Nude rear

A bit of a change this time. Since time immemorial, artists have been drawn to the human figure, so now it is my turn. I have drawn a few nudes from life before but none of the subjects will let me show off the pictures(!) so in the end I was forced to research pitures of nude women on the internet. It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.

(And the truth is, drawing nudes is not as fun as it looks in Titanic. It's more a case of 'Can I move?', 'I'm cold', 'Can I have a blanket? How about on the top half whilst you are drawing my legs, then switch?', 'When can I got to the toilet', 'I have cramp', 'Hurry up and draw the thing!', etc. Hence drawing a picture from a computer is much easier. Although there is the obvious disadvantage of not being in a room with a beautiful naked woman, but you can't have everything. Anyway.)

So in the end I chose a tasteful picture of a nude model facing away from the camera and putting her feet in a ballet pose. It's a copyrighted picture so I'm not allowed to reproduce it here I'm afraid...  I chose the cheaper, smoother paper for this picture and used a soft pencil, which I smudged with my finger to get some shadow gradation.  There was a lot more hair in the picture than usual, although it was smaller on an A4 sheet. Because of this, the hair is much less detailed than usual, although I am happy with the 'sweeping' effect.

I was also happy with the back and bum. There is some great lighting in the photo, which allowed me to go really dark on the shadows, showing off the shoulder blades nicely. The hardest part was the feet, which I am still not quite happy with, although you can tell how she's standing. Anyway here she is:

For my latest pictures, visit http://pencil-pictures.co.uk

Pussy cat

Something a bit out of the ordinary this time - someone asked me to draw her cat! Having not drawn animals since I was about 5 I knew this would pose a challenge. Here's the pussy in question:

So, first things first, I drew the eyes. These are not so different from human eyes so no problem so far! Then I drew the shape of the face. The fur I made up as I went along, but eventually settled for lots of V shapes, pointing in the direction of the hair. If you do enough of these it looks like fur - trust me. Do a layer of light Vs and then dark Vs in different pencils (H and B for example) to get the 'mottled' effect, and add more dark Vs in the darker stripe areas.

The whiskers were done last. I rolled a putty rubber into a cone shape and 'drew' the white whiskers by erasing existing lines with the pointed end using sweeping hand motions and letting the paper shine through. I then continued eachwhisker beyond the cat outline using a B pencil. I'm very happy with the result and so was this moggy's owner:

For commissions visit http://www.pencil-pictures.co.uk.