Off the shoulder

Well I started this project to test the Derwent Graphic pencils again, with some blending, but it didn't turn out as expected. The Derwent pencils turned out to be really rubbish, and blending with them didn't help. The pencils were still too gritty and cut up the paper too much making building up layers very rough.

So as I liked the reference image here I tried again using my Faber-Castell 9000 pencils, which I needed to supplement with a few new pencils to fill the gaps in the range. These pencils were much better, but still the drawing was difficult.

As before I started with a line drawing using my easy grid method.

Here I have completed the line work and started to add some of the hair to frame the face.

I then added more of the hair and the edge of the ear. This was difficult as the reference image had a lot of mid tones that together made it difficult to pick out what was going on in the picture. I found zooming out of the reference image a lot here helped.

To help frame the face more I then added tone to the neck. I think this may have been a bad move and was the start of my problems. I also during this project, I think I started too many of the dark areas with too light a tone before building up. I think these early light layers overworked the paper and resulted in some darker spots in the final image.

I then moved focus to the eyes. In retrospect I think I should have started this drawing with the eyes as they have the most detail and also represented the darkest and lightest tones in the image. This would have given me a good reference for the tones of the face the the next area that I had already done. 

Continuing with the eyes I added more dark tones. I really like the way the eyes turned out and I think they are probably the best part of the drawing, but after completing them I could then see that the tone of the eye required the rest of the image to be much darker than I had planned.

To continue with the main facial features I added the tones for the side of the nose. Again I really liked the way this turned out, but in the end I needed to make this darker which was a shame.

Adding the mouth completed the main features. Again I was really please with how the mouth turned out, but it too had to go darker to balance the tone of the drawing.

The large shadow on the face was next, and proved to be the most difficult part of the drawing. It was practically difficult to lay down such a large dark area of tone and also to blend it in. At this point I realise I needed to balance the tones, and in particular darken the mid tones of the hair, ear and neck.

To finish I added tone to the shoulder and darkened the neck. The tone of this is smoother than seems to have come out on the scanner. I am guessing that this may be due to some glare or graphite reflection of the scanner.

Overall this image was much more difficult than I had expected and I will practice shading dark tones on large areas before my next project.