Carl's Portrait.

Started work on a portrait of Carl - a lovely guy who does re-enactment, and as it's such a big part of his life it seems only fitting his portrait should reflect his passion, so I'm sketching him in costume.

It starts with a rough outline to get the size of the head and the features in the right place.

With the outline done, as always, I start with the eyes. I'm drawing on a flat white cartridge paper, there's no texture to the paper, and I'm using a mechanical pencil with a HB lead.

The reference image I'm using for the portrait was taken in bright sunshine, and Carl's smiling, so the light and his facial expression makes his eyes seem smaller than if his face was relaxed and in softer light. This bright lighting is going to be a challenge!

Even with the eyes smaller I still need to capture the intensity in his facial expression, so I start right in the middle of the eye. The pupil is going to be the darkest part, but it needs a spot of reflection, a highlight, otherwise the eyes will look flat.

With the darkest part down, I start building up the tonal detail around the eye. The nose guard of the helmet is casting a shadow over the other eye, and blocking out any highlights within the iris and pupil, so this is going to be tricky not to make the eye look flat and lifeless.

I'm using the pencil to make soft cross-hatching marks that blend into each other and I'm building up layers of darker pencil to suggest the 3-dimensional form of the eyes. As I work, I sketch on both eyes, building up each a little at a time so that the tonal qualities work together.

The bright sunlight is on the right side of the face as we're looking at it, and at this stage I'm think of leaving the paper completely white to show the brightness.

So I'm just slowly mapping the tonal changes on the face as it transitions from shade to sunlight. I'm not worried about the range of tonal depth, just mapping the shapes out loosely.

I'm not decided yet, but I'm thinking of making the details around the edge of the face a little out of focus, or more sketchy, so there's more emphasis on the main part of the face.

But it's early days yet, I still have an enormous amount of work to do, and the feel of the portrait may change as work progresses. It's certainly going to be a challenge though!

Carnival Portrait Finished.

There wasn't much work left to do on this drawing, but it was at a critical point where I could really mess it up. This is how it looked yesterday...

Using the medium black Bic biro pen I continued the gentle build up of layers of pen marks.

I use the word 'gentle' because if you press too hard with the pen you put down a very dark mark that you can't undo, and so everything else around it has to be that much darker for it to blend. In doing this you lose the ability to create the illusion of solid form; you can use darks and lights to suggest the three dimensional form of the eyeball and socket in the face.

So by gently building up layer on layer of lighter pen marks I can create the depth of darkness that I need to suggest the eye as it sits back in the socket, as well as making it look like there's make-up on his face.

Even at this stage, close to completion, I can still get it very wrong. To keep control of the sketch I step back after every few marks and look at it from a distance to check I'm not making one area too dark.

At this point I think I've finished. But after getting a cup of coffee and coming back to it, I realize the bottom of the eye, where the skin of the lower lid covering the eyeball bags a little, it looks too prominent and it's distracting my focus. So I add a few more pen marks to darken it up a little, blending them so the skin looks smooth and soft.

The difference is almost imperceptible, but put them side by side and hopefully you can see it.

It's always worth taking a little time out from a sketch and coming back to it, to see what doesn't quite work. But it's also good to know when to stop! I set out with a loose idea of a sketch, no definite plan, but knowing I wanted to create a face which looked like it had make-up on the skin. I'm happy with this one at this stage and it's a good practice run for a more developed sketch in the future.

Just a quick note: the images on the blog are yellowish in color - this isn't because I'm drawing on yellow paper, but because I'm often sketching in the evening under artificial lights and taking photos with my phone camera and uploading them with only a change to the brightness of the image. This is how the same image looks without the yellowing of artificial light...

Quite a difference! But keeping up with the blog and sketching every day will often mean slightly yellowish images as it's the quickest way to get the blog done!

Thanks for reading.

Picking Up Where I Left Off...

Time to resurrect this blog; work is crazily busy and so now it's more important than ever that I find time out each day to sketch for pleasure rather than just designing for work. It also helps that over the festive season I bought myself a gorgeous new drawing board and have been itching to get started with it!

The first sketch has no definite plan, I've just taken a reference image of an eye and sketched it roughly out using a mechanical pencil with a HB 0.5mm lead on Daler Rowney Cartridge paper which has a smooth surface.

 At this stage I'm not going to draw the whole face - this is really just a practice run, getting my hand back in, so I'm just focusing on a small part of the face and working on my control to build detail.

Once the image is roughly sketched in pencil I start using a different drawing tool, a black Bic medium biro pen.

 Most people just use these pens for writing but I love drawing with them. They can be used in a similar way to a pencil, creating soft shading and dramatic light and dark effects, but I have a habit of smudging pencil, and I find the pen work much cleaner.

