It's pretty rare that I actually ever finish a drawing I start in my spare time, but I forced myself to finish this one. A sketch of a portrait ( I think the reference is actually Angelina Jolie, but it's not quite recognisable as her ). I don't think my follows on Deviantart would be that bothered about seeing sketches ( which is a shame because I love to sketch! ) so I thought I would at least give it a blog post, especially seen as I took a few photos along the way. I will also post up the tools I used for this one at the bottom of this post :)
At first I started with the basic consutrction and then began blocking in the features, however straight away I could tell I had made some mistakes and made the eyes too big and the face a little wide ( especially compared to the reference ) but I plowed through anyway, even though I really should have spent more time to correct them (I know, shame on me).
So this is what she was looking like at this point, looks really strange without ears, but the hair will completely cover them anyway. It's also worth noting that I adjusted the levels in Photoshop a bit on this photo just to make it a little more visible seen as the construction lines were barely visible in person. I thought she looked a little odd at this point but I decided to take the piece further anyway.
At this point I was actually pretty pleased with myself. It's by no means 'great art' but I struggle with drawing faces a lot, and considering I thought it looked so wrong in the early stages, I wasn't expecting it to improve with more detail, but in my opinion it did! The main thing I have left to do at this point is the hair, some people love drawing hair, not me.. I still haven't got the technique nailed down yet. I don't mind painting hair in Photoshop depending on the hair style, but I certainly need a lot more practice. But sketching hair is another ball game altogether. I like to think I am much better at sketching things compared to painting them, but when I use sketch pencils to draw hair, it usually looks scruffy and wiry, kind of like a 6 year old has done that part of the illustration. So I tried to take a little more time on this one, starting by blocking the hair into larger sections before using the light and dark areas to define it a little more..
So there you have it, the finished product, it started out as a mess but it actually turned out pretty good for my skill level, probably one of the best jobs I have done when it comes to sketching hair, plus this face is fairly big, I usually draw faces about 1 inch by 1 inch, super tiny where I can't get much detail in and probably don't get as much out of it either. So you could argue parts of this were out of my comfort zone. Still a long way to go yet though and there are noticeable mistakes.
Here is a link to the photo reference of Angelina Jolie that I used in case any one wants to give it a go - http://images.wookmark.com/511337_wookmark.jpg
The pencil I used for this one was a Pantel mechanical pencil 0.3mm (because I am too lazy to sharpen a pencil..) with a H lead in. Then just a Staedtler eraser and of course the sketchbook itself which is a Daler and Rowney Jumbo Sketchbook (95gsm)
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