Sean Connery ~ My "Learn To Draw With Friends" Contest Entry #3
Good Morning Steemians! This is my 3rd entry for a drawing contest by @tonyr.
This was definitely the most challenging of the three entries. After a day and a half of procrastination and fighting those inner self-doubt demons, I decided to dive into this one around midnight last night. I knew I would need a quiet house and focus to pull this off, after all it's been about 18 years since I have done this kind of portrait sketching. I finished at 2AM, and just like with my previous 2 entries, I took photos to show my work along the way.
If you like my work please upvote my work, and jump over to @tonyr contest post, scroll down to find my comment with my drawing and upvote me there. The judging is based on upvotes in the comments. The link to his post is after my images. Thank you!
Finished Work
Here are the work in progress images:
Getting the rough sketch down. Once again I used the standard cross-line layout to establish the positions for the eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hairline, but set the center line off to the right. (Roughly half way between center and full right.)
Drawing in the basic facial features to get the shape and relative position of his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. Then I erased my initial guide lines.
At this point I got a little anxious and had a moment of internal panic thinking "Can I really do this?". So I went downstairs to get a drink, shake it off, then returned to my desk.
I started by working on the darkest areas first, his eyes, that allowed the 3-dimension feel of his face start to develop. After that I fell into "The Zone" and didn't remember to take progress pictures until I had the everything sketched in.
Getting all the areas of light and dark drawn in. Since this is a black/white rendering with just a pencil I can only put down 50 shades of grey or so (wink wink) but not white. So I had to remember to shade around areas of white in his hair and mustache. Then come back in after with gentle lines to low-light the white hair lines.
The final step was to go back in and put down the final dark lines and shadows using more pressure on the pencil just like we did in the previous entries. I colored in his shirt and jacket first, and that set the bar for how dark I needed to go back and make his eyes and other facial shadows. When I was done I rubbed my fingers in the dark pencil of his shirt and used that to smudge the shadow areas around his head instead of going full black like the example image.
I am definitely happy with my final work. It was great to pull this ability out of the deep dark dusty corner my brain once again.
I hope you like it.
Again please vote for me here and in the comments of the contest post page!
https://steemit.com/contest/@tonyr/35-sbd-prize-pool-learn-to-draw-with-friends-week-2-for-all-ability-levels