Pencil portrait of a Hamer Girl

Graphite pencil portrait of a Hamer girl on A4 Daler Rowney Airbrush Bristol board.
 
Pencils: Various Mars Lumograph (6H to 5B), Faber Castell 9000 (6B to 8B), WH Smith Woodless 9B, mechanical pencils 0.3mm/2B, 0.5mm/4B with Pentel with Ain Stein leads.
Blending: Blending stump from Royal Langnickel, Daler Rowney 3/8 Dalon brush and Kleenex paper tissues.
Erasing: WH Smith kneadable eraser, Blu-Tack and Tombow Mono Zero Ultra-fine eraser.
Photo adjustment using GIMP: Removal of barrel distortion; Cropping to A4 ratio and removal of perspective distortion; Cropping unfinished edges of drawing; Adjustment of histogram.

I owe my thanks to Dietmar Temps, the photographer, who has made his photo Girl in a small Hamer village near Turmi available for derivative works, with a  CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.

This lovely young Hamer girl is growing up in a culture in Ethiopia, where women undergo ceremonial beatings during male initiation rites, leaving their backs heavily scarred.  No screaming is permitted and they apparently beg for it to continue until the blood flows.   They also adorn their bodies with intricate scar patterns made with thorns.  For those interested in reading more about this tribe and their life, here are a couple of links larskrutak.com/ethiopias-last-… and www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/art… .

I thought that this would be another challenging drawing, because of the finely braided hair covered in red ochre and fat, the texture from the ochre on the top of her forehead and the cowrie shells.  Indeed the hair was certainly difficult as I kept losing my way among the many locks!  Normally when I draw hair I am not overly concerned by the details, but here I felt I had to try to keep close to the reference.  

Here are some other of my drawings