I am a primitive man. I have no Photoshop or anything like that, just a basic grip of the English language and Windows Word.
I am a self-taught artist just trying to pass on what little knowledge I have to the poor unsuspecting masses.
Honestly the best tip I can give anyone is to seriously take your time. Chillax! Did I just say chillax?
It's not a race. I get a little peeved when I see other artist bragging about how quickly they finished a drawing. Why does it matter? It's how long the finished piece can conjure joy in the observer that really means something. I think a recent piece I did, if I had worked solidly from start to finish, would have taken me about 40 or 50 hours, maybe longer. So take your time and really try to observe what you see there in front of you. Ignore your brain. I ignore my brain all the time. So much so that it really doesn't bother to tell me much at all any more. Ignore your brain when it tries to tell you what the thing you are trying to draw looks like. An eye isn't just an oval shape with a circle in the middle situated somewhere around the middle horizon of the face. Concentrate on the individual lines and angles. I find it useful to turn my entire drawing and the reference on its side or upside down. It helps to fool my brain and stops it plaguing me with predetermined ideas of recognition.
Don't ignore your brain when it tells you it is time to go to the toilet. It's an important distinction to make!
Experiment with techniques. Some artists like to grid their work, some like to measure the distance between primary features; some like to go hard-core and only use freehand. Again, find what most suits you. I have tried many different techniques.
If I am drawing exactly to scale, I'll measure. If I am scaling up, I'll probably grid. Freehand is fine but personally I find that because I am such a perfectionist (some would say anal) I can spend more time on the sketch, getting the proportions right than any other part of the drawing. So for the sake of my sanity, I don't tend to do that any more.
But measuring and gridding is cheating, right? Yeah – I mean no! Well I don't think so. I even heard a rumour that the great Michelangelo rather primitively transposed a carbon grid on the roof of the Sistine Chapel to get the proportion right, so make what you want out of that!
F…Off!!! Yes that right. I have found that an F grade pencil generally erases better than any other pencil grade when it comes to removing your grid if you've cheated… I mean, have the moves like Angelo. It's important to only allow the weight of the pencil determine the pressure applied when drawing the grid. You don't want to indent the page.
Some people like to sketch out the entire outline while others prefer to shade as they go and again there are many techniques. Personally I like to shade in circles. I recently found out that this is called Circulism. It's always nice to give something a name, I guess. Anyway, I start to shade in tiny circles on the first layer and gradually increase the circumference of the circles as the layering progresses. Other techniques you might want to try are using predominantly lines. I am going to call it "Lining" coz I really don't know what it's called. Basically the distance between the line determines how light or dark and area of shade is and Cross-Hatching. Cross-Hatching is like "Lining" but instead of just using parallel lines you also add lines 'err' crossing in other directions as well. Amazing! Yes I am head of the Stating the Obvious Dept.
What else is there? Blending! Of course, blending. I like tissues. Man-size tissues, I should add, fore I am a man. None of that moisturising embedded balm stuff though. Soothing on thy nose, wretched on thy portrait. Cotton buds (Q-Tips) and small tortillions. I always try to blend with the contours of the face. I also use a 2cm wide flat headed acrylic paint brush. I find sweeping it, again with the contours of the face helps to soften the texture slightly without overly smudging finer details.
Highlights! Blu-Tack. It's blue and tacky so they cornered the market well. You know the stuff. In your youth you used it to put up your posters of Jason Donovan or Take-That or Cindy Crawford whatever floated your boat. Personally, I had a poster of a Floating Boat.
You can mould it into fine point and remove small bits of graphite or you can roll it like a sausagey-wormey type thing across your page and remove lots. It so versatile. Not so good for wiping across the page though, I use a putty eraser more for that technique.
All the things I use are here.
So you've managed to read all the way to here and you must by now be asking yourself why you even bothered.
Well below are a few professionally produced tutorials from artist who actually know what they are talking about.
I bid thee farewell.
