I’ve been around in this forum for a while now and shown my work in 3D and I thought it would be fun to show you what I can do in 2D with a pencil.
WARNING! Very boring story below!
I’ve drawn since I was around ten years old when I and my sister drew pokemon together, she stopped after a while but I thought it was loads of fun so I continued. After I had drawn about 100 diffrent pokemons I began to read Dragon Ball and I was so caught in it that I wanted to make my own manga.
I continued drawing manga for about 5 or 6 years and went better and better at it until one day 1 or 2 years ago I felt like drawing a real person. I knew that drawing a real person would be too hard so I found a good photo and began drawing the person on it. When I was finished I looked at it and thought: “Well, this isn’t too bad.” Í found it very intresting drawing persons on photos so I continued to do it while drawing manga at the same time.
So, with that said here’s my pics : )
------------------- Luigi from Ratatoui ----------------------------------- Remy from Ratatoui ------------------
------------------- A lake in my neighberhood --------------------------------------------------- A scene from “Pride and prejudice” ------------------
-------------------------------------- Dr House -------------------------------------------------------------------- Robot T Rex!! ------------------------
------------------------ An unfinished old man ------------------------------------------------ A little island from a nearby lake ------------------------------
Yes, I have been thinking about make the sketches darker for some time now, in fact two days ago I bought a charcoal pencil to use instead of my regular pencil.
What I came up with was the “scary Mr Bean” picture, it looks darker and is the exact darkness I want in my sketches. The only problem with charcoal is that it’s hard to erase so I couldn’t fix the errors that occured in that sketch. The next picture I try to do with charcoal I will probably do the base with a regular pencil and then do the shading with the charcoal.
You could always try just using softer pencils for the darker tones, my watercolour 8B does a good for that sort of thing. I also have a black oil based pencil which goes on much smoother than charcoal (which some people seem to be able to work wonders with, but generally looks awful when I use it), and erases quite well with a putty eraser.
Very nice sketches, you’ve managed to capture the majority of likenesses very well, particularly for the pixar characters.
Yea, when I went to the artstore to buy the charcoal they said that a soft pencil could be almost the same as with charcoal, but I don’t know why I didn’t buy the soft pencil too… Black oil based pencil ey? Didn’t know what that was so I googled it and yea it looks really nice!
Now I have to go back to the artstore and look for those two things. (It’s always exiting to try out new pencils) : )
To improve the shading in your drawings I would suggest you to draw a value scale for each of the media you’re using (pencil and charcoal). That will help you give more volume to your drawings.
I find charcoal very annoying when used with some kind of papers. When I have some money, I use a special paper for drawing called Basik Guarro wich works very well with pencil, charcoal, washes and other similar media. See an example of soft charcoal on guarro.
I forgot to say something. It’s about outlines. I think they are very obvious in your portraits, and it makes your drawing more plain, more cartoony. I think you could try to give different values to those lines too by varying presure, this way you get lines that go from dark to light and thick to thin and your drawings might seem more interesting. You can even make an excercise that consist in drawing without or with very few lines, just shades; define the limits of different areas in a subject with light and shadows.
