How to Draw Portraits with Colored Pencils: Realistic Drawings

1. Introduction: What I love about color pencils is how beautifully detailed and highly vibrant they are, which makes them absolutely perfect for drawing portraits. That said, I think a lot of people struggle to know where to start. I want to show you today the full process I use for drawing portraits from the very start to the very finish. And it's not as difficult as you might think. My name's Jemma Chambers and I've been making online art tutorials since 120. I've helped tens of thousands of people improve their art on my Youtube channel. But today in this course, I want to focus in a really detailed and specific topic. I want to cover in depth how to draw portraits. I have created this course very much with the beginner in mind. So if you know nothing, that's fine. I'll talk you through all the materials you'll need as well as the essential basic techniques. I'll then talk you through the whole process of how to go about drawing a portrait, and then we can work through that process by drawing this lady. So let's get started. 2. Class Project - Drawing a Portrait: The class project, we will be drawing this lady. Now, there's a few reasons why I chose this specific reference photo, and I will explain those a little bit later on because it ties in very well with how to pick a reference. My goal is by teaching you how to draw this lady, You'll be able to apply this to other portraits. Now, I have included in the class resources details of all of the colors I use in this drawing. So you'll either be able to use the same pencils as me or find the closest match. I also have included in the class resources sketch outlines. So if you don't want to create your own sketch, you could use mine. Don't forget to upload your art when you've finished. I always love to see your drawings. 3. Materials for Colored Pencil Drawings: Let's talk about the materials you'll need to draw portraits with color pencils. And the most obvious material you'll need is color pencils. Now I like to draw with professional color pencils. I tend to use either prisma, color or polychromos. That said, you can definitely create beautiful drawings with something cheaper like Creola. I think the main thing to bear in mind if you are drawing with Creola is if you're wanting to sell your drawing or put your drawing up on the wall, there is a chance that the colors will fade in time. That's something that professional color pencils are designed not to do. In this course, I'll be drawing this lady with polychromos pencils. Now as I always say, I don't think the color pencils that you're drawing with are as important as the paper. You can create much better drawings with cheap color pencils on the proper paper than really expensive professional color pencils on the wrong paper. So you don't want to use something like sketch paper or printer paper. I always like using Bristol Board. This is not only a particularly smooth paper, so it's really good for creating all of the fine details that we need in a portrait. But it's also really nice and thick so we can build up a lot of the pencil, really make some beautiful, vibrant colors. Now beyond that, you want some of the kind of more basic items you will need a pencil sharpener. Now, I always use this hand crank pencil sharpener. I really like this. I find it's really helpful that I can change the blades if it's getting a bit blunt. That said, you don't need a fancy pencil sharpener. You could have a much more basic one. What you're looking for is just any sharpener that's going to create a really good sharp point. Next up you'll need a pencil Azor and a ruler so that we can draw out our sketch. Now another material that you might need is a pencil extender. I use them a lot, but they're definitely an optional extra. I find as my pencils get down to this kind of level, they get pretty uncomfortable to hold, So I can use one of these pencil extenders to extend my pencil, and I find that I get much more use out of them. It means I don't have to bin them so quickly. Next up, you're going to need a material that you can't actually buy. You're going to need to make something. I'm talking here about color swatches. Now, in order to draw with color pencils, you're going to need to work out which colors you need to be drawing with. And the absolute easiest way that I have found to do this is with color swatches. This is where you draw out every color in your pencil set on a piece of paper, the kind of paper that you will be drawing on. I like to go in order. I go as light as I can to as dark as I can with every pencil making sure that I label it. And then this gives me a really nice grid where I can see exactly what every pencil looks like. So I'm not relying on the look of the lead because that's not generally hugely accurate. Same with the barrel, and I can use this to compare to a reference photo to work out which color I'll need. Now the final thing that you'll need is some way of looking at a reference photo. Now for my drawings, I always use an ipad. I particularly like that I can zoom in so I can see all of the details. That said, you don't need to use this. You could use your phone or you could of course, print out the reference photo. You will need some way of looking at it though. So you will need a set of pencils, the right kind of paper, a graphite pencil, ruler and eraser for creating this sketch. You could get a pencil extender. You need to have your color swatches and some way of looking at the reference. Next up, let's talk about the basic techniques you'll need to master. 4. The Basic Techniques for Drawing Skin: Let's talk about the basic techniques that you need to know for drawing skin. And I think to understand how to draw skin, it helps to understand generally how color pencils work. So the absolute key to color pencils is building up the color through something called layering. Layering is where you put down really light layers of pencil rather than just going in really hard. This basically allows you to mix colors together and it builds up a nicer, softer, smoother color. Now, as I mentioned earlier, when I draw with color pencils, I like to do it on something called Bristol Board, which is a really smooth paper. But if you actually looked at that paper under a microscope, you'll see that it's made up of a series of, when you put a light layer over the top of these bumps, it lodges some little pigment particles in those bumps. The more layers you put down, the more particles get lodged and these bumps gradually get filled up with the color. This is why once you put some pencil down on the paper, you can see all of these little white spots. That's the bumps. Now you want to not only think about putting down these light layers, but also really think about how you're putting the pencil down. So first up, the easiest way to work in light layers is to hold the pencil further back than you might think. Generally speaking, when drawing skin, I like to hold the pencil about halfway down the barrel. What this does is it literally stops me from being able to press too hard. If I were to hold the pencil closer to the tip, I would have to be a lot more careful, really focus on my pencil control. Now another thing to think about when getting the pencil down in as smooth way as possible is the kind of motions of the pencil. So I like to work in what I call circular motions. Rather than going back and forth with the pencil in a slightly scribbly way. I think it goes down a lot smoother if you work in circles. So kind of circles or large ovals. And you can see how much smoother this looks. So you'll hear me reference circular motions very frequently. I do think it takes a bit of practice and it is well worth really being confident with this before starting a drawing. Now the final technique, when thinking about the skin, is something called burnishing. Burnishing is where once you've built up the tooth of that paper, you've really built up a lot of layers of pencil and you want to smooth it all out. So really give it that final smoothing. Now for this, I press much firmer with the pencil. Essentially what it's doing is really flattening the tooth of that paper and filling up any final bumps I find it mixes the colors together and you end up with a really lovely glossy finish. So those are the main techniques for drawing skin. We'll cover hair in a second because that's a very different kettle of fish. But before we get into that, I first want to talk about how you pick colors, so how you can go about mixing colors. 5. How to Mix Colors: Let's just take a brief moment to talk about mixing colors. When I went through all of the materials you'll need, I talked about swatches. These are the key to mixing colors. So essentially what I do is I compare my reference photo to my Swatches and also compare that to my drawing to work out which color I need to use next. Because color pencils and the colors are built up using layering, we continually need to work out how to build up the color and how to work out which colors next. Now, it's probably going to be easiest if I show you by drawing out just a little color swatch to begin with. If I go through my exact thought process and you can see how I go about reaching the end color. So let's try and color match two. Just a random object in my house. I'm going to use this cat toy, but this brown is quite a good color. It's not too dissimilar to skin color. And I don't have a color like this in my set. Now for this little swatch, I'm going to use prisma color pencils. But it would be the same process, whichever set you'll be using, starting off by looking for the closest color to this donut. Now, it doesn't need to be a perfect match. I just want something that's reasonably similar that we can then build the color off of. So I would say that it's reasonably similar to maybe it's got a bit of this light umber, but this is quite a lot darker than this. There's also certainly some aspects of Beijing here and it's not dissimilar to the yellow ochre. But I think probably the color that's closest to this is the golden rod. So I'm going to start off by putting down a layer of this golden rod, and then we can go from there and decide which color is the closest or the one that's missing from there. Okay, so now we've got something down, we've got something that we can be building off of. Now, this actually isn't a bad match, I don't think for this. But what it is, is it's a bit too light and it's a bit too kind of orange. But it certainly is a good base that we can build off of. So what I want to be doing now is comparing this swatch to the doughnut and also to the swatches here. And I want to be looking for the next sort of the color that's missing. So as I say right now, this is both too light and to orange. I think this is quite a bit darker than this and it's kind of browner. So the closest color that I think we're missing is the, this has the kind of brown tones that I can see in here. This is quite a lot darker than this, but looking at the lighter end of the Swatch, I can see some aspects of here and here. And I think if I add some of this color lightly on top of this, it will just tone down the orange and give us a slightly darker base that we can then carry on building on. Okay, so we're a little bit closer on the color now. It's looking a bit richer. We once again, want to be comparing this in the doughnut and comparing it to the swatches. And I want to be thinking about now, what's the most obvious color that's missing between these two. So obviously, this is a much richer color than what we've got here. This is quite pale. That's okay. That will build up in time. So beyond that, what I'm particularly noticing is that this looks a little bit kind of warmer, has got this ever so slight kind of pink. And I think that's because this does need to be warmed up a little bit. Now I want to be particularly looking at these pinks along here and kind of seeing which one I think is the closest. So there's some sort of more pinky purples and brighter pinks along here. Then we get much, much lighter. This, there's definitely some beige in here. But I think the sort of warmer color that's missing between this and this is more like the peach. I don't know if you can kind of tell, there's not a huge amount of it in here. But certainly, I think that that is what this is missing right now. So let's add a little bit of peach and see where we go. I think one of the ways in which people always struggle with matching colors is that they're worried that they're going to make a mistake. They're going to add a color that just doesn't make sense in there. You'll see when I put this pink over at the top, that actually it doesn't make a huge difference. And even if it doesn't still quite look right, that's okay. We can add more colors over the top. It's just a case of continually building and eventually it will match this color. Now we're getting a bit closer to the match. I would say that at this point it's probably looking a bit too pink now. So I'm once again comparing my drawing to the donut, to the swatches. And I think that golden rod is. We need to add a little bit more of this. This looks a bit more orange than this color, but kind of earthy orange. Which golden rod, again, matches very well. And just because we've already put some of it down, doesn't mean that it wouldn't benefit from some more of it. So let's do that. And then we can see what is the most obvious color that's missing after that. Now we are getting