Michael Fassbender

I finally drew a new portrait last weekend. It's relieving that it at least turned out well enough, and I remembered to take work in progress shots just for funziez. Enjoy Michael Fassbender! Mmm...

First I contour an outline of general features. This is when I use my light box and grid to stay in proportion. If you want to know more about it, visit my Portrait Commissions tab above. I go into it with a bit more detail.

Next I'll try to add in the shadows and more details. I like to spend a lot of time on the eyes and lips, sometimes using black ink instead of pencil for the darkest regions like the pupil. The nose tends to be the most difficult facial feature for me to draw because it doesn't necessarily have very distinct lines like eyes do.

          

Once I'm fairly comfortable with how the face is coming out, I start filling in the hair to get a better idea of how the finished product may look. I'll add details to the hair at its edges, like stray and flyaway hairs around the face or on the top or side of the head. Michael Fassbender didn't need a whole lot of details to the hair because he had it smoothed out for the photograph. He's classy like that.

A lot of the times nowadays, I don't finish darkening in the hair because it's so time consuming and by the time I'm working on the hair, my hand is sore and cramping from overuse as I tend to want my portraits finished in one sitting. So instead, I would take a picture of the drawing, load it into Photoshop, and fill it in there. I also use Photoshop to adjust the brightness/contrast and white/black levels of the image to make it look as good as it can.