Today I want to share some process photos of my pencil sketch that I did as a gift.

I know that I still need to practice a lot to get better at drawing portraits, and in general at sketching. I was not sure if it will turn out as I wanted it to be.

I’m still happy with the result, because it’s usually very challenging for me to make portraits. It’s hard to recognize the person on the drawing:-) Well this time I asked around and more people agreed that the drawing is close to the original, yay!

Materials used.

Regular pencil HB

Regular pencil H

Regular pencil B

Pink Eraser

White paper for sketching

• I first made an outline of a face shape, and the whole drawing to get the feeling of how much space do I need.

It’s hard to catch the facial features. I think that’s one of the reasons that different artists can be working only in one field. Some are portraitists, others are landscape artists, or realistic and animalistic artists. So each artist chooses his/her area in art.

• Next, I was working on shape of the eyes, smiling lips, nose, and the eyebrows. At this point everything is still not certain, I still erase and correct some lines.

• After all that work is done, I begin shading darker parts of the face. If it would be a face of an old person it would be much harder, because of the wrinkles. But younger face has its own challenges. For example, for me personally it was challenging to get the right shape for the cheeks.

• In this step I start working on the girl’s hair. Another part that I’m struggling with, but for me today the main point was mostly working on the actual face.

• I added more details: shading, freckles, corrected face’s shape a little.

• Here is the result. I know that it’s not a finished ideal portrait, it’s a two hour sketch that resembles with the original girl. That was the goal for me. I still hope that in the near future I will have time to work on a fully finished portrait. If I get skilled at doing portraits then I could start getting orders from my friends and neighbors.

I hope you enjoyed the process photos.

Thank you for visiting!