towards the end of matching these colors. I think we've only got a couple more to go. So once again, I want to look at the main difference between these two. And now I think so it's hard because this is a series of different tones. But I would say that on the most part, this has a bit more of a kind of a light reddish brown to it, like a earthy red. More so than this, This is a bit of a simpler kind of color. So I think probably the closest color to this is the sienna brown. But very, very lightly you can see a bit of this kind of brown, particularly in the sort of darker patches here. So I'm going to add a very light covering of this. And then I suspect that there'll only be about one more color that we'll need to add. All right. This is looking pretty close to me now, but I think that there is one final color that we should add in. So this just looks a little bit darker than this. And I think it would benefit from having a light color added to it. Now, I have said a few times that I can see some began here. So that's the color I'm going to use to go over the top of this and just ever so slightly lighten it up. And I think that when we've added big onto here, then it is going to pretty closely match this. Now the important thing to remember when you're putting a lighter color over the top of darker colors like this, is that it's not going to fully lighten it. So you're not going to end up with the beige color really brightly on top of this. All we're going to do is ever so slightly lighten and add a hint of this color to the darker colors. So you can see with me adding this beige, you can kind of see it's there and it is lightening it up. But not to the full extent on if we had, for example, put just beige down. So that's how I always go about mixing all colors. Obviously, if I'm drawing a portrait, then I'm doing this over the whole face. And maybe in one area where I need to add one color, and in another area I need to add a completely different color. But that's essentially what I'm always doing next. Let's look at how to draw hair 'cause there's a few different methods to think about hair. 6. The Basic Techniques for Drawing Hair: Let's talk about the key techniques to drawing hair, because I think it's very different to drawing skin. And the absolute or fundamental thing to know is that you don't draw each individual strand of hair. What you want to do is split the hair into clumps or sections by focusing on drawing each of these sections. Really looking at the direction of the hair and the lights, darks, and colors within each section that will create the illusion of hair, rather than having to draw every strand that would take ages. Now, in order to create the hair texture, you'll need to use something called a flicking motion. This is where you gently brush a very sharp pencil against the paper, kind of going back and forth, just really, really lightly. Again, this is another one that I really strongly recommend. Practicing is absolutely the key to creating really nice soft hair. If you press too hard with the pencil or you have a blunt pencil, I think it makes the hair look a little bit wiry. And I think the easiest thing to do here will be to draw a little swatch of hair so I can show you the process that I use by essentially drawing one section. So let's draw this section here. So I'll just begin by drawing out a really rough sketch. I'm only trying to get those main clumps of hair in here so that I have something that I can be working off of. And then once I'm happy with my sketch, I'll just erase it so it's really nice and light. I will cover more of the sketching process for the whole face a bit later. And from here, what I want to be doing is looking for the lightest color within the hair. So I'm going to compare this hair to my swatches. And the lightest color I can see is this color here. This, I would say is a very light warm gray, or at least that's my closest match. So what I want to be doing to begin with is putting down a nice, smooth even layer of this pencil. I'm not worrying about any hair motions right now, I just want to get something down covering everywhere where the hair is going to be. So this whole section. Now, in terms of how I'm doing this, I'm working in circular motions like we did when drawing the skin to try and get it down as smooth as possible. And of course, I'm pressing as lightly as I can as well. Then what I like to do from here is work from this lighter pencil towards the darker pencils. And I'm going to begin building up all of the different hair shapes. So from here, I want to be looking for the next darkest color. And I would say that the next darkest is probably this shade here. Now comparing this to my swatches, the closest color I have to this is the burn ochre. So what I want to be doing with a really nice and sharp pencil is to begin making those flicks on the paper. And I'm particularly focusing on the direction of the hair. So for example, in this top section, I'm noticing that the hair is kind of curving around the corner and going up, Curving round here and going up, and again here it's curving round and up. I'm also noticing that there are some slightly darker patches and some slightly lighter patches. So there's darker here, darker here, darker along here. And I just want to go over those areas more times. I'm very subtly going to mark in those darker areas, but I'm not going to do anything particularly drastic right now. All I'm wanting to do so so lightly with my pencil, is get some sort of hair marked out. It's gonna make my life ten times easier. If I've already got all of the directions marked in, you can see that I'm leaving some of the lightest areas. So this patch here, for example, I don't want to go over that too much, but the rest of that I can just mark in that direction and maybe in some areas start marking in or getting a bit of an idea on where these particular dark strips are. I'm noticing that it's particularly dark here, here, around here, and generally over on this left hand side. So once I've gone over all of the hair with this pencil, I once again want to be comparing my drawing to the reference photo, to the swatches and working out what the next darkest color is. So from here I'm moving on to quite a dark brown. I am pressing very, very lightly, so it's probably not looking as dark as this pencil can go. And I can begin marking in those darker patches that I pointed out a second ago. Now I still want to be gently brushing my pencil against the paper. I want to be gradually building up all of this hair texture. Don't worry that it's not looking very dark, because we can build that up in a little while. And then once again, I want to move on to the next darkest pencil. So from here actually there's a lot more gray to the hair than what I have at the moment. This lady's hair certainly includes aspects of brown, but actually it's a kind of, I guess, ashy color. So it has a lot of gray to it. Right now, I've been focusing more on the brown, but I want to build up that gray so I can start adding in a darker, warm gray. At the very beginning, I added in a lighter, warm gray. But I can start building up that darker gray and also building up some of the shadows a bit more, and you can see the general shape. The hair is now starting to build from here. Let's move on to the darkest pencil. Now that I'll be using in this drawing here is the black pencil. And I only want to be using this in the absolute darkest areas. Now you'll notice that I'm still using those flicking motions. And I'm using it in quite a lot of these darker patches. So as I say, on these really dark areas and on this general left hand side now, I don't generally like using black too much when it comes to drawing hair. I think it can look quite harsh. So right now, I think it looks a bit much, particularly in comparison to the rest of the hair. So if I am going to use black like I'm doing here, I like to do it this sort of point only. And then I won't use it again because I can add other colors over the top of it and I kind of feel like it tones down that harshness. So in a second, we'll build up maybe some brown and gray over the top of this, and it will just tone it down. We can get that really nice dark value, but not how harsh it is. Now, I'm happy with how the hair's looking at this point. Before I move on to the next step, I'm just going to have one last think about if there's any other colors. I want to add any other colors that I want to include with this flicking motion. For now, we will build up a lot more colors a little bit later. And actually, I can see kind of a reddish brown in the hair as well. So I am going to add that in just once again, building this up in the way I did before. Now from here, I think the hair looks a little bit kind of scratchy. So what I want to do is think about smoothing out a lot of it so I can go back now, particularly to some of the darker colors. So the brown for example. And I'm actually going to use circular motions rather than flicking motions. And what I want to do is gradually start shading in and building up some of the darker values a bit more on the left hand side of this darker section, I'm particularly using this pencil to go over the black. You can see that using circular motions over the top of here, nice and lightly, isn't making the hair. We're not losing all of that texture we've built up, it's just smoothing it out. And I can gradually fade that into the lighter areas. I don't want to be going over this with the lighter areas. I generally kind of think of this as adjusting the underlying colors. So where, for example, this area down here is looking a little bit too harsh and maybe it's not blending very well into the areas around. I can use the circular motions to just smooth it all out. And once I've done that with the brown pencil, I also want to be doing it with the gray pencil. Generally speaking, the darker colors, maybe I'm losing a little bit of the texture we've built up, but I can always add that back in. Not something that I'm worried about. Once I've gone over and smoothed out, particularly the darker areas, so it looks a lot less scratchy, I want to go back to my darkest pencil, so they're walnut brown, and I'm going to start building up those flicking motions again. Now I am still pressing reasonably lightly, but maybe not as lightly as I was. And what I'm going to do is start from these darker pencils and work my way towards the lighter pencils. So building up these flicking motions with the brown, and then I can move onto the gray, do the same thing here. Just lightly build up this texture a bit more. And then I'm going to gradually work my way down through the colors. So now I can move back to that burn ochre pencil, add in this kind of orangy tone. I almost think of it as adjusting the colors of the hair. So we built in the framework of the hair the general shapes. And then we can start making the hair a lot darker, really add a lot more contrast to it. And also just tweak all of the colors that are here to make it closer to the colors that are in the reference. And then from here, I can move on to the lightest pencils, to this warm gray, the lighter warm gray. And again, just add flicking motions over those lightest areas. Now, the last thing that I think really makes a drawing, a hair drawing, is baby hairs, so I'm going to use the warm gray, the darker warm gray to build up a lot of these hair flicks. So what I like to do is make some very, very light flicks coming out from the edge of the hair, so I don't want the hair to look too uniform. It's not actually a solid block of shape. It does have all of these little flyaway hairs. I find it's helpful to look at the direction of the hairs on the reference, at least for a bit of a guide, because they don't necessarily go all in the same direction. So for example, the baby hairs going in this direction here. But there's also the odd hair that's just flicking out randomly round here. They're generally coming round and in this direction, but then there's the odd hair that's just coming out, again, randomly here, same here. They're generally going down in this direction, but you want the odd hair to flick out. And I do like to build these up with a couple of different colors. So I started off with the darker, warm gray and now I'm going to do exactly the same thing with the walnut brown and you can see how much more natural that looks. Now you don't want to overdo it. But also in some key areas, particularly on kind of the main bends, I guess I think it makes a big difference. It looks a lot nicer to have a reasonable amount of the baby hair there. It just makes the hair look a bit softer. And then I could do any final tweaks. So I'm just going to add a little bit of white to lighten up those light areas back to circular motions 'cause I'm kind of adjusting and smoothing out the color here. And then maybe just some final few baby hairs with a much lighter gray. So now we've covered the key techniques, both for drawing skin and for drawing hair. Let's think about the whole process. 