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.

Talk like a pirate....

My fingers are all healed and I'm back working, sculpting and sketching away! So hopefully now I'll get back on track with this blog, healed fingers crossed.

Amongst my travels and activities during these few months I've joined a re-enactment group and plan to be a historical pirate! So there will probably be a lot of historical influences showing through in my sketches, and I have no doubt that will also influence my sculpting. First up is a portrait of one of the group's established re-enactment pirate characters 'Pete'. This portrait is taken from a photo so the first thing I did was ask permission to use the photo. That granted, off I went.

I measured the features from the photo and sketched them out at the same size on the blank paper. Again I'm using a Strathmore Drawing pad, with a medium surface and medium weight, a mechanical pencil with a HB 0.5mm lead and a small Crimson & Blake putty rubber, with lastly, a sheet of plain A4 paper to lay over the drawing as I sketch so that I don't smudge the graphite already laid down.

I always start with the eyes, to me the most important part of the portrait, if these don't look right back out at us then the portrait won't work. And I'll return to them constantly, as I build up the shading. I start with the darkest shade of the pupils and plot the highlights in the eyes and then work up the tones around them. I build up the shading gently around the eyes because there is a lot of detail in this small area and I want to capture as much of this detail as possible.

 

Looking at the photo I'm trying to plot out the areas of dark and light. This will give me the overall form of the face and make the face look more three-dimensional. The lightest point is the tip of the nose and the front tip of the tricorn hat, but the light is reflecting more off the nose so this will mean I leave the paper white and lightly shade in the highlight on the tricorn hat. I also think about the composition of the sketch, and I may push things into the background by making them darker if it suits the composition better.

I realise I have a habit of working from left to right in pretty much all of the portraits I do, not sure what that means, I just happened to notice it. Anyway, to build up the shading I'm using hatching and  cross-hatching lines, both in larger sweeping motions and small controlled strokes. You can see this most clearly around the edge of the hat and face. I'm not blending the lines on the face to make the shading smoother because I want the skin to look slightly rougher, he's an older man (not that old, but older than me!) and he's portraying a pirate so I want some roughness to the portrait. 

A truly amazing artist that uses lines to build up fantastic drawings is Laurie Lipton - to borrow a quote from her website by 'Artweek' magazine “Technically Lipton is a profound draftsman. She captures nuances of light and shade with masterful proficiency.” The size of the image files means they take a while to load, but I promise you it's worth the wait.

I've made the decision to concentrate solely on the face and not add in any detail of the surrounding environment; there's enough expression in the face to hold our interest without adding further information into the sketch. This is also greatly helped by choosing a good photo and having a good photographer who knows how to capture the moment. To emphasise the features and expression of the face at this stage I'll make the shading around the face very dark. It will help give the face more form, push it forward to become the focus and give a little more drama. I'm framing the face with a dark surround but I still have to watch that the overall tones so as not to flatten the form of the face. I'm starting to put in the detail on the chin. This is tricky because there is a lot of dimpling and texture but I still want the focus on the eyes, so I work the two parts of the sketch simultaneously.

The detail is there but it's a little too dark....

 

...but with a careful  application of the putty rubber I lighten the area until it fits in with the tonal plan of the sketch. With the hat and pipe left to complete I choose to loosen up on the sketch, adding in the shading but not to the same level of detail as the face. I want the face to really push forward in the overall drawing....

 

And that's it, completed! I think it's a good likeness, an interesting drawing, with just the right balance of detail and loose sketching and a good portrayal of an 'historical' pirate. Arrr!