Exercising your lower legs

Hello, what is Steemians, this post is my entry to the contest hosted by

Hive account@yoganarchista which tries to draw the body parts weekly from the feet to the head. This week consists of drawing lower legs.

I really like this contest, since my passion is to draw and I like the fact of working on the anatomy. I feel that part of participating in this contest I am working on refreshing my knowledge about the human body.
Last week I had the opportunity to see an infinity of works by different artists and the truth is that I was surprised to see how much talent there is in this community. That fills me with joy because I can share knowledge and grow as an artist within the community. I also try hard in my drawing related to the feet which I enjoy and I could have a good position in this contest. I want to thank all those who supported me and commented my work, really your opinion is very important for me and also to Hive account@yoganarchista for allowing me to be part of this contest and especially for doing it.

I think that every artist needs to exercise his body, it's not all about using his tools and drawing without stopping, I think that good mental and physical health is also important, and since this drawing deals with the body parts, the idea occurred to me to do this work in favor of physical well-being. It is important to exercise, meditate, jog a bit and why not? Bike riding ... is a good way to strengthen your legs, although we do not need them to draw because you do not consent to the body and feel good about yourself?

As I did?

I will show a little and in detail how I will carry out my work and I hope you can understand the process, although sometimes I miss a lot of what I do. xD

First of all I make the sketch of what I want, in this case it is a sportsman riding a bicycle, I always use a HB pencil to do this, since at the time of erasing leaves no traces or messes up the work, since the mine This pencil is very hard and gives us a fairly clean stroke. (Excuse me if the image is not so sharp)

Once the sketch is done, I look for the darkest parts in the dark, or those that I would like to give more darkness.
I really imagine it to be very dark so that's the first thing I'm going to do, give it all the darkness possible. Although filling the dark parts first can give us many problems. because, we would mess up all the work and lose the guide lines of the sketch. That's why I use a sheet of white paper to pose my hands and thus not stain with the graphite sequel where I support my hand.
Start by illustrating the rear wheel and give the reflections to the chrome of the bike using only a pencil 6B, as I always say this pencil is great! You can make very clear strokes as very dark without much effort!

Then I wanted to highlight all the other dark parts, wheels, shadows and all the mechanism of the bicycle, this part really took a long time, only fill in black most of the work is very tiresome, but I should try that the effect I wanted to give the work a good result.
What we care about is focusing on the legs going well, so I wanted to make a kind of blur effect, use it only on the front of the bike. It really is a very difficult effect to do in pencil, so help me from one of my best friends "the smudge" by passing it slightly through the legs gives a slight effect of gradient and is how we blur the image.
But it was not convenient to blur everything since it would fill the drawing of astracted images, so I draw very badly the front part, and very detailed the back part, it is as if a camera focused only that part!

The effect looks very good, but at first glance the drawing looks like a caricature. xD (believe me I thought about making a caricature, it looked very attractive)
But no, I really like realism and I wanted to detail the features of the lower legs, so finished with so much black I started the part that I like the most, to draw, to shade.

Fusing the two effects, the pure black without degrading and the realism in the lower legs this ended up being the Final Art.

I noticed some flaws that I did not want to correct presumably because, like this, I can see all the strokes I made with the pencil and I feel that if I polished it completely I would lose some effects!

And this is my entry to the contest "Discovering your body" which calls:

Exercising your body

I greatly appreciate the time spent on my post and tell all the artists in the community that they are amazing! They are very talented and enjoy what they do, just as I enjoy my work! and I am very happy to be able to participate again. I hope to do it every week!