7. The Process: Let's talk about the full process of drawing a portrait from the very start to the very end. And the absolute first thing that I always do is find a reference photo. Every portrait I draw is from a reference photo. Now the difference, in my opinion, between a good and a bad portrait is partly the reference photo you pick. And there's a few key things that I'm specifically looking for. First up, I want the photo to have been taken from eye level. I don't want the person to be looking up or looking down at the camera. Say if it was a photo of a child for example. I would need the photo to be taken down at their level. The second really important thing I'm looking for in a reference is the contrast. I want to have really good light but also good shadow. So for example, a photo like this just looks really flat. Whereas a photo like this is much more interesting. I think if you're trying to draw a portrait from a poor reference photo, it's going to be very hard to create a really stunning drawing. So for our drawing today, I selected this reference photo here. Now I think she's good amount of shadow on her face. It's not too much, she hasn't got some really stark shadows, but she has got some really nice subtle soft lights and darks. I also think she's got a really interesting color hair, it's that kind of mousy brown, I think a lot of people struggle with. It's also very nice clear in focus. You'd be surprised how many people try and draw from an out of focus blurry photo. So once we've got our reference photo, the next thing I like to do at this point is really take a good look at it. So this might seem obvious, but I think people often don't take the time to do it. So I'm looking at just the main colors and anything that I really think I need to take note of. Now, one thing that frequently comes up with portraits is generally actually around the eyes. For example, the whites of the eyes. Thinking that they are white. Whereas actually, if you look at this lady's eyes, they are much more of a kind of cool gray in some areas pretty dark. You also generally notice when studying the reference that underneath the person's eyes, it tends to have a kind of bluey, purple tone. Because the skin is so thin around the eyes, you do find that there's quite a number of cool colors around here, and it's also generally quite dark. Now I will talk through all of the things I'm noticing about the reference we'll be using today. And hopefully that will make this step a bit clearer. But honestly, it's so important to just really know what you're drawing from here. We need to sketch out the outlines. So I want to get everything mapped out marked out in the right place. And to do this, I like using something called grid method. This is where you draw a grid on your drawing paper and put a grid on your reference photo. And just draw what's in each individual square. So rather than trying to draw the face as a whole, if you're just drawing what's in each square, you can kind of look at it like a series of shapes rather than a face. And that'll stop you from making various assumptions that I think is the main downfall in people getting their proportions wrong. In fact, with portrays, I like to add an even smaller grid on the face to really make sure that everything is in absolutely the perfect place, and then I can erase the grid. So at this point, I have a sketch that I can work from and I can start building up the color. Now for all portrays, I always like starting with the eyes. Drawing eyes is always my favorite part. And I think it looks a bit odd if you start elsewhere, to be honest. So what I do is I start by mapping in the main shapes and colors in the eyes, using that sketch to get something down on the paper. I kind of think of this as marking out my base layers, Getting down some really light layers of pencil to get everything in the right place. So just really lightly putting down the first few layers of pencil to kind of map everything out, get my bearings after doing that with the eyes. I then like to do that with the rest of the face. And generally speaking, I start from the lighter pencils and work my way towards the darker pencils. Certainly, at least for the base layers. Once I've built up those few base layers, I can really hopefully see that everything's in the right place. Although if it's not, then the pencil is so light, I am able to move things around from here. I can brighten up the face, really build up those colors a little bit more, then I like to move on to the hair. So working in the way that I described when we were looking at the basic technique of drawing hair, building up some flicking motions, generally, again, working from the lighter colors towards the darker colors. And then once all of the main shapes and clumps are marked out, I can then build up the vibrancy from there. Now at this point, I tend to find that I have a pretty good head of hair with a reasonably pale looking face. So then I can go back in with often the same colors that I've already used, really brighten everything up. Now, this may all seem extremely complicated, but it'll make a lot more sense when we actually do it in practice. So now let's start working our way through that list. 8. Studying the Reference Photo: So as you know, I've selected my reference photo. Let's take a minute to have a really good look at it, and I'll show you what I'm seeing here. The first thing I always notice is eyes. Now this lady has kind of green eyes. Greeny, bluey gray, I guess. But let's look at the actual colors that are in here. So there's kind of a light green in this section. The lighter section, there's a dark greeny blue or maybe even a warm gray around the edge. And then the center, obviously, is black. So we're going to need to build up a bit of color around here. Looking at the white of her eye, the most important thing to notice is that it's not really white. There's a lighter little patch here, but the bulk of the white of the eye on both eyes is actually a reasonably dark gray, I would say a colder gray looking at the skin around her eye. You'll notice that there's also some kind of gray around here and around here. And the same on this eye, Usually you will find around these sections, it's a much cooler color than the rest of the skin. So that is what I'm seeing here. And then the rest of her face is looking reasonably simple. I don't think there's a huge amount to say about her face right now. Let's take a minute to look at her hair. And for this lady, her hair is split into actually some pretty simple sections. She hasn't got a huge amount of different sections, I would say. So we're going to want to draw this kind of triangular shape here, as well as this sort of curved strip here, and this triangular shape above. And then this patch, this is kind of one whole big long section of hair. I guess there are some hairs going over the top of other hairs on the most part, that looks reasonably simple. Same on the other side, there's this section here which is kind of one big section. And then I'm noticing that you can really see the direction of the hairs in here. So we're just going to kind of need to draw this all in one go. But beyond that, I'm noting that there's a pretty strong shadow under her chin, around here and around here, which is really helping to define her jaw. So we're gonna need to add really quite a dark color here. And I'm noticing that she's got a nice little shine of light here and here. We want to make sure that we get that in, but those are the main things that I'm noticing. To begin with, let's start drawing. 9. Sketching the Outlines: At this point, I want to create my sketch outlines. And I'll be doing this with something called the grid method. So what I want to do is draw a grid on my drawing paper. And I've also put a grid on my reference photo. Now I have included this reference photo in the class resources if you want to use the same grid as me. Now, before I start drawing this out, it's worth noting that I am pressing reasonably hard here. In actuality, when I make my sketch, I like to do this as lightly as possible, but I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. So I'm pressing much, much harder than I otherwise would you want to be pressing really nice and lightly so that specifically the grid lines will be easier to erase later on. Judge, so I've put a grid on the reference photo here and what I need to do first is work out how large each square needs to be on my drawing paper so that I can fit the full grid on. So each square on my paper needs to be 2 centimeters wide. It might be that your squares need to be slightly different sizes. I'm very basically just drawing out the grid. And then what I'm going to want to do from here is just draw in each individual square. So I'm going to start with this square and the first thing I need to do is just make sure that I'm counting how many squares over this is, how many squares down to make sure I'm drawing in the right one. It doesn't really matter which one you start in. And then what I like to do is look at where the line crosses over the edges of the square. So in this square, I'm only drawing the outline of her hair. And I'm noticing that actually this corner here, very easily the hair, so happens to meet in this corner pretty much. So I'm drawing a line from here. And then at the top, this is maybe one quarter over from the right. And then it's a slightly curved line, but not very curved. So that is literally all I'm doing for this first line is just marking in a slightly curved line from one end to the other. And then I can start looking at the next square. So for this square, this left hand side where the hair crosses the edge of the box, it's just a little bit up from the corner now. Not a lot, but a tiny bit up to the line, goes slightly through this box and then across here. And then I'm noticing it goes up and down. And here maybe it's about between a four and a third of the way up on the box. So I can mark in where I think these two lines are and basically join them. Adding that slight little bump up, I can then start looking at the next square. So this square here, this is reasonably simple. We're going from this corner up here and crossing, that's about halfway through the box, so I can put that mark halfway through and then join to the line up here. And I'm literally going through and doing this for every square that is all there is to it now. Something that you can do to make life a bit easier. So it's particularly simple. I think around the outside edge, around the hair, there's really only one line per box that we need to worry about. But where we look at the squares that contain particularly her features, these get a lot more complicated. So for example, in this box here, we basically need to draw a whole eye in here. Now what can be a good idea to do if something's a little bit more complicated than this, you want a bit more help, is you can add another smaller grid. So you can add extra grid lines in here so that you've got smaller squares and you can draw what's in each smaller square. It means that you'll know that the proportions are still right. So let me show you what that's going to look like now. Zoomed right in on the face area here. I've drawn the rest of her hair now, marked all of that in, but I haven't drawn anything for her face. So what I'm going to do is make little marks every half a centimeter now. So we're adding an extra four lines or four squares per big square. And it all looks a little bit messy, but that's okay. Do remember that when you're doing this, you want to be doing it so, so very lightly so you can easily erase this. I am only pressing so hard and doing this with such a dark pencil because I want to make sure that you can see it on the camera. So once I've marked in this grid from here, I then want to make sure that I'm getting everything in the right squares so I can count how many squares over from the left. For example, I need to be drawing the first square. And then I can once again just draw what's in each of these. You can get an idea here for how much easier this is going to be by having that smaller grid. So for example, I can start in this square and I'm noticing that the pupil here is crossing about halfway through the edge of this square. And the top of the pupil here is maybe just over, about a third of the way up. Then the line for the top of her eyelid is about a third of the way down on the box. And where it crosses here, that's about halfway through the box. And I'm just drawing a line across here, drawing this pupil line here. And I want to be adding this iris line round here. And as you work your way through drawing in what's in each of these squares, it will gradually become an eye. So once I've gone through and I've mapped in her whole face, I've drawn in all of her hair, everything is marked out. What I need to do at this point is erase all of those grid lines. Now I'm just doing this with a kind of bog standard eraser, nothing fancy. The goal here is to just make sure that we can't see any of these grid lines at the end. And in fact, what you want to be left with is a really nice and light sketch. As I mentioned, I've been quite hard with the pencil. I'm not going to be able to get all of these grid lines off, but hopefully you get the idea. Now, I have included my sketch outlines in the class resources, so if you are struggling with the sketch, you can use mine. Now we've done all of the prep and from here we can think about starting to add some color. 