Billie

He who pays the piper...

After watching 'Secret Diary of a Call Girl' I felt like drawing this image. In this project I used carbon and graphite pencils, which I found to be really soft after using the col-erase.

As usual I started with the easy grid method.

As the pencil was soft I started with the hair so as not to smudge the image if I did the hair at the end.

The blond hair was difficult to draw, and over the course of this project I returned to the hair a few times to darken the shade tones.

Next as the eyes and Billie's signature mouth are so important I wanted to get them in place early. The eyes too were often adjusted over the process of this project. I broke some of the portrait rules here and outlined the the teeth as they are so significant here.

Next I added the shade tones round the nose, which I often find leads to the rest of the face tones.

The basic skin tones of the face and chest were added, though the tones were darkened later.

Shade tones were then added to the rest of the body and the top. Also some darker tones were added generally over the image.

Again the tones were adjusted after a break, and the eyes were re-shaped to fit the face better.

Then there was a final pass over the tones. In this project, the carbon and graphite pencils didn't seem to take working as well as the col-erase normally does. But a good draw.