Speed drawing video of Darth Vader

My son is a big Star Wars fan and asked me to draw him a picture of Darth Vader. We had a look through his books and found a nice picture to copy, and I took a photocopy. I thought it might be fun to film it so I suspended a camera above my head using a tripod. Looked a bit silly but there you go! I only had an hour and half's worth of tape spare so I drew it in a bit of a hurry, but the results are not bad. For most of the detail in the helmet I used the pointed end of a B pencil, with a bit of 2B for the darkest areas, and some H for the lighter areas. In the photograph Darth Vader is standing under some strip lighing so each light bulb is reflected in the helmet. I left these parts white.

The cloak was drawn with the flat side of a B pencil, with extra shading in the darker areas to give the illusion of folds in the cloth.

Here is the video:

And in case you are not impressed enough, the piano version of the Imperial March is played by me :)

Here's Darth:

And lest you forget, here's my Elvis video:

Done on the same table, before I realised how to suspend the camera!

Here's Elvis:

Happily for me I managed to sell this one, but let me know if you'd like me to draw you one!

Little boy in a kimono

The latest picture is actually from a full-length portrait of a little boy wearing a kimono. The face was quite small in the original hard copy so I took a high-resolution scan and blew it up (enlarged not exploded). The resultant picture was still quite blurred, but there was enough detail to be going on with.

For this picture I went back to the old method of a 2B pencil on the older smooth paper. The face was done as usual, with the shading the result of the side of the pencil, and the detail done with the point. The kimono was fun too. It's actually easy to draw - simply shade with the side of the pencil in the direction of the collar, i.e. from the neck to the point in the middle of the chest. (Whatever you do, don't draw the robe as right over left - this is reserved for corpses!!) A few dark and light areas give the illusion of creases in the fabric. Experiment with this and you'll find you can create life-like images.

Not a lot else to say about this one, other than this boy has the cutest little cheeks I have ever seen!

See all the latest pictures at http://pencil-pictures.co.uk.

A new sketch pad - Alfred Hitchcock

I was in town the other day and decided to look at sketch pads. WHSmiths does a pad with really thick textured paper so I thought I would try it. I have a long mental list of people I want to draw and decided on British film director Alfred Hitchcock, he of the distinctive jowly jaw. For this first picture I went back to using a 2B pencil for the whole sketch. This worked nicely in the very dark areas under his chin, and also for the lines on his forehead.

Lines are fun to draw. Hext time you see someone with a lined forehead, especially when they are raising their eyebrows, have a look at the light. The forehead is divided into folds of skin separated by lines. The lines are very dark, but the top of each fold is light. So a lined forehead is basically light fading to dark at the line, then immediately light again for the next fold of skin. Try it - it is really effective. (In Alfred Hitchcock's case, the light source is quite low, and his face is raised, so his wrinkles go the opposite way, but I hope you get the idea!)

The textured paper shows up best when using the side of a pencil as opposed to the point, so for a textured skin tone use the flat of the pencil. I like the effect on Alfred's clothes as well.

Finally when I had finished the face, I decided that the left side was too bright and not easily defined, so I shaded the background a bit on that side. Now you can clearly see his profile:

Let me know what you think in the comments section! As usual you can see the latest pics at http://www.pencil-pictures.co.uk.

Marylin Monroe

This picture was another suggestion by a friend. Marylin Monroe is a popular subject for portraits, both photos and sketches/paintings, so inevitably mine would be compared with others, but I decided it was worth it. As usual I Googled a picture and found this nice one of MM looking down at the camera with arched eyebrows.

For this picture I used only a B pencil and a very cheap sketchpad which I picked up from a shop near my office. The paper is very thin, but it is also very smooth, which makes the pictures look quite different. The problem is that pencil lines look very much like pencil lines... Let me explain. If I draw a line with either the point or the side of a pencil lead on a textured piece of paper, the undulating nature of the paper means that the line is already quite interesting before going any further. This is not the case with smooth paper, so I 'cheated' and in the smooth areas of the faces used my finger to smudge the darker shadows into the right places. I also made the earrings far simpler - after all they don't make the face any more or less recogniseable!

Anyway, here she is. Let me know what you think in the comments setion:

http://pencil-pictures.co.uk



Another unfinished work

Regular readers of the blog will have realised that most of my pictures are 'unfinished' and there is always something I plan to go back and add. Well this latest is no exception, and is in fact the most unfinished (can I say that?) of them all so far! When I mentioned to an old friend of mine that I was starting an art website he offered me a picture to draw of himself driving a boat on a lake. It was a good picture, although it was small and consequently the resolution was not great. However if there is one advantage of drawing rather than photography it is that using a pencil one can increase the resolution of a picture!

I started off intending to draw only the face but just did not have enough detail for a full facial portrait, so I abandoned that and 'zoomed out' to include the arm on the steering wheel of the boat. I drew the face first, and the lack of detail made me realise it is actually really hard to visualise a face, even that of someone very familiar. I made the face look as good as I could then drew the arm on the steering wheel:

I showed him the picture at this stage and he was happy with it in this state, so I abandoned it there and then! (No sense risking disappointment with more work...) Hence it remains a pencil picture of a head, arm and steering wheel.

As always to see the latest pictures visit http://pencil-pictures.co.uk.

William Hartnell

When I am not drawing commissioned works for http://pencil-pictures.co.uk, I draw people whose faces I like. I am a fan of the TV series 'Doctor Who', and it seems that an interesting face is a requirement for the job of the lead actor, because certainly Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton have very strong and distinctive features, not to mention the new boy Matt Smith, with his deep-set eyes and unmistakeable chin. However, I feel that the chiseled and well-worn but charming features of the late great William Hartnell lend themselves to a pencil portrait better than any of the others, so it was he who I chose to draw next.