10. Marking out the Eyes: All right, so we've had a look at the reference photo. We've drawn out our sketch. Let's start putting down some color now, I always like to start portraits in the same way. I always like to start by drawing in the eyes. In fact, I like to start by drawing in the people and the iris. I think it just kind of looks a bit creepy if you don't. So I'm going to start here looking at the iris. And I really want to be looking at the colors I can see within here. So I'm starting off by really focusing on the dark edge around the outside of the iris. And this I would say is a kind of bluish green. So I want to look at my color swatches and think about which color I think is the best match. And I'm beginning here with the deep cobalt green. This is, it is a green, but it's a kind of bluish dark green. And I'm just very, very carefully to begin with, marking that circle around the edge of the eye. I'm not pressing hard. I have gone over it a few times, but I really want to add this in very, very lightly to begin with. And then I'm also going to put some of this color over the rest of the iris. Now, once again, I want to be working extremely lightly here, really, really light pressure. I am avoiding the patches of light on her eyes though. So these little kind of rectangles of light here and here and the same on this eye. I will want to add those in with a much lighter pencil than this. So for now I'm just going to mark out where they are and work around them. All we're focusing on right now is getting something down on the paper and then we can work from there. And generally, for the whole time that I'm drawing the eyes, what I do on one side, I'll do exactly the same on the other side. So I can once again start off by very carefully marking in the outline and then I can draw in that rectangle of light and very lightly shade around here. Now, I'm not going over where the people will be, we'll mark that in in a second. There's just no need. It'll make it easier to see my sketch outlines if I leave it. And all I'm going to do for the pupil is use the black pencil to very, very lightly mark it. In literally a case of very carefully marking out the circle of the pupil. Which is made easier because I can see it from my sketch. And then very light little circular motions to just lightly mark that in. As I say, I want to have something here that I can then build upon, so let's do the same on the other side. Lightly mark that in. And then I generally speaking, want to be working from the lighter pencils towards the darker pencils. So I'm going to use the cold gray here. This is the lightest, cold gray I have in my set. And I'm just going to block in the whole of the white of the eye. Now, once again, I'm pressing really lightly here and I'm working in these little circular motions, you'll see that it's not really standing out. And that's fine. We don't need it to, we just want to have a great base that we can then build other colors on. It says go over the whole of the white of the eye. And I'll also go over those light rectangles. When you actually look at those light rectangles, they're not white, they're like a very light gray. So we can add that in. And then let's once again do the same on the other eye. Once again working in these circular motions. I'm really looking at the shape of the white of the eye. And again, this is made a lot easier because we have marked it in really thoroughly with the sketch. Adding in that very lightest, cold gray. I have one other cold gray in my set, it's a much darker, cold gray. And I'm going to very, very lightly use this to mark in all of the rest of the white of the eye. So looking at the white of the eye on this side, there's this triangular patch of white, Or it's not really white, it's a very light gray. We want to leave this section, but basically use the darker gray to shade in the rest of the white of the eye. You'll notice that it's really not as light as you might think it would be. And we do want to be building up some more of this gray around here. It's the same on this side, it's really quite dark in the corner of her eye. It's a bit lighter here, although it's a less obvious patch here. I want to put less of the dark gray here and build more of it up around here. So you can see that I've left that light triangle. And I'm just lightly working in these circular motions. Again, blocking in this whole area with the gray. Now you'll notice that it looks very peculiar. Very, very dark right now. But don't worry about that. As long as we're very light with the pencil, we're going to be building up a lot more and much bolder colors here. So although it looks very dark now, it only looks dark in comparison to the iris. As I say, once we build up a lot more of the color on the iris and generally around the eye in comparison, it won't look as dark and it won't look as peculiar. So now from here I want to be thinking about the most obvious color around the white of the eye that's missing. And I'm really looking at the inner corner of the eye here, the tear duct. This has a kind of pink tone to it. It's not a really bright pink, it's a kind of earthy pink. And there's similar, but less on the other eye as well. So I'm going to use the coral pencil. This is actually quite a bright pink, but I'm going to use it really, really lightly. Again, right now it looks really bright in the corner of the eye, but as I say, it will tone down as we go. Let's just add a very small amount of this color in the corners of each eye, and I'm just really trying to. Take the time here to get the shape of the eye, definitely. Right. And then let's also use this pencil to just add some very light little veins. I'm not being particularly perfect about this because you won't really be able to see it in that much detail when you're at kind of a normal viewing distance. But where you look at her eye, she does have these subtle pink veins. Not a huge amount. There's this kind of fork here, there's a couple around here, one here. And there's also a few around on the right hand side as well. So I just want to subtly add those in with this pencil, you'll see that it's not a hugely bright look. And then from here, I want to draw my attention back to the iris. It's looking way too muted in comparison to the rest of the eye. And what I want to do is add a little bit more green here. We can add a bit more of a light green for now. And then we can build up some of the more bluey tones in a second. So I'm using a kind of earthy light green, I would say. And I'm just going over the light sections again, still very, very lightly. I can't stress enough how you need to be light here. We want to build all of these colors up gradually. And I'm again, just really taking the time to mark in those rectangles. Let's do the same to the other eye. Nice and lightly adding in this green. And it has made quite a difference to the color of the eyes. They are looking much brighter. If we wanted to tone them down then, because we've still been so light with the pencil, it would be easy to do that. And once I've added in that green, I really want to redefine the darker edges of the eyes. As I said, the outline of the eye is particularly dark and it does have more of a kind of gray tone to it. So let's move on to, I'm going to use a warm gray, quite a dark warm gray for this. It seems like the closest match from my swatches, and I'm likely going around the edge. And I also want to go around the top. And I can lightly again, redefine these triangles. So adding some very light shading on the light part of the eye. Mostly I'm working in some very small little flicks here, so there's some very subtle little lines coming around from the pupil out to the edge of the iris all around here. I want to very lightly mark those in with the gray, and I'll need to do the same on the other side. It's not hugely obvious, I can see it, so I do want to draw it in. I'm also noticing that it's a little bit darker at the top and even more so on this eye. So I will need to add some extra shading towards the top because of that shadow. So just add these little flicks very gently to add that little bit of detail into the iris. And then again, let's do the same to the other side. So add in the darker edges to the eye. Just go around the whole of the edge of the iris. Really redefining. And you can see how this immediately makes the white of the eye look less of a dark gray. It immediately looks more like a white. So let's add extra shading at the top here. As I mentioned, because it is a little bit more shadowed up here, the halfway along the top. And then I'll just add some few subtle little flicks just to add that little bit of detail around here. And then now that we've done all of that, the pupil itself is looking way too light. So I'm going back to the black pencil, redefining around the edge and just generally making it a little bit darker. So still going over here with circular motions. I'm not pressing hard by any means, but I do want to build up a bit more of the black so that we know a bit more what we're doing here. So I'm generally happy for now with the eyes. Let's start drawing our attention a little bit more around the outside of the eye. And I want to put something down on the skin, just a very light base color. Now it's tricky with the set that I'm using. There isn't any particularly kind of pale skin tones. So what I'm going to do is go back to the coral pencil and once again, very, very lightly using the circular motion so it's as smooth as possible, go around the skin around the eye. Now, this is a particularly bright color, and that's why I want to be using it so lightly because I don't want to end up with a really bright pink skin around the eye. I just want to have something that I can start building other colors off of. So I don't want to start with white paper. I want to start with some sort of color and then I can build from there. So let's do the same to the eye on the right hand side, just very, very lightly going around the edge of the eye. There's kind of less skin because of the angle of the face. There's less to do on this side 'cause I'm not going to worry about going onto the nose section for now. And now that I've got something there, I can move on and start marking in some of the main shapes with some browns. So I'm going to need to work through a few different browns here, and I'm going to start with a kind of reddish brown. So looking at a lot of the shading around her eye, particularly around this line here, this whole line coming up, and this section here is quite dark. It's all a kind of reddish brown. It's not a sort of more standard brown, I guess. And I think it will certainly be good to begin with to mark in a lot of these darker areas. With that more red toned brown, so I'm using the bent sienna. And to start with, I'm just really, really lightly and carefully marking in the edge of the eye and the lash line. And I want to do the same at the top and at the bottom very, very lightly as I say. And I can also fill in the line that kind of separates the tear duct from the rest of the eye to get something in there. And then once I'm happy with the shape of the eye, I can go over it a few more times, just lightly shade it out into the skin area. Let's also use this same pencil to just begin marking in where the crease of the eye is going to go. Now I have marked all of this in with the sketch, so it's not too tricky. But if I can lightly mark it in with a lighter brown than it will eventually need to be, then if there are any mistakes, if I'm thinking it's not looking quite right, then I can use a darker brown to correct it. It'll be much, much easier to correct than if I just went in with a dark pencil. Particularly if I went in hard with a dark pencil, this is much easier. As I said, the lid of the eye looks reasonably red toned. So let's shade that in, and then let's go around the underside as well, just marking in the edge of the eye and gently shading out from that eye onto the skin. Now, it is worth bearing in mind that we're going to need to draw in or leave the water line. It's very, very important. It's something that I feel people often forget. You can see her water line, particularly here. And then it gets kind of a bit less clear because of the makeup she's wearing. But we're needing to draw in her lash line comes quite a lot lower than her eye and up. And then we're going to need to draw in a separate line along here for the water line. You can also see it subtly here. It's more obvious in this section of the eye. You can't really see it here. So we're gonna need to draw in a line under here and then a separate line just above here. And you can see me just very carefully marking in where that water line will go. And then I can fade out and fade into the rest of the skin, that line at the bottom here. And that's already looking a lot better. It's already looking a lot more realistic. So let's just make the line for the top lashes a little bit fuller. And generally add a little bit of extra shading around the corner here, make it a little bit darker. I don't want to be adding a huge amount and most of the skin shading we will be adding in a little while. I like to work at it all in one. I just want to, as I say, get something down for the eyes and then I think I know a bit more where I stand. So after building up a lot of the shading here, really adding in quite a lot of this brown, I can start thinking about doing exactly the same to the other eye. So starting off marking around the outer edge, it's really quite a dark brown around here. So all around here, I want to mark this in on her eyelid, you can't see a huge amount of it, but it is very dark what you can see. And there's also, so we're going to need to add a darker shading around here as they say. We need to mark in that water line. I also want to add some darker shading along the top, along here and underneath. But try and leave this strip here very light so I