I’d like to share my last project now, at the beginning of the semester! This piece was made for my grandfather’s 80th birthday celebration. My grandmother requested that I make a realistic graphite portrait of my grandfather to display. I spent a week working on the piece. I wanted it to be something that could be treasured for years to come, as well as something me and my family could be proud of when viewed! The process of making this piece reinforced a lot of things I’ve learned as I’ve continued to make realistic portraits.

One of the main things I’ve learned over the course of making images of people is that when one small detail is off, your mind immediately notices it. In pet portraits, you can get away with a slight facial difference. Since we are humans, we recognize others of our kind much more easily and can thus recognize errors more easily as well. I needed to ensure that the main facial features were as accurate as I could get them. Slight errors could happen in value and placement of individual hairs, but the key facial features needed to be accurate.

Another thing I tried to mitigate as I made the piece was sharp sketch lines. When making faces, any stray sketch lines are recognized as wrinkles. Although my grandfather is older, I knew if I left harsh sketch lines it would register as extra wrinkles that just aren’t there.

I also tried my hardest to work from light to dark. I love to go right in with darks because that high contrast helps me decipher the image and placement of elements more clearly. However, if I jumped into the darks too fast, if I got the placement of any elements wrong, I would have to attempt to erase my dark lines. This can get kind of impossible once the darks get to a certain value. There were very few spots of full bright white in my reference image. Because of this, I laid down a base layer of a light but not fully white value with my HB pencil and then went up the value scale from there. I still jumped around lots, but the more structure I enforced upon myself, the better it would turn out.

In the end, I am very happy with how this piece turned out. It was a big hit amongst the family and everyone assured me it looked exactly like him. I’m glad the whole thing worked out and I now have another piece to add to my portfolio.

That’s all for this week! Expect more school based pieces now that the first week has passed!

More to come!