Quilt Barn Pencil Drawing

 

Hello, last week I talked about accuracy in drawing and how I wanted to improve on that. To work on my accuracy, I am starting a portrait of my grandparents.  As I stated last week, I have always wanted to be able to draw portraits well and I will be devoting time to working on them. Because practice is the best way at improving on any task. Anyway, for the next several weeks I will be posting my progress on this portrait and the steps that I am taking to bring it to life.

This portrait really started with a decision to do a drawing where I focus on every part of it from beginning to end. To be honest, many of my landscapes are only roughly planned and I will have only a general idea of the direction I want to go. Then there are normally several side routes I take along the way and I end up experimenting. For this drawing, I want to take what I have learned in the past and use that without experimenting too much.

Sadly, my grandparents passed away many years ago so all I have left of them is a few old photos and some wonderful memories. Normally, I would recommend using a high-resolution photo, but I do not have that. I do have an electronic photo that was taken in the middle 1990’s that I will be using as a reference. To get started, I made several copies of the original using Adobe Photoshop to try and pull out as much details as possible. Using the curve tool in Photoshop, I increased the levels of contrast between the shadows and the highlights so I could see the shapes better. I also changed a couple of the images to black and white. That way, I could see the values and will have an easier time matching them.

Once I had the reference images that I wanted, I printed off a copy of the black and white photo. The reason I printed a copy was that I needed an image that I could take measurements from to create the outline for the drawing. I am doing this drawing freehand without using tracing paper. I also did not want to use a grid method because of all the erasing that would be needed to clean up the finished work. I started the outline by drawing the bottom shape of the nose then slowly worked to get all of the important details in. To ensure I did not get off on any of the details, I used a compass to compare everything to the printed photos. Over all, I spent around two and a half hours just drawing the outline.

The outline was done using a B Fiber Castel pencil lead in a clutch drafting pencil. Most of my drawings are done with the Fiber Castel pencil leads with the clutch drafting pencil holders. I like to use them because they are really easy to sharpen, and they always have the same feel. When using a wood pencil, the feel of it changes slightly when you sharpen it because it gets shorter. With a drafting pencil the feel is always the same because I only have to keep the lead inside sharp, the pencil itself always stays the same. I have also seen may artists using mechanical pencils for this reason as well. Although, it is harder to find different hardness lead for mechanical pencils.

I bring up the type of pencils I am using here because they will become very important through this drawing process. Instead of using just a few pencils for this portrait, I will be using a wider variety. The reason is I want to protect the paper surface as much as possible so I will let the type of pencil dictate the value instead of using a higher pressure. I will admit that I have a habit of trying to get darker values out of harder pencil lead. To do that I use too much pressure on the pencil and end up damaging the paper surface. This makes it harder to fix errors later in the drawing process. Because accuracy is so important in a portrait, I am going to do my best to protect the paper and much as possible.

Anyway, I completed the outline using a B pencil lead and very light pressure. Then just started to add some of the skin tone to establish some initial values. This is where I will be leaving off this week. For next week, I will continue to establish more of the skin tones by focusing on the areas that will have the darkest value. Once I get the values established, I will use them as a reference for doing the remaining parts of the drawing.

Moving forward, I will post my progress each week until the portrait is complete. I have not set a time line because I really have no idea how long this will take. Just for information purposes, I will try and keep a running total on how long I work on this.

Please leave a comment below if you have any comments. I hope everyone has a great week.