Step-by-step portraıt
CONTOURS
After lightly erasing the intuitive marks of the rst stage I made a second pass through all of the shapes of the face, clarifying important edges. As all of the major shapes have been established in the earlier under-drawing, this stage serves as a clarication rather than an invention of the features and should focus more on contours than shadow shapes.
◂ SEEING WITH YOUR FINGERS
To start this portrait, I chose an approach advocated by the great draftsman and etcher John T. Freeman that he called ‘seeing with your ngers.’ With a light touch you make a swift and responsive establishing drawing, intuitively recording the most prominent shapes of the head and spending more time looking at the subject than your paper.
SMOOTH
In this stage, I started by dragging the broad edge of an eraser over the black pastel hatching to smooth the tonal transitions of the key features and the spaces in between them. It is important to be selective at this stage, deciding which areas will remain loose and simple while adding further tone to areas that need to be darker. ▸
TONAL VALUES
In the next stage, I introduced tonal values to the face, striking a balance between accurate visual representation and design choices. As I’m working on mid-tone paper, I left plenty of clean space in the areas that will later be heightened with white pastel pencils and kept to simple, hatched marks that follow the form of Sam’s face.
RED
In the penultimate stage, I added red pastel pencil, hatching it gently onto selected features of the face and smoothing it into the underlying black with a plastic eraser. The viewer’s eye will be drawn to saturated colour and, while it is common to draw the attention to the features of the face, alternative decisions can create exciting tension – picking out clothing or an unusual feature like an ear rather than the more obvious eyes and lips.
BLACK AND WHITE
Finally, I added the lightest lights and the darkest darks to the face. I left the eyes mostly blank until this stage as they contain some of the lightest and darkest tonal values in the face. The more time you spend working on an area of a drawing the more time your viewer will spend looking at that area, so it is important to step back and think consciously about how to vary the detail across the face to direct your viewer’s attention.