Week Eleven: 'Big Book of Drawing' II, Plus My First Portrait!

In non-art news, I took part in several karate demonstrations this past week.  This is significant, as the 'threat' of these shows demanded concentration and practice, which took some time away from other pursuits, namely drawing.  Well, with that out of the way, I could again focus on drawing this week, and focus I did.  Here's my second week of working from Lee Hammond's 'Big Book of Drawing.'

Last week I did noses and mouths.  Here, both together, plus some teeth.  The teeth were interesting; at the time I thought they sucked, but now I kinda like them.  Most attempts at teeth like like white bricks or tic-tacs, but these curve enough to suggest real teeth.  The nose and mouth are less good, at least the nose.  Well, it's supposed to be on a slight angle, but I ended up drawing the mouth straight.  The mouth looks great.  The nose, well, I really struggled.  Oh well.

Time for some eyes.  This almost looks like a before and after comparison, but not so: the left image was a basic outline, and then the other went into more detail.  I don't care about the left one.  The right one is fantastic.  Interestingly, as I was drawing it, I thought it looked freaky -- and then I added the eyelashes, and suddenly everything came together.  It actually looks incredible.  Unbelievable, even.  So much texture.  Only  the eyebrow serves as a negative, but I can live with that.

Now for some ears, the final facial feature.  You know what?  Ears are pretty freaky looking.  Here are two attempts.  First of, wow, I need to learn how to use my erasure for highlights better.  The right ear's 'highlight' likes more like an incomplete area.  The other ear, though, does look pretty decent, even if the one lob arcs in a weird way.  Can't complain about either.  (Though maybe I should complain about my photoshop skills. Why there's a patch of paper just floating in-between the two images is beyond me, and I made it ...)

Finally, I then took all the lessons I've learned over the last two weeks and put them together, creating the following:

By all that's holy, it's perfect.  Well, no, it's not perfect, but if you compare it to my first attempts at faces, comparatively it's perfect.  Before I kill this with praise, I should point out my mistakes: the one pupil is smaller than the other one; the face is slightly longer and out of proportion on the far side; the shadows could be darker and more even.  Honestly, that's all I see.  Time for praise!

For starters, it looks like a real face.  You can tell it's a person.  Also, it looks startlingly close to the reference image.  As in, the girl in question would recognize herself if she looked at this.  That's unbelievable. I thought it would take years to reach that point.  I spent about 20min trying to get the eyes right; I have a habit of drawing one great and then the other off in some respect, usually too big or a different shape or lower on the face.  These work.

And the hair!  Do you see the hair?  It doesn't look like scribbles!  It looks like hair.  Holy cow.  I still need more practice with lifting out highlights (actually, I need to find a youtube video or something to demonstrate, because I doubt I'm doing it right...), but I did create the rough effect I was looking for.  All in all, it only took two days to get this baby done, or about 3-4 hours.  I planned on making WIP again for this, my first portrait, but when I was 70% done after the first sitting, it didn't make much sense.


Once again, my goal is to capture reality on paper, graphite realism.  This book has helped me so much in so little time.  I'm astounded, really.  Time to push through, forge ahead and hone these new-found skills even more.  Unless I am unable to renew this book, next week should have even more portraits and other realistic goods.  I can hardly wait.