Oct. 21- Click pictures for bigger versions. I'm still figuring this out.

After starting work on another piece, I randomly decided to start another before I went to sleep. The following is a picture from a post on http://irison.blogspot.com:

I really liked her hair and the structure of her face, and decided to try and draw her. After a really fast initial sketch to get the basic shape down, I decided to not try and replicate her perfectly like a portrait, but rather to create my own person based on her facial features, which is something I usually only do after I realize that my attempted portrait doesn't look enough like the original. For the first time, this would be my actual goal, rather than just me giving up. The initial sketch was a bit iffy.

The next time I worked on it, I added shoulders and hair in an attempt to make it look better, when I knew the real problem was her eye.

The next time, I did much more detail on the hair, and widened her shoulders a bit. The "I know her eye is very off center, but it adds character!" defense was wearing thin. She was starting to not be attractive to me at all, and I knew I wasn't going to get away with leaving her eye that way.

So, the next time I worked on it, I went erase crazy and fixed it.

And here is the final. Click the picture for a much bigger version. I'm pretty happy with this. This is my first real portrait-type pencil drawing where I did the first sketch by looking at the subject picture, and then put the picture away, and just went to town 100% without guidance. I tried to make her eyes less dark than I usually do, but kind of failed. I absolutely love drawing hair, and this hair was particularly fun to draw. I'm not entirely psyched on the way her neck came out, but I had already smear-shaded so much towards the end that I couldn't do much, and had to let it rest. This also marks the first portrait type piece I've done where I have some fun with all of the extra pencil smearing around her. I usually just erase all of that. I like this much better.

Not having a scanner is interesting- it's amazing to me how different she looks in each picture based on tiny alterations of the angle I took the picture from. I think the first up close shot at the beginning of the post is my favorite.