Pencil Portrait | A Portrait For An Awesome Couple

I have not posted anything here on Steemit for the past ten days. Other than feeling unwell, I have been busy with life and hardly have time to go online. One of the reasons I was busy was because I received a huge portrait commission to draw a family portrait. And I had less than a week to complete the task. Since I am a part-time portrait artist I had to use my whatever spare time I had to complete the job as soon as possible. I really envy those who could draw all the time, every day with minimal interruptions. But alas, I can not afford to have that kind of life, for now, maybe someday when my children are all grown up, maybe then I can call myself a full-time artist!

Anyway, this portrait is very special for me personally because the couple in the picture are my church friends. This portrait is their farewell gift from the church because they are leaving Malaysia for good to start their new life in their home country. Yes, there are not Malaysians. They have been staying in Malaysia for the past ten years, got married and both of their kids were born in Malaysia. I will not go into details about them here though.

The size of the drawing is 29.7 x 42 cm (11.7 x 16.5 in). It's A3 paper size. The initial request was for me to draw on an A4 size paper but for pencil portrait of four people, the size is too small. A4 paper size is only suitable for a single portrait or for a couple. I am sure a lot of portrait artists will agree with me on this.

By the way, the completed portrait at the top is not how it actually looked like. The image quality is bad with reflections because of the plastic case I used to protect the drawing from dust etc.

Here are the progress photos and a bit of explanation on the process.

I started the sketching process from left to right to reduce smudging. I began with the dad portrait, followed by the baby, the eldest son, and finally the mom. I used HB, 2B, 4B, 6B and 8B pencils. One section of the portrait took roughly 3 hours to complete. In total, I spent approximately 35 hours on this portrait and that is less than MYR10/hour. So yeah, my service is relatively cheap compared to other artists :)