I went through all of the pictures I could find of the great man, and discounted all in which he was not wearing his famous Doctor Who wig (yes it really was a wig!), and settled on a picture taken on the set of the very first episode of Doctor Who ('An Unearthly Child') taken back in 1963. The photograph shows off his mischievous eyes and severe nose to great effect, giving him the air of a professor who is not averse to going off the beaten track. In fact just looking at this picture alone it is easy to see why Hartnell was chosen for the part... but I digress.

I started as usual with the eyes. Hartnell's eyes were quite a light colour, so in addition to the usual shades caused by light and shadows, I had fin with the darkness of the pupils, the lightness of the iris, and the glint of light in the corner of the iris, which is the plain white of the paper shining through.

The symmetrical nose actually posed a problem. Noses are much easier to draw from the side. Face-on relies so heavily on getting the shading just right... but since the light sorce looks to be top-left, the heavy shading under the nose makes this part stand out the most, making the shading of the sides slightly less consequential to the overall portrait.

In this picture the Doctor is giving a familiar grim smile, so no lips are visible. I was a bit worried that this would look unnatural in the finished portrait, but as usual, all I had to do was draw exactly what I saw and it turned out okay! (I always think this during a portrait - should I try and be creative or draw what I see? In every case, drawing what I see is the best option! Some artists have great imaginations, but not this one...)

I am very pleased with the face in this picture. The only parts not quite up to scratch are the hat and scarf. One of these days I might go back and revise it... but probably not.

Next stop, Patrick Troughton. Watch this space...

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!

One of the pics that started me off

This is the picture that effectively encouraged me to launch the site www.pencil-pictures.co.uk a few months back. This is a picture of my little girl when she was about 4 years old. I can date it by the fact that her first adult tooth was showing!

I happened to find the photograph whilst looking for something else and thought it was really sweet, and on a whim decided to put pencil to paper to see if I could capture her likeness. Whilst not perfect, I was not displeased with the result, and she is definitely recogniseable from the picture. The mouth is a little bit too dark and a little bit crooked, and one of these days I might go back and change it (though I doubt it). However the shape of the face is just right. She used to have lovely cute baby cheeks (alas now sadly gone) as shown here.

The hardest part was the hair. I had not drawn hair for many years and so tried to draw the individual strands - big mistake! So then I tried to divide the hair into different shaded areas and draw the strands on top. This approach has served me well since, but for this protrait I was just getting my bearings. I have not changed it because I think it is a good idea to compare old pictures with new ones to see if I have improved. Thankfully I usually have (though not always!) so it's a confidence booster - I'd encourage any other budding artists to do the same.

I plan to draw her again one of these days.

Charlie Chaplin without disguise

I am not ashamed to say that this is a totally unrecognisable portrait of a very famous person. I have shown it to a few people and no one has had the remotest idea who it is. One of my colleagues thought it was Lewis Hamilton!

Well I have put his name in the title, and you can also see the description over at pencil-pictures.co.uk, so no prizes for guessing the identity of Mr Charles Chaplin, the British silent comedy actor who made it big in Hollywood. I chose this picture of the great man because once upon I time I used to organise a picture quiz, and this was always a favourite because it was such an unfamiliar view. Strange to think that the image of a man is defined by a false toothbrush moustache and hat but there you go.

The portrait stuck in my mind because every time I looked at it I was surprised that such an apparently happy-go-lucky comedian could have such intense eyes. This is what I tried to capture when I drew this and I think the eyes have come out well.

The biggest challenge came from that crazy hairstyle! Apparently back in the 1920s, wavy hair with a centre parting was all the rage. For this I looked at the picture with screwed up eyes and simply drew the light and dark patches on the portrait, then afterwards added finer lines to show hair and its general direction. The wavy bit on the right-hand side took a while, but I took some liberties and made it reflect rather more light than in the photo.

The suit in the photo was almost entirely in darkness so I made it up. This is something that some artists, myself included, have a weakness for. It's all very well to draw what we see, but trying to imagine what something looks like is an extra-special skill! The suit on this picture is quite weak, but I am hoping that I drew the eyes well enough that on one notices!

Speed drawing!

This weekend I tried filming myself drawing Elvis. I speeded up the video and the results can be seen at pencil-pictures.co.uk, or at Youtube or here:


Enjoy!

Robin Wells portrait

This was a picture I was really looking forward to. This gentleman is Robin Wells, a musician/composer/conductor. He is the leader of the Farnham and Bourne Choral Society, of which I am a member, and he has a marvellously expressive face, full of character, as one would expect of a choirmaster. I obtained a photograph of him after the 2010 Easter concert and recently set about drawing him in pencil.

The first thing to note was the glasses. Unlike Groucho Marx's, Robin's glasses are quite real, and therefore bend the light from his eyes. It was a real challenge to draw the image behind the glass as it appeared and not succumb to the temptation of drawing what I thought it should look like!

Then there were the eyes themselves. Robin's eyes are quite dark, so I decided to exercise a little artistic licence and make them sparkle a little. I prefer this effect, but it's not for everyone. Comments on this are appreciated (and don't spare my feelings if you don't like it...). I did something similar with the teeth.

When I showed the portrait to Robin (who has no idea I was drawing it) his first reaction was 'Am I really that wrinkly?!'. Well the answer is yes and no. All the wrinkles in the picture are faithful to the original, but I must admit I made then far darker than they really are. I feel they stand out more this way and bring the face to life. Again, comments welcome on this. Apart from this Robin seemed happy with the portrait so here it is for all to see.

It is also on display at pencil-pictures.co.uk