I totally lost the likeness in this portrait of Sveta. I’m also guessing at her name – this is a shortened version of her username on Sktchy, Her actual name is in Cyrillic characters! It looks beautiful but I can’t hope to reproduce it correctly here.
Scribbling away with my 4-colour Bics today for this portrait of Madgie from Sktchy.
This was fun! A very straightforward Copic marker and coloured pencil portrait of Polina from Sktchy in my Midori cotton sketchbook.
This is Anna from Sktchy, drawn on my iPad Pro using the Procreate app.
This is Ryan from Sktchy painted in my Fabriano Venezia sketchbook with Daniel Smith and Zecchi Toscana watercolours and finished with Prismacolor coloured pencils.
I do like doing simple ballpoint pen hatching. There’s something so meditative about drawing all those lines going in one direction. This is so simple to do if you feel like having a go – just draw a simple outline of your main shapes and then fill them in building up the colour layer by layer. It’s easiest if you focus on your lightest and darkest areas first – I usually map them first with blue and then add other colours on top.
This is Angelina from Sktchy. I didn’t quite capture her likeness, as usual I lost it around it around the mouth somewhere. But it’s not the end result that matters so much as the process and I had a wonderfully focused couple of hours drawing this.
I try to let go of any attachment to the end result as far as I possibly can when I’m drawing and just let myself get lost in the process. At the end of the day the outcome is just a drawing on a piece of paper. If I’m not happy with it I can turn the page and start again. What is really important to me is the time I spend drawing, the sense of calm and relaxation I get from that, and the learning and practice I get from any time spent drawing. Every hour spent drawing is time spent developing skills, even if that drawing turns out being one I hate.
If you’re beginning to draw this is the hardest lesson to learn – I remember people saying it to me a few years ago and I just couldn’t believe I would ever learn it, but I did in the end. Process over outcome. It’s the process of drawing that matters much more than the outcome, at least while you’re not a professional artist or taking exams. Draw, draw, draw, worry less about outcome and enjoy the process.
It’s been a while since I’ve used this digital drawing style and I didn’t want to get too out of practice with my method so I used it for today’s portrait of Yuka from Sktchy.
I’ve made a little flip through of my Screen Queens sketchbook before I send it off to the Brooklyn Art Library and I thought some of you might like to see it. If you want a look you can see it on YouTube here.
This was fun! Digital drawing can be very liberating because the ability to work in layers makes it so much easier to correct mistakes and experiment with new different approaches and ideas. And I think that often shows in my digital portraits, like this one of Juli which I finished very quickly and deliberately decided not to spend too much time tidying it up because I didn’t to lose that sense of freshness.
drawing faces 