can once again mark in that crease of the eye following the sketch that I took my time getting right, and then add a little bit of shading over the top and then I can start working my way underneath marking around the edge of the eye but really making sure that I'm avoiding that light patch. So you can see I'm shading underneath it and that's making the light patch on the skin stand out a little bit more. And we will add to that more as we go. So at this point, I'm feeling a bit happier that I know what needs to go where, but I do want to mark in the eyebrows and get some of the darker shading added in. So let's move on now to the walnut brown. This is the darkest brown that I have in my set. And I'm literally going to just block in the shape of the eyebrows, still very, very lightly, you'll see that I'm not pressing hard. And although obviously the eyebrows are made up of a series of hairs, the underlying color of the eyebrows is what we're focusing on marking in here. And we can think about adding in the texture of the eyebrows a little bit later on. So let's do the same to this eyebrow on the other side. And I really want to be looking at the shape of the eyebrows, particularly this side. It's not necessarily what you would think of as eyebrow shape because we're looking at it from a different angle. So using these light circular motions to block that in. And then I'm also going to use this brown to mark in all of the other darker areas. So let's go over the crease of her eye to begin with. Now, obviously we did mark this in with the previous brown, and I'm pretty happy that it is in the right place. So that makes my life a lot easier now and makes me much more confident that I'm adding this incorrectly so I can start pressing a little bit harder. I mean, I'm by no means pressing hard, but I'm certainly building up a little bit more of the pencil not pressing maybe as lightly. So let's also use the stark brown to go back over the lash line, get that marked in a little bit clearer. And the same for the lash line at the bottom. So I've once again marked in this line already, but actually it needs to be a little bit darker than what the burnt sienna can do. So I can just lightly shade all along the edge here. And that's also adds a little bit more darker shading to the corner of the eye here. Again, we can adjust all of the colors and add to it a little bit later on. What I'm actually really focusing on right now is trying to get the contrast right. So for now, if I can get the lights and darks in the right place and get all of the shapes marked out correctly. So get the shape of the eye correct, for example. Then all we're going to need to do from there is adjust the colors, add to the colors, make them more vibrant as is needed. But it doesn't matter as much as the contrast. It really can't stress enough that contrast is the most important thing. So this work along the lash line on this right hand eye as well. And just like I did before, I need to be working the whole way around the edge of the eye. As I mentioned, this area where I'm drawing here is particularly dark. So I'm going to need to build up a lot of darker brown here and then I can start working my way along the bottom lash line. So remember that the dark line of the lashes doesn't actually extend the whole way along the eye. In fact, for this eye, it's stopping kind of level with that rectangular section of light. And then I can shade out from this point. Also add a little bit of shading around the corner. Just lightly mark this in, but we will add this a lot as we work on the face and the nose. So I am going to add a little bit more shading on the eyebrows. I'm literally going over it in the same way. I just think it'll be easier if the base is a little bit darker. Right now, I think it's looking too pale. But generally speaking, I feel like we can really start to tell what the eyes look like. It all looks in proportion, and although it looks very pale, the colors look very muted. I certainly feel like we have a great basis that we can build upon. Now, before I move on, I am going to take the time right now to just lightly mark in the lashes. And to do this, I really want to take a minute to have a look at the shape of hair lashes. So actually a lot of hair lashes are quite straight, I guess from the makeup she's wearing and the way her makeup has been done. But I am going to try and follow the pattern of them. So for example, these lashes here are kind of going up and in this direction these lashes are slightly curving round surround to the corner. And these lashes here are curving around the opposite way. So generally speaking, you expect lashes to curve this way on the inner corner and this way on the outer corner. Depending on the angle of the eyes around the bottom, you can see there's a very prominent curve here. So we're going to need to draw in these lashes down the bottom with that kind of curve. And then down here, they're going a bit more kind of straight down, I guess. Again, because of the angle of the eye, they are curving a little bit, kind of this way. And then pretty much all of the lashes stop by about this kind of point. Same on the other eye. You can see from the angle of the eye, they're all curving in this kind of direction. So we're going to need to make little flicks with our pencil like this. Same at the bottom. They're curving round and down, Judge. Now, first off, you don't necessarily need to try and get it exactly the same as the reference. I wouldn't spend the time trying to get all lashes in exactly the perfect place. I just don't think that it necessarily would necessarily be possible or I just don't think it would be worth it. Also, you'll notice that I'm still pressing very lightly here. I'm doing this for now with the worn up brown pencil, that very dark brown. In actuality, I would say that her lashes are more like black because of the mascara she's wearing. I don't want to go in really dark with the black right now because I'm only adding these in to kind of help me a bit better, get my bearings. It's gonna make my life easier. Getting the colors of the skin right. And we are going to adjust this a lot. I don't want to go straight in with the black. Adding these lashes in really hard. But you can see from that left hand eye, we're really getting a good idea of what these eyes are going to look like. So let's add some light flicks with the same pencil on the right hand side. And then at this point we have something down for the eyes from here, I'm going to want to draw something on the rest of the face. And then we can think about brightening everything up from there. But that is it for this first little section. 11. Marking out the face: Next section, I want to start marking out the general colors and shapes of the face. And what I want to do is start in the same way as we did on the skin around the eyes. I want to begin by just putting down a really light covering with the coral pencil. This is this lightish pink, just a really, really light covering. Now you'll notice that I'm holding the pencil quite far back here. I'm not holding it really close to the tip. This is because it stops me from being able to press too hard. If I hold it back here, it means it's literally not possible. And it just makes the whole thing much easier. So I want to put this coral pencil anywhere where there is skin tone. You'll notice I'm also working in circular motions. I want this to be as smooth as possible. Again, it's just giving me something that I can work off of, some sort of color that I can build upon. So I'm working the whole way along the face, so gently marking along the jaw line. I think it's just going to make it a bit easier if I can keep the sketch nice and clear. And I'm also working my way around the mouth again. I think it just helps keep those sketch lines a little bit clearer. Although I am also going to be shading over the mouth, but still nice and likely, I don't want to lose those sketch lines. I want to still be able to see everything I marked out to start with. Let's not forget, I'm focusing on just the top section of the neck in this chapter, and then I can focus on the rest of her neck and her shoulders a little bit later. So now I've got some sort of color on the whole of the face. What I'm going to do is move onto the cool gray pencil and I'm just going to start marking out the really obvious cool gray sections. Now I'm particularly noticing this area here, both all around here and this area here is a very, really a quite dark, cool gray and the same here. So there's very lightly marking these patches with the gray. Really, my whole goal for this section is to get all of the main shapes marked out. Right now, we don't have a face marked out. And areas like these gray patches are really important in creating the general shapes of the face. So drawn in the corner and I can shade all underneath under here, just still really nice and lightly. Throughout all of this, we need to be working lightly because I'm going to need to be building up a number of different colors to create the skin texture or the skin color. And if I go in really firmly with the pencil, then I'm not going to be able to build up that color. So now I've got these areas marked under the eye. I'm going to move on to the reddish brown. So the burnt sienna pencil, and I'm going to use this pencil a lot. What I'm really wanting to focus on is marking out all of the shapes of the face and actually there's a lot more light and dark patches than you might think. So let's start off by looking at the forehead and I'm particularly noticing that there's a lighter patch here and there's a light patch here. Sometimes I think it's easier to see if you step back from the reference a little bit. So you can see this dark patch. There's a dark patch here, a light patch here, and then there's this dark patch here. This is the shadow from this piece of hair, and it's generally dark up here as well. This area in the middle is more of a kind of grayish color, but we can think about adding in these extra grays a little bit later. And you can really see how lightly I'm shading this with this pencil. You'll also notice that I'm still holding the pencil further back. This is actually a slightly shorter pencil, so I've got what's called a pencil extender on the end of here, just so I can hold it a bit further back. It just generally makes using the pencil a lot more comfortable. So I've marked in where that shadow for the hair is going to be and I've marked in that area in the top right, which is particularly shadowed. So let's now mark in this area between the eyes at the top of the nose here. Would you want to be looking at the shapes on the face and trying to create similar shapes on my drawing paper? And I am trying to make it as smooth as possible here. But you can see it looks a little bit scribbly, but don't worry about that. The more pencil we put down, the more that that will get covered and it'll become less obvious the more we build up. So let's move on now down to the nose and I want to be, again, marking in the main shapes, which this is made much easier because of the sketch. But let's take a minute to have a look again at the reference and see what's actually here. So I'm noticing that up the right hand side there is quite a thick dark shadow. Then there's a light patch here and a light patch here, and there's this darker line in between. And this darker line extends all the way down to the tip of the nose because there's a light patch here and a light patch here. There's then this darker patch here, which is extending the whole way round. And there's also a kind of dark triangular shape here. And then a lighter triangular shape here with a little dark strip running through it. And I think it helps to start with to just look at all of this like they're a series of shapes. So I'm not thinking about drawing a nose because I think that makes the whole process feel a lot more daunting and a lot harder. I'm just going to draw the series of shapes I can see on the nose, so I'm shading to start with that line down the right hand edge. I can then start adding in those two lighter patches, those two light strips, whilst adding a little bit of extra shading around the eyebrow here, generally making the eyebrow shape a little bit bigger. I do find that the more I do, the more I realize needs to be added. So don't be afraid to go back to an area like the eyebrow there and just tweak the size or shape of it. If it's not looking quite right, then I can just very carefully go over the sketch mark in the nostril and around the edge here, and then I can start marking in all of those darker shapes. So some areas like this area, I'm shading around here. I would say on the reference, it looks like it's got a lot more grade to it, but that's okay. We can tone that down in a little while or we can add extra grade to it. For now, I'm literally just focusing on trying to get these shapes in the right place. And again, I can't stress enough. I know that it looks very peculiar. You can just, you want to keep going. It doesn't matter. It will all come together. So let's move on and round onto the cheek. Now I want to, again, be looking for any shapes around here. And actually on her cheek there is this very prominent patch of light here, which means that this area here is particularly dark. And then there's also a dark strip all along here, here, around here. And then there's this dark strip on her cheek as well by her hair line. This is obviously a shadow