Tag: portraiture

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.

Mahan

I taught a class on using alcohol markers yesterday and pulled out a Derwent Graphik bleedproof sketchbook I’ve had on my shelf for years during the class to test some markers on. The paper seemed to work better than a lot of the other paper samples I had available in terms of not leaving any stripes when filling large spaces. Students were curious so I promised to test it further with a portrait.

I drew this portrait of Mahan in that sketchbook today. It does absorb the marker ink well, leaving no stripes, but I don’t like the chalky appearance of the markers on the paper. The paper also isn’t bleedproof as claimed. I got a reverse image on the other side of the page (you can see it below) just as I do in other sketchbooks (although it didn’t mark the next page). I wouldn’t be able to use this page for drawing.

I don’t hate the paper. I will probably use the rest of the sketchbook because I hate to see a sketchbook go unused. But I won’t be buying another.

Anna

This is Anna from the Museum by Sktchy app. I’m teaching a pop-up class on alcohol markers for the Spark programme at Sketchbook Skool later this afternoon and I want to talk about a range of markers, not just Copics, so I’ve been breaking out some of the other markers I’ve got in my supplies that I haven’t used for a while. So for Anna’s portrait I used the Spectrum Classique fair skin pack for all the skin tones. They did a nice job, though they’re a little darker than I would usually use for fair skin.

I also did an interview recently with Danny Gregory, the founder of Sketchbook Skool, about my sketchbook practice. He posted this on the Sketchbook Skool YouTube channel last Friday and if you’d like to take a look you can watch it at https://youtu.be/29P_Cqdp4rQ