I would like to share my latest drawing of Rihanna. It is of the character Bubble she plays in the movie "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" that came out in 2017.
I'm very happy with the results of this drawing. I can clearly see my development of drawing portraits and I feel like I start to get closer to get that super realistic look of my drawings. I have been drawing for many years but mostly cars and motorcycles. Recently I made a challenge to myself to make more portraits and also draw animals, and I can really see how practice makes a difference.
Below I will go through the process and share my method of how I made this drawing.
First I start to draw a rough sketch of the basic shapes of her face. For this I use a graphite pen like 2H and press gently. I may have a different method than most artists, I draw some rough lines and measure the distance between different spots with a ruler to get the proportions right. Many people use the grid method and draw each square separately. I like to shade up the face and see the drawing develop.
The next thing I do is to draw the darkest areas like her hair, eyes and mouth. For this I alter between 4B and 6B. Somethimes I start with shading the entire face in a light shade and then go on with making the darker parts. But it's fun to try different techniques, in that way I feel like I develop as an artist.
After the eyes, mouth and hair I start shading her face in I light shade and I use a piece of toiletpaper to smoth outh the graphite in the larger areas and a paper stick to blend the more detailed areas like chin, nose and mouth. I also start to make the background black by using a very dark graphite pen like 6B.
When the background is done I start to make everything darker. Contrast is a key thing to get that realistic look in a drawing. The shadows around her eyes mouth and ears is almost black in the reference photo so thats what I want to create. The hair is also black with some light reflection in some parts. To get this right I use a thin mechanic pen with a diameter of 0,5 mm.
The finished drawing you can see down below.
