Portrait #2: Not so easy

Remember this girl from last time I was drawing? I've been working on her portrait. I no longer have this drawing because it was on the back of the first portrait, but I figured it wouldn't be too hard to start over.


Boy was I wrong. Last time I kind of skipped over the initial drawing phase in my post, but its actually the most important part of the picture. No matter how good you are at blending colors or drawing hair, if the features are off - mouth crooked, nose too long, etc - then its just not going to look that good.

I don't know if other creative types have this problem, but sometimes you just have an "off" day. Or two. That is what happened here. No matter what I saw in my head, it just wasn't getting translated to the paper. Real portrait artists don't have to erase, and usually don't have to start over. Yeah, that wasn't me. See all the starts I made on this one? (If they're hard to see, just click to see a bigger version) :

The first one had a tiny face scrunched in a big head. Start over. The second was way too big on the paper, and I was already having to erase too much. Start over. The third wasn't looking too bad, and I was measuring everything to get it right....but then I noticed that it was HUGE on the page. Start over.

Then I had a brilliant idea. The first portrait that I no longer had was looking better and better. So I printed it off the computer, and used some carbon paper to trace it onto my page. Its not cheating if it was your own art to begin with. (Actually, many artists use that technique, but it can become a crutch if you do it too often.) I changed the angle of her head which was the main problem, and changed the shape of her eyes and jaw slightly, to give her a younger look.
The paper slipped while I traced the nose, so I hoped I could get rid of that later, but it wasn't too bad.
I could finally do the fun part!

My main worry at this point was that it would turn out too cartoony. The measurements weren't exact, which works for me; when I focus too much on being exact it turns out like some of those first drawings. But I noticed the eyes might be kind of big. Generally, they say a face is five eyes across, but on little kids you can make the eyes bigger than normal or it won't look right. So I trusted that this was true in this case and just ignored it. Can you kind of see the double line under her nose where the carbon paper slipped?



Once I started putting colors in, the eyes weren't so distracting. I didn't color the hair in as quickly as last time, because she had a lot of blonde highlights, and I didn't want to accidentally color in dark where I wanted something light. You really do want to avoid erasing too much, it messes with the quality of the drawing. At this point I decided the real nose was actually a little wider, and her mouth was a little different so I adjusted them accordingly. One of the eyes was bothering me too, but too late to change that now! ( I don't know why, but the color quality scanned in weird on these, sorry.)



I was liking the hair now. I needed to put some color behind her, but didn't want to go too dark, as she had some whispy pieces of hair that I might want to put in later. I used purple instead of blue, which I also used throughout her skin tones. It seemed to compliment her warm hair color better than tons of blue would. I used a lot of purple in her hair too. For the warm colors, I used a light olive green color; I didn't want to use so much yellow or orange because then her face would just look like her hair.



She had an odd expression in the photo, where you could vaguely see some of her teeth. I have never seen another picture of this girl and have no idea what her teeth are like, so I needed to be careful with that. If you guess and put in too much detail inside the mouth it will look wrong to the family, but if you just color it all in dark she'll look toothless. Right now the teeth are showing too much, so I went with a dark color on top of a slightly less dark color, which implied teeth without actually rendering them. (Below) (Oh, I figured out why they were scanning funny, and these last two are 'fixed'):



In the photo, she was partially behind her little brother so I couldn't see how her sweater came together in the front. Thats where a sketchy style comes in handy, because it looks okay that her clothing isn't completely finished. I realized also that the right side of her face was darker because of a slight shadow from her brother. It didn't make much sense visually in this single portrait, but I wasn't about to do it over.
Between this point and the end, I decided her jaw was still too wide. It wasn't too hard to fix, as I just had to bring in the shadow under her jaw to make the chin narrower. However had it been the opposite problem- if I wanted to widen her chin- I probably couldn't have done it. That would have required erasing all the dark shadow, and you still would have been able to see it on top of her chin. Not happening.






This is the final version. I did throw in some blue to separate her skin from her hair a little bit, as they were so similar in color. You can see the narrower chin, darker teeth, and some yellow in the shirt to match it with the rest of the drawing better. I also put a touch of blue in to the purple background to make it slightly darker.
It doesn't look like it, but I actually spent much more time on this drawing putting in color than I did on the first one; the layers are just so light its hard to tell how much color is really on there!
If you look really close, you can see the line under her nose still...but there is enough other detail that you don't see it unless you're looking for it.

I wish I would have signed it somewhere else- it looks a little tacky on her shirt like that. But if you sign too far off to the edge it gets cut off or covered up when the drawing gets framed.

In the end, I'm happy with this drawing, but it was definitely a lot of work! I hope the next one goes better. (I'll be doing thirteen total.)