from the Museum by Sktchy app. I’m absolutely in love with the True Grit Chromagraph brushes I bought recently – True Grit brushes aren’t the cheapest Procreate brushes on the market but they’re worth every penny. They’re the best quality of any I’ve tried and I get excited every time they bring out a new set!

If you’re interested in having a look at their brushes you can check them out here – and this post isn’t sponsored by them in any way, I just love their brushes.

Murphy

I have two things to tell you about this portrait. The first is that I hate drawing someone if I don’t know their name. As you will know if you’re a regular follower of this blog, most of my photo inspiration comes from the Museum by Sktchy app. Most of the images posted on there to be drawn are selfies but people do also post images of family members or friends, and often theses images don’t have names. If I can’t name the person I won’t generally draw them. This guy wasn’t named but I really wanted to draw him – it’s such a great inspiration photo – and the last name of the person who posted the photo is Murphy so I decided to steal her last name and use it for his name. Sometimes, if there’s an image I really want to use, I can create a workaround to one of my own rules 😂

The second thing I want to say is that this is the second portrait I’ve drawn of Murphy this week. I drew the first one in my sketchbook and painted it in watercolour and it is truly, embarrassingly awful. The worst portrait I’ve drawn in years. I did think about working on it in Procreate to try to improve it but once I’d uploaded it and had a look I decided that it wasn’t worth rescuing and I should start again. So I did. And this is an infinitely better portrait. Sometimes it’s better to simply start over.

Neshama

This is Neshama from the Museum by Sktchy app. I decided to stop drawing her T this point because I really like the expression I’ve caught on her face and I have a tendency to overwork ballpoint pen drawings. I didn’t want to overwork this one.

Evgenia

I drew most of this portrait of Evgenia in my class for this week’s Sketchbook Skool Spark programme. I didn’t have time to work on the hair during the class so I did that later and just focused on the face initially. I drew the portrait in my sketchbook and cleaned it up digitally on my iPad using the Procreate app.