Getting Started

Welcome back and happy new year!

When I first started the pencil-pictures.co.uk business  I asked friends, family and business colleagues permission to draw them so I could put them on the site to hopefully entice new customers to commission pictures from me. One of the first of these was a colleague of mine who gave me this picture:

Of course I was very grateful, but to be honest I was a bit disappointed that his hair was totally different from usual (or 'dorky' as he himself described it to me) and he had a bit of a beard going on in the picture, which he does not usually have. In short the picture does not really look like him. (In real life he looks more like Parkman from the TV series 'Heroes'.)
However the guy was doing me a favour and beggars can't be choosers so I set to work.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I regularly use a ruler when drawing faces. In this case I drew the outline of the face and measured it, erased and re-drew for a while, before starting on the details. I actually measured the face INCLUDING the beard, but was a bit reluctant to draw said beard since I was hoping other colleagues would recognise the subject and want their portraits done too!

Anyway I persevered with the face, without the beard and in the end it looked good, but not like the guy it was supposed to be! Even without the haircut the chin was way too big. Here is what it looked like:

Since it made him look like James Dean he was happy with it so I decided to leave it as it was.

For the latest pictures visit http://pencil-pictures.co.uk. Enjoy!