This drawing class PART #2 is focused on the shading techniques used to create realistic portraits or drawings in general.

Drawing a portrait is quite challenging! While trying to master the drawing techniques, you must also think about capturing the likeness of your subject.

When learning new skills, I like taking my time with little steps to keep my motivation all along the way.

When I was a child, I started learning to draw by tracing my favorite comics characters. Some may say that it is cheating, but I think it allowed me to train my eyes in order to understand and analyse the general shapes of my subjects. And it definitely gave me more confidence in my drawing practice.

Later when I felt more comfortable, I started to draw "for real", without tracing. And this is how I started to develop my drawing skills.

That is why I decided to break down my Portrait drawing class into two, in order to break down this challenging topic:

The first class PART #1 is focused on drawing the outlines and I give you some tips to have the proportions and the likeness right.
And in this class PART #2, I will teach the shading techniques to create the volume and the contrast and obtain realistic portraits.

FOR WHOM IS THIS CLASS?

The course is dedicated to anyone interested in portrait drawing and which has followed PART #1 of Drawing Portraits.

Note that I won’t present any anatomy lessons nor academic drawing lessons. We will focus on the shading techniques as a start. This class will be a gentle and relaxed way to jump into the very challenging “Drawing a realistic Portrait” topic.

Practices that you will learn:

How to build volume and contrast using layering techniques
How to shade a face with pencils and stumps
How to use a paper stump to create gradients and give a smooth result

My uncle will be our subject of study for this class, but you are more than welcome to pick another topic.

IMPORTANT: take something or someone that inspires YOU!

Some other exemples I worked on in the past for inspiration!

MATERIAL LIST

For this class, you will need:

- Pencils: I would recommend having varieties of pencils, from HB to 8B at least for the practice. I mostly used Faber-Castell graphite pencils.
- Sheets of paper or a sketchbook
- Erasers: you would need several erasers such as:
  - a kneaded eraser,
  - a pen eraser (mono zero eraser for example).

Paper stump

See you very soon!

Grace Cook

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