Several Shades of Grey

Several Shades of Grey

Light and shade, the most important and possibly the most difficult thing to create effectively in a pencil drawing.

Some of my drawings are quite detailed others are less so depending on the result I am looking for.

I drew the cover picture for this post of Michael Jackson, mainly to practice with light and shade; I found a photo in a magazine of him looking up at the stage lights.

The one of John Lennon below was for the same reasons.

The reason for some of my work is to satisfy my fascination for getting a likeness without showing too much facial detail; also my detailed work satisfies my passion for getting it as real as I can.

I normally use an off white watercolour paper for my drawings, it has a really good feel and it’s heavy and robust and has a rich look about it, but if I particularly want a brightness or the dramatic difference between light and shade, like a bright light shining on all or part of a face then I use brilliant white paper.

For this type of drawing I shade the piece that I am working on by rubbing a cotton bud on a piece of graphite and using it like a paint brush, then I take a pliable eraser and use that as a paint brush for the white.

My style of drawing is like a building process, I start off with the outline.

Then add a little detail.

Now I rub over it with a cotton bud.

Then use a pliable eraser to 

get rid of the excess graphite.

The same applies to the facial lines; my idea is that dark is further away getting light as the object gets closer. So I apply that idea to the lines of a face, for deep lines you will need quite a dark line outlined by lighter shades to get the texture.

Then I keep building by smudging, erasing and drawing until I get some sort of textured look of real skin.

I've had no formal training in art so you probably won’t see any of my methods in textbooks but I have a great passion and desire to create, so I guess the end justifies the means in this case. 

The Eyes are the Windows into the Mind

The Eyes are the Windows into the Mind

Thanks to +June d'Arville  for allowing me to use her image in this post.

From a portrait artists point of view all the features of a face even down to the tiniest crease are very important to capture the mood and personality.

In saying that I personally think that the eyes have the edge, I mean they do much more than anything else to show how a person is feeling at any one time.

You can draw a person smiling but if the eyes aren’t smiling it’s just someone with their mouth turned up at the edges.

Serious/Sad

 Surprised/Shocked

Happy/Smiling

I use basically the same routine for eyes on all my portraits, first of all the shape it’s quite important to get that right from the outset.

Then the pupil must be the right size and shape depending on the mood of the subject.

Now I get to work on the cornea, I like to harden the edges a little then make various curved lines around from pupil to edge this tends to give it a bit of a 3D look although most of it will be smudged out.

I then get to work on it with my cotton bud.

Now with a pliable eraser in just the right places it’s time to make the eye come alive.

That eye, I would say comes from a very sparkly person.

Ah yes it's +June d'Arville

The Right Hemisphere

My thanks to +Azlin Bloor for giving me permission to use her image in this post.

I've been an artist since I was a boy when I discovered that I could copy cartoons from my comic books almost perfectly in freehand.

I dabbled and experimented with still life and landscapes but they didn’t capture my interest nor did they satisfy me, I had this fascination with trying to capture the character and personality of a person’s face, or indeed the face of an animal.

I also became very interested in why some of us can do it and some of us cannot, a writer uses words, a musician uses notes and an artist uses visual perceptions.

Our brain has these extraordinary capabilities most of which we take for granted, our faces are more alike than different, same size more or less, eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hair in the same position give or take. You could pay thousands of pounds for a face recognition program for a computer and given enough time it could recognise and match a face, your brain can do this in a blink of an eye. 

Visual perceptions come mainly from the right hemisphere of the brain, the less dominate part of the brain that schools don’t readily encourage students to develop. The right hemisphere of the brain is where you get your eureka moments, in other words it processes information as a whole and being the non verbal side of the brain it’s a bit like when you say “I know what I mean but I can’t put it into words. Whereas the left more verbal side of your brain is the half that will work things out logically in stages.

I’m not a neurologist by any stretch of the imagination but because of my fascination of how the brain works in relation to art I have read many books on the subject, one really good example being Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Dr. Betty Edwards.

When I make a start on a portrait my first thought is proportions, this is where I will use the left hemisphere of my brain, the dominant, the verbal, the logical side of the brain that works things out in an orderly fashion. 








If I’m working on A4 paper I will size the photo to A4 then print it out and lay it by the side of my blank sheet, I then make several marks on the blank sheet, top of the head, bottom of the chin, eye, nose, mouth position and so on.

Now my right hemisphere must come into play so I discard the printout and concentrate on shapes, it’s freehand all the way from here on in.

I now have a drawing that is proportionally near perfect but, it doesn’t look anything like my subject, why? Because that is the most difficult part of the whole project.

Light and shade is a very big part of photography and therefore very important in this kind of art because after all you are trying to replicate true life.

At this stage I usually stand my drawing pad up by the side of my subject on screen and then get on with other things, I will glance at it from time to time and occasionally I will sit and study it for a while.

Every so often I will see something different on screen that I have missed in the drawing so then I sit down and carry on shading and altering shapes. Eventually I begin to see the character and likeness evolving before me I will carry on this process for some hours until I am satisfied, actually that is untrue because I am never satisfied but there comes a point where I have to force myself to stop because there is a likeliness for me to start undoing some of the improvements that I have made.