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:

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Audrey Hepburn

This was a suggestion by a friend of mine. The original idea was something of a competition, whereby the following morning we would each produce a portrait of someone we could agree on and see whose was better. He chose Audrey Hepburn, so I agreed, and started work on it when I got home that evening. I drew it in a bit of a hurry, so considering it only took me about an hour and a half I am pleased with the result:

Sure, the nose is a bit flat and the outlines a bit thick, but hey - you can still recognise her!

And to add to that, the guy had forgotten he was supposed to be drawing her. I won, but only by default, so it was a hollow victory!

A nice coda to this is that I was showing another friend of mine the portrait and she asked me to email it to her. I scanned it and sent it, and a few minutes later received the following back:

Needless to say, she is more artistic than yours truly...

The eye of the beholder

This entry is about a picture I drew a few months back of a girl I know in real life. Unlike the others, I actually approached her to request a photo that I could copy. Hers is a great face for a portrait, with classic big blue eyes and high cheekbones, and when she smiles her cheeks become slightly babyish, plus she has perfectly straight teeth. The icing on the proverbial cake is the nose. At the top this nose starts like it might be equine, but then tapers into a baby nose at the end. It really is a unique nose! So whilst I was delighted with the smile in the photo below, I must admit to being a bit disappointed that the face-on view does not show off the nose to full effect. (The only other downside was that the face was not in focus, though regular readers will know that with a bit of pencil trickery it is possible to sharpen it up somewhat!)

I started off as always by drawing the outline of the shape of the face, followed by the eyes, nose, mouth then hair. I used an almost perfectly smooth piece of paper, and a 2B pencil for the entire protrait to see what effect this would have. I usually alternate between H, B and 2B, but 2B sticks to the paper better than any of the others. On the parts of the face that did not require detail (mainly the cheeks and chin) I 'cheated' and used a finger to smudge the graphite into the right places to create the shadows. 2B works especially well for this trick. This photo was taken using a flash, so the shadows are few and far between, mainly on the extreme edges of the face and under the hair line.

Long hair is always fun to draw, and a tip I would offer is to make it far more shiny than it actually is. To me, hair looks far more effective when it has a highlighted area, as I did with the fringe in this case. The white of the paper 'shining' through gives the illusion of extra brightness and contrast.

The nose was actually quite easy, and the subject herself actually complimented me on getting the nose 'perfect'! The mouth however was much harder. In the photo the combination of the flash and the blur makes it difficult to see exactly where the lips are, so I made my best guess. I drew the mouth once, then rubbed it out completely and drew it again. It is still not perfect but it is better:

As always visit http://pencil-pictures.co.uk for the latest drawings. Feel free to leave comments!

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!