I have tossed around the idea of painting on webcam again, especially since I’m working on so many portraits at the moment. I’ll definitely let you know if I decide to do that and give you a link so you can pop in and watch me painting live in my studio.

Yesterday I decided to just snap photos of Claire’s portrait as I progressed and show you all of the stages I go through during a drawing session. If you’re looking for a tutorial on how to draw a portrait, I’m not sure that I am a very good teacher – but if you pick up more on visual cues, you’ll be good to go.

My supplies are very simple – an Ebony extra smooth drawing pencil, a set of Kimberly drawing pencils (a nice variety of hard and soft leads for shading and defined lines), a white block eraser, a kneaded eraser, sharpener, acid free archival drawing paper and a sock, so you don’t get yourself too messy during the process.

I started out measuring and marking the size, 4″ x 6″ on my pad, and worked in the line drawing:

I started working in a medium shade value with a soft lead, getting the general form of her hair and facial features, then deepening the background so that the shape of her face would be more pronounced:

I continued a dark shade in the background area – it looks a little rough – but I’ll fix that:

I finished darkening the background and blended through all of the portrait with my finger to soften and smooth the portrait over:

Then began enhancing the darkest darks and getting even deeper values where I wanted her portrait and features to pop:

Going back through the portrait from right to left now, I’m adding the finishing touches. Eyelashes, nostril shading, lip definition, and beginning to work through her hair and make it more fine:

I’ve finished her portrait, gone through and rubbed away highlights with my eraser and blended them down with my finger, deepened and darkened her hair and shadows, adding individual hairs that drop down into her face, detailing out the collar of her t-shirt. The little things that polish off the portrait, and then, the very last step in all of my portraits, I signed off on it:

This is the final scan of the piece, you can see much more detail here and reference back to the photo I worked from above. I’ve altered the drawing from the reference photo just enough to take out the noise and really given proper attention to Claire’s beautiful and thoughtful pose. Now this precious moment has been captured in such a way that the moment and the feeling will be remembered with a little more emotion than it would otherwise.

This 4″ x 6″ portrait is free to All Adither for her amazing and touching Birthday Wish, but my normal fee is only $48. That’s an extremely affordable piece of custom original art!

If you’d like to order one, or two or three or four …. drop me an e-mail.