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Video Tutorial
Copyright 2007 Archambault

A couple more, now let’s go over it one last time and sharpen some features up and then we will call it a drawing. Okay, so let’s start, I always start with what looks easiest to start with first and to me this is the easy part and I’m going to just blacken this. And let’s work a little bit more of the interior drawing with her eyes. So let’s flick the lash and get the angle of that and now let’s really try to preserve that white negative space of the eye because that’s crucial to get in it to look like her and now it’s getting that little pupil, okay.

And yeah, I don’t want to do too much detail over here in that lower eyelid because that comes in true to what we talked about earlier in this DVD that when I talked about the features you do not want to press down on that lower eyelid because especially on a lady, it’s just it doesn’t look flattering when there is like heavy shadows underneath the lower eyelid, okay. It’s just not what you want to do unless you’re trying to make the person look old and then you can press down like a really hard and make those unflattering-type dark lines.

So let’s move over to this eye and her eyebrows are not black, I think I am going to just pop them a little bit more. Let’s go to this eye. So let’s try to see if we can keep the integrity with this really soft pencil of the white of the negative space of the eye and let’s move this pupil over a little bit. Let’s darken this. She’s got this, really cool bluish eyes; maybe blue-green and so I find it a little bit more difficult to draw the blue-green eyes, I mean brown-green brown eyes are just a whole lot easier to draw because their just like a brown shape.

And you got to have like that have like that soft touch and let’s not go too dark with this. Let’s just go over this a few times and create the optical illusion of that lash. Go over this and—okay, this is a little hard edge so I’m going to just raise that out and maybe, maybe, maybe I’m going to use my light touch if I have it. Sometimes it disappears on me. I don’t where it goes but I think I have it and chisel this, sharpen that a little bit, okay. Let’s be careful we don’t overwork it and let’s just kind of push this now. Let’s go darker and let’s just try to go—it’s a little darker on the indent of her cheek bone into her jaw.

And I think that eye is too big, I’m going to leave it, I don’t want to, what’s going to wind up happening late in a day here because I’m going to destroy it. Draw a little bit with your eraser and let’s come on down and there is like this little doodad right here. And let’s just do a little chiseling so it’s not too soft. Let’s chisel out her nose and let’s put in some of that nostril like we talked about on the features segment of this DVD where I said, don’t draw a lot of attention to it. You want to draw attention to the eyes not the nostril so I’m not going to go dark with that.

I just got to make it more solid though. The more solid it looks, the better it’s going to look three dimensional or more three dimensional it looks the darker it goes. Let’s just push this lip area a little bit more of a darker accent line. Let’s roll around with the lay of the land and let’s just keep pushing this and make this darker because it is darker than the shadow on her skin. Yeah, that’s better and then there’s that little cast shadow. And then let’s pay attention to the distance from here to here. Okay, there’s a little indent dimple and this needs to be wider.

And let’s get rid of that line by matching of value of the shadow and she’s got like a little dimple in her chin and let me just match the value, see this is the unflattering part of that cast shadow, but let’s just go with it. It’s more about just learning how to draw not about doing a portrait that’s going to hang on the wall today here. And then let’s just do like a little gradation and let’s grade eight this out and make this darker look more like her if I do that and push a little bit more now with the hair because I’m not going to push the face any further, this is not the long drawing.

So let’s just do some here. I’m just doing my pencil strokes with the way that the hair combed and you want to draw more with your arm when you do this, not with your fingers, okay because then you are going to get in to my new shirt and you want to go for these big broad strokes. This needs to be taller. Okay, it’s never going to look 100% like her because I’m not matching the values and I have to sit here and tweak more and more with this and let’s get rid of this little line over and the last thing I’m going to do in this portrait is one last time.

I want to re-chisel and this is where I go over with my line at the end without messing it up hopefully and just chisel in the pot a couple of like little areas so let’s go back and do the lip where they touch, a little bit over here, a little bit on that lash and this line is driving me coo coo but we’re going to leave it. It’s just extending her lips a little bit too much and let’s just smudge this evenly with our eraser. Okay, so before we overwork it, let’s call it adjourn let’s move on.