created by her hair. So these are reasonably simple patches that when they're added in, it's really going to help add to the shape of her face. So I'm going to work my way around here, filling in all of these areas, Still nice and super lightly. This does still look extremely pale at the moment, and that's okay. I can also add some shading on her other cheek. This is reasonably simple around here. It's lighter in this little patch, darker up here and darker around here. So this is the area, we don't really want to be building up a lot of that burnt sienna. I also want to be adding a darker patch here, but keeping this triangle here lighter. And then again, this area here is darker and you can see quite faintly smile line here. So, those are all things that I'm wanting to bear in mind whilst drawing out the shapes of her face. Right now, I am avoiding her lips. We will add them in in a little while. But for now, I think it's easier to just focus on her skin and the shape of her face, and then we can add on the lips afterwards. So you can see here, I'm adding in the shadowed area underneath her cheek bones. So lightly adding that in so that we've got that light patch above, which is becoming a bit more prominent because of this. And then I can also think about adding that shadowed area over to the left hand side of the shadow created from her hair. All right. So I'm gonna work along the edge of her jaw coming down here. It's not really light at the bottom of her face here. And then I also want to add some of the shadow underneath her lips. So under here, there's actually quite a clear line. You can really see the shadow created from her lips. And then it goes along here and up. So let's add that in. I'm also noticing that there's quite a deep shadow around here and under here. So let's fill in all of these areas. You'll see that still nothing I'm doing is hard. I'm still not needing to press hard at this point. And then I can add some general light shading. Generally speaking, I'm quite happy with her face at this point. I'm happy that all the shapes are marked out. Let's just add a little bit of extra shading under her chin or on her neck. So actually this area is really very dark. Much darker than this pencil actually. But I do want to mark out so that I know what needs to be were, so you can see how dark brown this section is. And this section here. Let's get that roughly marked in so at least we can start to see the shape of her face a bit better. And then once I'm generally happy with her face, I am going to mark her lips in. And actually I'm going to do it once again with this pencil because her lips are obviously a reddish kind of color marking in the lights and darks. With this pencil I think is going to give us a really good idea on what needs to go where, where we move on to the reds. So let's look at the main shapes and shading on the lips. So I'm going to want to add quite a lot of shading on the top left here. Quite a lot actually, on this whole section here as well. And up the top a little bit along here and a little bit along here, but it's a bit lighter in this patch. And it's also got a light patch all through the middle of this lip here. So I'm going to need to add quite a lot of the brown on this right hand side and all underneath. Now, I am particularly focusing on trying to get this in the right place based on my sketch. I think if the mouth looks a little bit wrong, it really affects the whole drawing. So I've marked around the edge of the bottom lip here, and then I can add some light shading going all along the bottom section, so all along here. And that's going to help create that light patch. And along the top, up here, where the lips meet. All right, so now I feel like I have the whole face marked out, albeit it doesn't really look in the right color. Let's just add a few tweaks. Sometimes it's nice to take a step backwards and really look at the drawing. Look at the reference photo and see if there's any really obvious differences. I am happy that right now the general shape of her face has been marked out. Let's just add a little bit more of the brown around this section. There's really quite a dark, darkish brown, I would say, around here. The main thing that's really striking me right now about the drawing is that it's looking way too pale. So I really want to perfect the general lights and darks, make sure that everything's in the right place. But I also want to be gradually making the skin a bit darker. Just the whole thing looks really washed out. So it's particularly around the eyes. I would say that a lot of this color needs adding, particularly because of her makeup. Her eye shadow is more of this kind of brown. But I also want to be adding some extra brown down the edge of the nose, along here. And maybe just tweaking some of the shapes. I think some of the shapes around this part of the nose isn't looking quite right, so I can just tweak them, hopefully get them looking a little bit closer to the reference photo. And this isn't the only time that I'm going to need to tweak the shapes on the face. It is something that continually needs doing. But that's what's good about building up all of the light layers, is you can multiple times tweak and slightly change and adjust things. If we went in really heavily with the pencil, we wouldn't be able to do that. So let's move on to that darker, cool gray and really start adding in quite a lot of this pencil now. So I always think whenever drawing anything you want to be looking at what's actually here. You don't want to be thinking about how, generally speaking you wouldn't think people have gray in their skin. In actuality, along the edge of the nose here, for example. This does look like it has quite a good hint of gray both along here and along this middle section here and all around here. And actually when you start looking for it, you'll see that there is a lot of gray generally on her face. So not only particularly prominently under her eyes like I've mentioned before, but I've also mentioned here before, this looks gray along here, around the corner of her eye here. This area is particularly gray as well as actually all along here as well, particularly here and under her nose and along here. So what I want to be doing with this pencil is going back over all of the shapes that I built up with the burnt sienna, but now adjusting that color. So I'm going to add some gray over the top of some of these areas. And it's just going to slightly tweak that color, tone it down a bit from the brown and turn it more into a bit of a gray. And I'm just going to work around the face. So as I mentioned, in the corner of the eye, there is a lot of gray around here. So let's build that up. And build up all of the shadow where that hair is falling over the face. And then I'm noticing around the top of the eye here, we need to add quite a lot more gray to this section as well. And generally speaking, I would say that I try to work quite systematically. I try to work one section at a time. I do think that that is generally easier. That said, sometimes I will notice an area that just clearly to me needs something adding. And so I'm not only going to work on one section at a time necessarily. Let's work all down the bottom of the face. And then I'm also going to add some gray under here as well. Just I think it will look a little bit peculiar if I don't build up some of the gray here. It'll just look really different in comparison to the rest of her face. So let's not forget to add this onto the forehead as well. I do want to make sure that those light patches are kept. I don't want to go over the light patches and risk losing them. So now I've gone over all of those areas with the darker gray. I'm going to go back to the walnut brown. This is the very dark brown. Go back over the crease line of the eye. As I said earlier, I think the more that you add in, the more you realize how pale other areas are looking in comparison. So actually I'm going to go back over the crease line and back over the lash line. Make their eyes a little bit darker, hopefully make them stand out a bit more. And they will need to go over the eye itself 'cause that's looking too pale really now as well. But right now I'm just focusing on the skin and let's really build up a lot of this color around the eye. So it's also, as I've mentioned a few times, particularly dark under here. I have built up a lot of the cold gray, but I'm just going to add a little bit of brown to it, partly to make it a little bit darker, but also to warm it up a little bit. And actually I'm going to use this to go over a lot of those darkest areas. So for example, the inner and outer corner of the eye here and the same, the darker patches on this eye as well. So all around this edge here, then let's look at any other particularly dark areas that we might want to put the walnut brown. So I'm particularly thinking about along her nostril and around the Edge of her nose here as well as around here. And particularly looking at where her lips are parting. So this area is particularly dark, although do notice that it's not a really crisp line, it's a very soft line. So we're going to need to bear that in mind while we add that in. But this whole line along here is particularly dark as well, as I've mentioned before, this patch here and this patch here, Judge. So let's fill in these areas just going over the lines that we've already drawn in with the previous pencils, making it a little bit darker and stand out a little bit more. It might be that I slightly need to change the shape of some areas as I go here. And that's okay. As I said, one of the reasons to gradually build up the color and not just suddenly go in really dark and then also let's go along the line of the mouth. So as I said, we don't want this end part here to be a really crisp line. So I'm just going to really lightly shade all around it so that it hopefully blends a bit better into the skin or it will as we work our way through here. And then let's also fill in this area down here. This area does have a little bit of hair in it, and so I don't want to go into dark at this point. We want to be able to add that hair in, but I also want to make it a bit easier to visualize the whole of the face. I think it's going to be a bit easier. So with every color that's added in, I think the face gets a bit clearer and everything we've marked out gets a bit clearer. What I'm going to do now is just brighten up the lips. Right now, we haven't put any colors in there except for the burnt sienna. And I don't necessarily want to make it fully as bright as it will be eventually. But I do want to get a bit more color in here. So I'm using this red here, so it's not too bright and it's not too dull. And for now, I'd say I'm really just going over all of the areas where I put that sienna brown. Going over the line in the middle of the lips and generally shading in the darker areas around the edge. And it's not really changing what's here, it's just brightening it up a little bit. And then after doing the top section, let's very lightly go over the light patch of the lips at the bottom. But I'm not going to go over that too much. I'm not going to go over all of it. I'm actually going to switch back to the coral pencil, that lighter pink, and just lightly fill in the bright patch here rather than using that darker red. Now as they say, we will go over the lips more in time. But right now I just want to make them a little bit closer. We'll gradually build up the color, but if it's a bit closer to what the lips will look like, I think that'll make life easier. So let's also use the coral pencil to just add a bit more pink to the rest of the face. It's looking a little bit too pale and I think the main color right now that is missing is the pink. If we can warm it up a little bit, then from there we can hopefully start to see the most obvious color that's missing, as I'm literally going over the whole of the face with the pink. Now there are a few areas that I'm either leaving or going over extremely lightly, and that's any areas that are particularly bright. So for example, this shine here, this shine here, these shines here. I don't necessarily want to go over them. I think it'll mean that we'll lose those light patches, they'll be less obvious. And that's not what I'm wanting to do at this point. So I want to work my way over the whole of the face. And then once I've done that, I can once again take a minute to think about the most obvious color that's missing. So from here, and once again, really particularly looking at the nose and thinking that there is a lot more gray here that needs to be added. A lot of the shapes on the nose are actually pretty prominent, but right now they're looking very faint on what I've drawn. So let's go back to the darker, cold gray pencil and once again, take my time marking out all of the shapes here. So going back over these gray patches around the eyes and you can see I'm really starting to build up a lot of color here. As I say, it is very dark around her eyes. So I do need to build up a reasonable amount of the pencil, particularly in the outer corners and under the right hand side of her eye, I would say is the most of the gray. You also really want to build up this section along here. It's just another area that I think has a lot of the gray as well as up this right side. So you'll notice at this point that the skin color isn't really looking right. She kind of looks a little bit unwell, but that's okay. We're