Pensive Girl drawing process

Here are a few notes on my drawing process.  I must apologise because the first eight photos were taken with a tablet computer, often under poor illumination as the weather was  overcast so are of very poor quality.  Only the last photo, of the completed drawing, is of a better quality having been taken with our compact camera after my wife had returned from her holiday with it.

Each photo was taken of the previous day's work, before starting any new work. Sometimes I would work for less than an hour in a day, sometimes there would be two sessions of up to two hours.

The first photo shows the initial sketch made using the 'Slip and Slide' method and a 0.3mm mechanical pencil, very lightly.  At this stage I also added the indentations, made with the finest embossing tool, for the fuzz on the cuff of her jumper, the highlights in the single hair strands of the curl by her chin, the highlit hair crossing her left eye, etc.

There are just a few more things that I will say about the way I made this drawing. 

The skin tone was built up slowly, layer by layer, with circular shading and tissue blending. I used mostly 0.3mm and 0.2mm 2B pencils, but used 0.5mm 4B and even 6B and 8B pencils for the darker areas.  For the final adjustments I used the pencil very lightly and blended, again very lightly, with a cotton bud so that some fine texture remained.

I zoomed in on the reference photo (using IrfanView which has an excellent 'zoom to selection' feature) to get a better view of the texture of the jumper and elsewhere where I needed to make a closer examination of the reference.

For the hair I first divided the hair into locks.  I then laid down the basic tone of the hair with the side of the lead of a 4B pencil in the direction of the hair strands and blended.  Further tone was added, drawing from dark to light in the locks with the point of a pencil again in the direction of the hair strands with decreasing pressure towards the highlight.  Next I would blend lightly and then lift out highlights, or general gloss, with a kneadable eraser.  I repeated layers of pencil and lifting out highlights, often using a pinched edge on a kneadable eraser to give a finer highlight, until I was satisfied with the effect.  By using a 0.2mm mechanical pencil, fine hair texture was added in both darker and lighter areas.  A sharp soft pencil was used to darken areas where locks overlap.

Stray bright hairs were added using a TomBow ultra-fine eraser, which was also used to carefully clean out indentations made earlier where they had partially darkened with graphite dust during blending.  I frequently cut the eraser to a fresh edge with a craft knife to ensure clean erasing.

The very subtle shading on her fingernails was added with a point of a small blending stump that had been used so that it had picked up a very small amount of graphite, rather than drawing it in with a pencil, and then adjusted with a kneadable eraser.


Here is the finished drawing


Here are some of my other drawing processes