So, in the same way I would if I was using a pencil, I start to define the dark areas of the eye.

My pencil lines provide a guide, once the pen mark is down on the paper there's no going back so the rough pencil sketch really helps at this stage.

The iris of the eye in the reference image is a pale color so I have to keep the pen marks in the iris to a minimum whilst still trying to make it look realistic, but when I reach a point where it looks okay I leave it and move on to the surrounding area of the eye. I can always come back to the iris later if it looks too pale but if I over-work it now the whole image will fail.

 As I said at the beginning I don't have a definite plan but I will be doing a series of carnival character portraits in the future, so I'm thinking of trying some carnival make-up on this image. I need to extend the image to allow for that, so I add in the nose.

I don't need to sketch the whole side of the nose in, because at this stage the light and the dark shadows are suggesting the form for me. With a tiny bit more shading on the nose, I return to work on the eyelid.

The eye needs a lot more work but I'm starting to think about how the carnival make-up will sit on the skin so I've sketched out a rough pattern and I'll work on that tomorrow.

Fantasy Head - Skull with Horns Part 3

Today I was back sketching on the fantasy head I started almost a week ago. I sketched the head's outline with a mechanical pencil using a 0.5mm lead on a Strathmore Drawing pad with a medium surface. I then started to fill in the shading to create a three-dimensional image using a black Biro pen.

I've been sketching this image without any definite plan, just going with the flow up until now but I had decided I wanted the image to use chiaroscuro - the dramatic use of light and dark to create the perception of solid form, so the darkness of the black pen seemed ideal. You can see as well that I've been playing with the idea of something being inside the skull's open mouth; I often make notes on my drawings so that I can remember the ideas I've had.

I'll need to fill in the background to create the sense of darkness to offset the light hitting the head. And there's a lot of background! If I use anything other than the same pen I think it will look odd so I'll have to persevere. I could add some faint detail to break the background up but I think I'm going to keep it simple.

The texture of the horns has to look different from the texture of the skull, so I make different marks with the pen, more scoring than gentle shading, although when I have built up the detail I do go over the whole horn lightly with the pen to reinforce the form with shading.

Most of the detail is built up with hatching and cross-hatching pen lines, often then blended to hide those lines but at this stage the hatching lines are clearly visible. I'm also laying a sheet of paper over the sketch, only revealing the section I'm working on so that I don't smudge the pen's ink and ruin all that work!

The form is really starting to come out from the paper now. I may make the shadows darker, I'm not sure yet. My plan now is to complete the detail over all the paper and then see how the shading values play out together before I start darkening any of the drawing I've already done.

 

So I'm going to complete the other side of the head and the other horn and then I will fill in the detail in the mouth. I'm doing it in this order because I'm still not sure about what will go inside the mouth so it'll give me a little more time to decide. There's so much more to do but it'll have to wait til another day!

Fantasy Head - Skull with Horns Part 2

It's been a few days since I've been able to pick up my sketchbook and any kind of drawing implement but thankfully I was able to get back to the fantasy head I previously started. I never really had a plan for this drawing, I just wanted to sketch and let the ideas flow.

I decided to break up the symmetry of the image and sketch a shorter horn on the left. I also wanted the horn to twist at a different angle making it look more natural. I've been sketching the image with a mechanical pencil, laying a sheet of paper over the sketch so as not to smudge it.

I like the asymmetry of the horns and it doesn't detract from the overall image, I think it strengthens it by adding more interest. The head does look a little 'empty' though, I think it needs some eyes to give it more character.

 

I'm not worried about the anatomical accuracy, the fact that the eyeballs are floating in the sockets, it's the imagination behind the image that's important to me. I am aware that the eyes do need to look like they belong to the skull though, that it can actually see, rather than it looking as if the eyeballs have just been placed into the skull.

I'm not sure about the development of the teeth, but at this stage I'm going to leave them as they are now and come back to them later and decide then.

From the outset I've seen this head in my mind's eye in a very dark setting with a strong light, probably influenced completely by my love of chiaroscuro - the strong contrast between light and dark creating a strong sense of three-dimensional form and drama. I love the eyeball - it looks really solid, like you could pick it up with your fingers!

 

Using a black Biro pen I create hatching and cross-hatching lines with a light touch on the paper where the light hits and building darker and darker layers of lines where the shadows are deepest. The white of the paper is left bare where the light is strongest.

I still haven't finished sketching the details on this image, I'm still deciding what will fill the open mouth, but the shading I've added has no impact on that part of the sketch. There's a lot of work still to go into this drawing but time's not being kind to me at the moment! I shall return to it another day.