current-drawing-i-m-working-on-7912c4852d78f

Hello everyone and welcome to another art post from me.
It's been a few days but I'm still drawing despite the stress that comes with school.
Today though.. I will be posting about a drawing I am currently working on. This was contracted to me a few days ago and I have been having less than an hours chance per day to work on it. This is my third day though and this is where my progress is.
Model : Unknown
Mode : Portrait
Tools : 9B, GPC charcoal pencil,Soft brush.
Surface : Cartridge sketchpad.
This artwork when completed will be gifted at the models 60th year birthday which is cool cos my artwork will be presented in front of quite a few people. (Every artists dreams of this). I am glad though that I have ample time to draw this.

STEP 1

i draw the grid into a 12 by 16 inches size.. Total of squares I had to make was 768. Crazy right? I know. But this isa necessary evil as I need to make sure everything in this drawing is very precise.

STEP 2

I begin to draw the outline of the image of the woman starting from her head gear Also called 'gele' in my dialect. This is one of the crucial parts.. Making a mistake here can lead to a whole lot of frustration but once done correctly, the results are beautiful.

STEP 3

I begin to shade right from the fore head. There are delicate soft shades here and I have to be careful so I will not have to darken any place unnecessarily. I'm using my 9B pencil to make both the light shades and dark shades by variating the force I apply on the paper.

STEP 4

I jump to the eyes and leave the glasses frame untouched yet. Since the glasses will need to bw really black.. I decided to shade it earlier so I won't have to smudge darker shades into the soft shadings of the eyes.

STEP 5

I then take my GPC charcoal pencil and begin to make extremely dark shades to fill in the glasses frame. This really makes the drawing come to life a bit. I then realize the eye pupil wasn't so dark so I applied my GPC pencil on the pupil and boom... Looks more realistic.

STEP 6

i begin to draw the rest of the face down to the neck. This part is tricky because the face was smooth and I was trying to make a few parts of it rough and have skin textures. One things about pictures edited with photoshop like this tend to be too smooth : Skin texture wise.

STEP 7

i wrap up the drawing by drawing the head gear. Now this was where the trouble was. I faced a lot of trouble doing this as this was the most complex part of the drawing. I had to improvise and make the patterns into something I was more comfortable with and could work fast with. I was already hitting the deadline and the work had to be framed, packaged and delivered to Ondo city the next day. I won though. It got there and she loved the work.