not worrying about that at this point right now. I'm just trying to get the shapes and the contrast in the right place. We can still tweak it as we go here. We don't need to make this the final version. Obviously, it looks a bit scratchy, and as I say, the colors aren't right. But the goal here is to just keep building up the pencil more and more. And in fact, we're going to do a lot of tweaking colors and adding to the skin color more in the next section until eventually it resembles a skin color. So let's just add a little bit more gray again around the eyes. I'm just going to keep building this up. And then at the end of this section, you should have a lady that resembles a lady, but maybe isn't looking brilliant at this point. But that's okay. 12. Adjusting the Colors of the Skin: In this section, I want to focus on getting all of the color looking a little bit more realistic. And getting it to the point that we can start drawing the rest of the portrait. So I'm going to start here, back with that cool gray pencil. This area down the bottom just isn't looking quite right. And I just want to add a little bit more shading around here. Typefully make the shape of the face look a bit closer to the reference photo. Now I want to focus right now on getting the darks dark enough and getting the skin color looking a little bit closer to natural. I actually in this section, don't necessarily want to make everything absolutely perfect. But if we can get it to the point that we want to put their hair on, then it's going to be much easier to see what's wrong about the color of the skin. Now, before we make our way too far through this section, I'm just going to make the whites of the eyes a little bit darker. One of the main things that is standing out to me as not looking quite right with this drawing right now, is how white the eyes look. And before I was very, very light with adding this gray in, I'm just going to be a little bit firmer with them. So you'll see that on the left eye, I've made sure to leave that triangular patch of light. I still want that to be really light. And also on this right eye, I think that there's just a little bit of water line that's missing here. The eye on that side is just looking too kind of big. So I'm just going to draw in where that water line is and then add some firmer shading with this cold gray. Now I am pressing harder than I have been up until this point, but I still wouldn't say I'm pressing hard. I could still put more color over the top of here even later. It might be that we'll need to do that in a bit. So once I'm happy that those grays and the whites of the eyes are looking a little bit closer to the reference, I'm just going to think about any other areas where I want to be adding this color. So I'm particularly thinking about under the nose here. There's more of a shadow, I would say, on the reference photo than there is on my drawing. And it's really just a case of taking a step back, looking at the reference versus the drawing and trying to work out what's missing. So now, at this point, I think the main thing that's missing is the skin color isn't looking quite right. It's too pink at the moment. And actually I can see quite the hint of yellow in this lady's skin. So I'm going to use the lightest yellow in my set. This is the cream pencil and I'm going to very lightly go over most of the drawing. I want to be doing this very, very lightly. I don't want to make a bright yellow lady, I don't want to give her really bright yellow skin. But I do just want to add a little hint of it. And generally it's going to tone down the pink, give us a color that is a little bit closer to the skin color. And you can see what a big difference is making when you look at the color towards the top of the face versus the color towards the bottom. Although it's not hugely different, I do think it looks a lot closer to the skin color in the reference. We still have a lot more building to do on this, but I think it is better. So I'm getting over the whole of the drawing. The only areas that I am avoiding is the very light patches or most of the light patches, Some of them. If I can see on the reference that there is a little hint of yellow, I will very lightly add it over the top, but I don't want to be adding a huge amount. So for example, that area underneath the eyebrow is more like a light gray. I don't want to be adding loads of yellow to there. So I think the skin color there is a little bit better, but it's still not looking quite right. So I'm actually going to go back to that burnt sienna. I'm going to adjust all of the grays, all of those darker shadowed, areas of gray that I had previously built up. I think if I go over them with this brown, you're still going to be able to see the gray color. But it's just going to tone it down a bit and maybe make it look a little bit more realistic. I feel like once again, it's making it closer to the skin color. So I don't think when you're drawing skin, when you're drawing a person is necessarily a case of being able to just make it look like skin color straight away. To start with, skin color is made up of a lot of different colors in a lot of different areas. But also we're just gonna need to mix so many colors together if we're going to end up with a realistic skin tone, particularly in the set of pencils I'm using. I wouldn't say that there's really any skin color pencils. So we're having to mix our own. Just add a bit of this brown up at the top here. As I've mentioned a few times, she's got quite a reasonable amount of brown eye shadow. And I'm also just going to adjust some of the shadows up here. Her nose isn't looking quite right at the top. Let's adjust that and then I can start filling in some more shading on the other eye. And I'm just working my way over all of these gray spots slightly toning down that gray color. Building up skin is time consuming process, but I do think it's very satisfying. There's something about drawing people that I think is particularly fascinating. Now one thing I'll mention, so the skin here is starting to build up and it's starting to become more of an accurate skin color. It still looks very scratchy and very blotchy at this point. Now with color pencils, it's never going to be possible to get it looking absolutely perfectly smooth. You're always going to have a certain amount of very subtle texture. But it is worth noting that I am very zoomed in here, so all of the texture that is really showing on the camera, it doesn't look as much in person. So you'll probably find that if you take a step back from your drawing and look at it at a kind of normal viewing distance, it will look a lot smoother than what you're seeing here or what you're seeing. If you're looking really closely and concentrating while drawing, it's just worth noting. Sometimes they think when it looks really scratchy, it can be a little bit disheartening. I think actually, the more we build up, firstly, the smoother that it will become. But also, if we take a step back, it probably doesn't look as scratchy as when you're working really close to it. So now that I've built up a lot of brown on here, I'm just going to go over a few areas one more time. Just build it up a little bit further, and then I, once again, want to think about the most obvious thing that I should add. So actually here I'm going to switch to the walnut brown pencil and I just want to start marking in the eyebrows. So where we look at this lady's eyebrows, it's really important to note the direction of the hair. Right now, we've just blocked in the general shape, but I want to start just adding those details. We want to really be able to see what we're working with here. So note that most of the hairs actually are all growing in this direction. Her eyebrows are actually pretty organized, is that the right word? So we want to be making little flicks, gently brushing the pencil against the paper, going in this direction. But I'm noticing that at the top they're coming down and going in this direction. So most of the hairs are going like this, but the top ones are going down like this. And actually is less clear on this side, but it is the same. You can see some of these top hairs coming down here and then the rest of the hairs are all traveling in this direction. Judge, so you can see me just very lightly brushing my pencil against the paper with this walnut brown to just begin to build up some of this texture. So I think the main thing for me right now that's really standing out as isn't quite right with the drawing, is that the eyes just don't look bold enough. And it's hard to decide what to do on the skin tone where the eyes aren't looking quite realistic enough. And so what I'm doing to one side, once again I want to be doing to the other. So let's build up some of those flicking motions on this right hand side. I say it's reasonably subtle, but I do think it helps visualize a bit better what's here. Now from here, the irises are really standing out to me as not being dark enough. They look way too light and bright. So let's go back to that warm gray and redefine the edges again, this is exactly the same as what we did at the start of the drawing. So going around the edge and also just adding some extra shading particularly around the top and adding some of those little flicks going from the center. And I think that that is looking much better. The eyes are looking a lot less washed out. So let's do the same to the right hand eye going around the edge again, really shading in the top section and defining the shape of the patch of light again. And then adding some of these little flicks to add that little bit of texture, but also a little bit more shading. Then from here actually I want to define a lot of the ice, so a lot of it just looks a little bit washed out. It looks too light. So let's go back to the worn up brown pencil. Define the edge of the water line. Not really heavily, just very, very lightly. And I also want to tone down a little bit of the water line looking at the reference photo, parts of it just look a little bit too light and then I can start shading like we did before along the bottom lash line here. This lady does have makeup on, as I've mentioned a few times, and we want to get that kind of smoky bottom. And then they also want to go once again over the crease of the eye and make the whole eyelid look a bit darker. Now, two things to note. Firstly, I would say that the walnut brown isn't dark enough. We are going to need to add a darker pencil to this, which means that shortly, we'll need to add the black over the top. Just because, as I mentioned, her eyelashes, for example, are a lot darker than this brown. Because she's wearing makeup and I think it's really showing. Another thing to note is that we are going over, particularly the lash line and generally around the top. So it's making her eyelashes a little bit less clear, but don't worry about that. As I mentioned, I wanted to mark in the eyelashes, but we can use the black to go back over them. We can still see them, but I'm not going to worry about those lashes right now. We can add them back in in a minute. So let's think about if there's any other areas that I want to add in some of this pencils. So just a few areas around the nose I think could stand to be made a little bit darker. And I also want to add a bit more shading around the neck here. I'm not going to go in full force with this, but I do want to build up a bit more of the brown. It just, it gets quite hard to visualize what we need to add in when there's an area that is so light, that needs to be so dark. I don't want to go too dark here as I mentioned before, because we will need to add some hair into this area. She's just got a little bit of hair coming down here. So from here, I want to think about the next most obvious color that's missing. And actually what I want to do now is really brighten up her lips. Her lips are not looking dark enough. As I mentioned, I built these up with a little bit of a red and the pink that I used for her skin. But we actually want to use a much darker and more kind of purply color, I would say for the lips. But all I'm doing here is going over this in exactly the same way as I did before. Just building up this pinky purple, particularly around the edges, but going very lightly on the spots of light. I do think the shape of the top lip, particularly on this side, looks a little bit wrong at this point. So right now's a good time to try and tidy that up. And maybe just slightly adjust the shape so that the lip looks a little bit more symmetrical. Then I can add a final little bit more shading to the lips. And then I want to be thinking about if there's any other areas I can see this color. So actually I'm going to add a little bit of it under the eyes. The eyes do have an ever so slight pinky tone to them. It's like a pinky purple along with that gray. And I think if I really lightly put this pencil over these parts, it's just going to slightly brighten up the eye. I'm also going to use it around the edge, around here. And there's also quite a lot of pink on the eyelid. It's kind of a pinky brown, I would say. You can see I'm not using loads of it. I'm just building up a little bit and it's just adding to that color. Just making her eyes look a little bit, kind of brighter. So let's add a little bit more around the top of this eye, and then I really want to focus on making the eye stand out. So as I said, the dark brown, the walnut brown isn't dark enough, so I'm