Robyn

A portrait I did of my friend for her birthday.

The funny thing is I did it the night before and managed to cram in a fairly detailed portrait in less than 8 hours while doing my projects to finish my semester. It was quite fun. Ish. Funish.

The drawing itself is on 110lbs paper and done in various graphite lead. The shading was done with blending stumps to give it the smooth skin.

The hair is the most process though. She's blonde. As I looked at the picture I couldn't figure out how to make her hair "blonde."

My process started as creating a light base with one of my pencils. From that base I added dark shadows where needed and built up the various tones. Hair as a lot of tones and if they aren't all there, it will look flat. When I had all my darks and mitones in I took an eraser and erased out highlights. All the fine lines that can be seen at the top of the hair are done using an eraser with an edge. Then I took a finely sharpened pencil and added shadows back into where they were needed. I actually really like how the hair turned out. Its the first time I've done it in this way and it actually worked extremely well.

As always, a larger version may be seen here.