Tag: drawing faces

Ahmed

This was a good inspiration photo to use for ballpoint pen practice. I got to use a good range of colours and to work on lights and darks, and there wasn’t too much to worry about in terms of actually drawing Ahmed’s face because the circle provided a frame and I just had to situate a few features. What I love about this ballpoint pen practice is that I do feel like I’m making progress with each drawing. It’s tiny steps forward, but it’s all in the right direction. I love that experience of learning something new!

I drew Ahmed’s portrait in my tiny pocket Moleskine with a range of Bic multicolour ballpoint pens.

Kiany

I drew Kiany’s portrait on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.

Berto

I totally messed up the mouth in Berto’s portrait, but apart from that this felt like a step forward in my watercolour technique. I felt like I had much better control of my brush and that there was a real connection between what my eyes saw and what my brush communicated on the page when I was painting.

I painted Berto’s portrait in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook with my Zecchi Toscana watercolours and finished it was Prismacolor coloured pencils.

Helena

I love drawing half faces. It takes away all the stress of drawing the second eye. Lots of other artists on Sktchy have talked at one time or another of the fear of drawing the second eye. In my case I tend to draw it slightly lower and bigger than the first eye. It doesn’t matter what I do to try to account for this (guidelines, careful measuring, etc), I still have a tendency to get it wrong and I almost always have to draw it two or three times before I’m just OK with how it looks. So drawing a half face (or a profile) every now gives me a day off from that particular worry. And I couldn’t resist Helena’s beautiful strawberry blonde hair!

I drew Helena’s portrait in my A4 Moleskine sketchbook with a Micron fineliner and Copic markers.

Claire

I haven’t used my coloured pencils on their own for a portrait for a while so decided to do just that today for this portrait of Claire. I drew this in a Moleskine sketchbook with Polychromos coloured pencils.

Denyce

When I first started drawing faces I was terrified of expressions and would only draw expressionless faces looking forward, mouth closed. Now, a few years and more than 1200 portraits later, I have much confidence in my portraiture skills and it’s all about expressions. When I’m looking through Sktchy for a face to draw the images that jump out at me are the ones with great lighting, interest skintones and/or wonderful expressions to draw. The inspiration photo for this portrait of Denyce has all three.

I drew Denyce in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook with a Micron pen, painted her with Zecchi Toscana watercolours and finished the portrait with Prismacolor coloured pencils.

Amanda

With the iPad drawing app Procreate’s latest update (Procreate 5) they included some new drawing brushes plus updated versions of existing brushes and I’m having a lot of fun trying out the new brushes. I wasn’t a huge fan of many of the old brushes and much preferred brushes I’d bought on the (very large) independent marketplace for artist-created brushes.

Anyone who follows this blog will know that my favourite brushes are the Bardot brushes made by artist and creator Lisa Bardot. But Procreate have seriously raised their game with this latest update. Both the new and existing but improved brushes I’ve tried so far are massive improvements on the old brushes. For this portrait of Sktchy muse Amanda I used the acrylic, wet acrylic, salamanca and stucco brushes, plus my usual Blackwing pencil brush for the highlights in the hair.

Drawn on my iPad Pro with a 2nd Gen Apple Pencil using Procreate 5.

Rick

This week’s Old School Sktchy weekly art extravaganza (wax) challenge theme is “historical”, and when choosing a photo I knew I only needed to visit Rick’s Sktchy photo collection to find an inspiration photo to draw from. Rick is probably the most well known Sktchy muse. He has a huge collection of more than a thousand inspiration photos, in a massive range of costumes and poses. He also very open to suggestions from artists if someone has an idea for an new costume he might pose in. So a quick hunt through Rick’s photos turned up the inspiration photo for this portrait, which wouldn’t look out of place on a miniature in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I drew Rick in my Moleskine sketchbook with a Micron fineliner, Copic markers and coloured pencils.

Grace

This is Grace, painted with Zecchi Toscana watercolours and finished with coloured pencils in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook. It’s a reasonable likeness except that Grace is much prettier than this. All the features are just slightly off – the eyes and nose a little too large, the mouth not quite right. This often happens in my portraits and I don’t generally worry about it too much because I usually like the portrait well enough nevertheless. But in this portrait it has all combined to create a portrait that just doesn’t work.

I could have just left the portrait in my sketchbook and not shared it but, for me, sharing what doesn’t work is just as important as sharing the work I’m proud of. I’m learning with every portrait I create and it means so much more if I can share that learning. What I learned from this portrait is that sometimes I can be lazy, I can take it for granted that my portraits will turn out well even when my initial sketches are slightly off. Taking the time to revisit the sketch, check proportions and make corrections is probably well worth doing.

If you’ve learned useful lessons from your regular art practice I’d be interested to hear them.

Jezori

I needed to draw a portrait with some colour today and Jezori’s inspiration photo for this one totally fitted the bill. It also gave me an opportunity to experiment some more with a range of Procreate brushes and tools to create some interesting effects. I used the smudge tool a lot, but very lightly, to blur the circles of colour together to try to get a neon effect, and also on that light green in the background. I used it again on the blue colour (drawn with a pastel brush) to very gently smudge the shadows and the highlights into each other. I’m not generally a fan of the smudge tool and can only really get it to work for me if I use it on a very low opacity and very, very gently.

I drew Jezori on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.