switching back to the black and we're really going to define everything around the eyes. Hopefully it's going to help us see a bit better what needs to happen. So T's once again go over the pupils, just build up a little bit more of the black on here. And then I'm also going to add a very small amount of black around edges of the iris. Not all round. There's a few areas that are darker than others and I just want to build up a little bit. And then let's once again go over the lash line in exactly the same way as we did with the worn up brown, but it's just making it that little bit darker. It's really going to help the eyes to pop. You also have gone over the crease of the eye, and now I can go back over all of the lashes. So I'm going back over what I did before, but just a bit darker, so they're standing out a bit more. Now, I want to go over the bottom lashes as well. I do apologize. You can't see. But it is exactly the same as what we did before. And I'm also going to use this black to just slightly make this area a little bit darker. You can see how lightly I'm going over it, but I'm just trying to do some extra little tweaks. Add a little bit of extra shading along the top here where there's a bit of a shadow from the eyelashes and the eyelid. And then let's do exactly the same on the other side. Go over that lash line and go over the crease and the eyelashes. So already I feel like the eyes are looking much, much better. Let's add a little bit of shading over the top of the eyebrows, just make these a little bit darker. So I'm going to add some very light flicks just to keep building up a bit more of that texture. Her eyebrows are actually pretty dark and I do want to try and keep that and help it to match the reference. So I want to be looking for any other areas where I should add in some of the black. So I'm particularly looking at the line along here. Make this a little bit darker, but In't want to add a huge amount of shading. And actually now that I've added that in, I think it looks a little bit too black, so I can just go over it with the burnt sienna. And it will just slightly tone down the brown. Just going back over all of the darkest areas, particularly around the edge. So now at this point, we have her face pretty well marked out. Now I do think that it needs some more colors building up, but what I want to do next is draw her shoulders. Any extra skin, I think we can see some of her top. And then I also want to draw in her hair. And then when that's all done, at that point, I want to be thinking about adding any final adjustments to the skin. It also, I think looks completely different when we are father back. I think because we're really zoomed in with the camera. It's kind of hard. And if you're looking really closely at the drawing, it's kind of hard to see what else needs adding. So I'm just going to add a few final little tweaks with the darker, cool gray. Just tone down this area and add a little bit more to under her eyes. And then we'll move on. 13. Mark out the hair: So, at this point we have the lady's face marked in reasonably well. I think it's a bit too pale, but we can build upon that. What I want to do now is get her hair marked in, but also mark in the skin of her shoulders and the V on her chest. So let's start off by doing that. And we're going to be doing this in a very similar way to how we've drawn the rest of the skin. We want to be using the same colors and just get it marked in for now and we can always build upon it later. So I'm beginning here with the coral pencil. This kind of light pink and just like we did on the face, I want to be putting down a nice smooth even layer of this pencil. So starting off on the shoulder, on the left hand side, and then I can move onto the chest along here. There's a little bit of her chain from her necklace in this section, but I want to be working around that. But again, just very lightly going over this whole section nice and smoothly. I'm very much doing this in the way that I have previously. So again, you'll note that I am holding the pencil reasonably far back so that I can press nice and lightly. And I'm working in these nice big circular motions, which hopefully is going to make the pencil nice and smooth. So once I put down all of that sort of lightish pink, I can then move onto the burnt sienna. This is that reddish brown to mark in all of the main lights and darks. Still pressing nice and lightly and still working in those circular motions. So there's not a huge amount of shadow that we need to be thinking about here really. Now you'll notice that I'm using a pencil extender here. This pencil is reasonably short and it just feels a bit uncomfortable not holding the pencil far back, as well as it's harder to not press too hard. So let's take a minute to have a look at the reference and we'll just see where the lights and darks are here. So she has a bit of a shadow on this right hand side, although it is quite a lot covered by her hair. We're actually only drawing up until about this point, and so there's quite a big shadow at the top as well, in this area here. Again, a lot of it is covered by hair, but there's a darker patch here, so there's this darker strip coming down here. And then there's a light strip, and then there's a darker strip here. And then it's light by her necklace. And then on her shoulder on the right hand side, there's these kind of two dips, this kind of U shape, which is much darker, but a lot of it on the left hand side is covered up by her hair. So that is essentially what I'm wanting to mark in with this pencil. So adding in this darker strip going along here, just building up the circular motions. And I'm also putting quite a bit on her chest down here. I don't want it to just stay pink. I do want to have some sort of depth to her skin color, but particularly build up more in this kind of area here. As I say, it might turn out that we need to build up a lot more a bit later on, but for now I'm really just wanting to mark everything out and get my bearings on what needs to go wear. So let's draw in that kind of U shape that I mentioned here and gradually build that up. And then actually already her skin on her shoulders and chest is looking a reasonably good color. It's not looking too different to the rest of her skin. And I do feel the main lights and darks have been marked in. I do want to add to this, it's not quite a close enough match for her face, but it's certainly not too far off, I would say. So I don't want to forget to mark in, this is her, that's kind of her pit. So this area here, what you've actually got is a line going up here, and then it's shaded darker to the right. Then there's these various lines of, I guess, folds of her skin. Is it There's these four lines. So I want to mark in where they're gonna be and then I can lightly shade over the top, just kind of marking out to get my bearings for the future. And then from here I want to carry on working my way through a lot of those colors that we went through for the skin. So I want to add over the top some of that cooler gray now, really just cooling down the shadows that I've added in. I wouldn't say I need to add absolutely loads as before. The most important thing is that I'm pressing nice and lightly now whilst I've got this pencil, because it is a cooler grain and that matches her necklace, I am going to mark in the necklace here as well, so just very lightly marking that in shading over the top. And then we can add some extra sort of definition in a second. It's obviously very basic shading right now, but this is going to make it easier to draw the skin tone around these sections once we've got something here. Now you'll notice that I've put a darker line on the bottom of each side. So on this side, the underside on both sides. In actuality, the jewelry is really, really detailed, but as I've said before, I don't think you'll be able to see that detail from a normal viewing distance when looking at the portrait. There's no point in me spending ages adding in all of those details when it's just not going to be visible at the end. I would say that the necklace that I've drawn in right now kind of looks detailed enough for this purpose. So let's move on now to the walnut brown and really add to some of the darker shading, specifically this dark strip along here. Just build that up a little bit and I can also really add to the shading around the lady's arm. As well as any other areas that are a bit dark. So particularly this shadow here. Note that I'm not appearing a huge amount in just nice and gently building it up. And then let's go over the top of this now with the cream pencil, just like we did on the face, and it's now looking a really good match to her face. We've kind of got the skin all looking like it belongs to the same person. So slightly go over the top of all of the skin. I don't want a huge amount of this. I just want to add a slight yellow tone. And then from here we'll be able to work on the skin in a future section altogether. So let's now think about drawing in this lady's hair. And what I want to start off by doing is building up some base layers. So primarily to begin with, I want to build this up using flicks of the pencil. But I'm going to start this by putting down a nice and smooth layer of the warmer, light gray. And what I want to do with this is just go over any area where I'm going to be adding hair. Now, it's pretty hard to see what I'm doing here because this is such a light pencil, it's much clearer in real life than it looks on the camera. I'm essentially doing this in exactly the same way as I would draw the skin, for example, working in circular motions, pressing nice and lightly. And as I say, just working over the whole section of hair, you can roughly see that now we've got something where her hair is going to be. And this is all made a lot easier because we had already marked this area out with our sketch, so we did know where the hair needs to go. And then what I want to do is start from the lighter colors and gradually work my way towards the darker colors, just marking everything out. What I'm wanting to do here is particularly get my bearings and work out what needs to go where. But also gradually build up the hair and build up all of the sections of the hair. So I'm starting off here with the raw umber. This beyond gray I would say is the lightest color I can see in the reference. So when I actually look at her hair, it looks reasonably dark on the most part. When you look at the actual colors, there are a lot of dark brown areas like this strip all along here and all around here, all of the shadowed areas, particularly around her face. On the lighter areas, it kind of looks like a kind of grayish, mousy, light brown. Now, I don't know that I have a color exactly like this, but I do think that the raw umber is the closest color for now. And we are going to build a lot of colors on top of this. So you'll see, just like we practiced earlier, I'm making these large flicking motions going in the direction of the hair. And I actually think that this is the most important part of drawing the hair, because what I'm specifically doing is drawing out all of the sections. So we're starting off by looking at this section at the top where her hair is going behind her ear. So this section here. And I'm putting these flicks down in the direction of the hair here. So for example, it's mostly going along and down or a long and round or these hairs along here are going kind of down and round a bit or this way. And if using these flicks, I can mark all of these hairs in the right place. Now, not only will it make my life a lot easier as I work my way through the rest of the hair, but it's really creating, I guess kind of like the backbone of the hair drawing. So just to go through it again, what you want to be doing is pressing really nice and lightly, and gently brushing your pencil against the paper. I don't want to be making lots of really hard marks here. The whole point of drawing hair is you want it to be really soft. If you start pressing really hard with the pencil, then it'll end up making really kind of wiry marks and you won't have soft licking hair. So do you just want to make these flicks going in the direction of the hair? And as I've said before, it is so important to frequently sharpen your pencil. I need to take my pencil away very often to sharpen it, or I end up making really thick marks. And I'm not able to control as well where it's going. If you want to make soft hair, as they say, light marks and a really nice and sharp pencil. So for the most part, actually, this lady's hair is reasonably simple. On the most part, I would say it's going in pretty kind of consistent directions. It ever so slightly waves at the end. So here there's this quite light strand that's going all the way down, so I want to try and mark that in if I can. And then most of the rest of her hair is going kind of round and round or along here, it's going down and round. And then this section of hair here is going more in this direction. This hair is going in a different direction and it's much darker. We don't necessarily need to worry about that right now, but it is worth bearing in mind. And so once I've marked this in on the left hand side, I want to be doing the same to the right. And I think it is worth noting that you're not expecting this to be a masterpiece. It will look a little bit peculiar partly because she's just. Got really light hair, and that looks a bit odd. But beyond that, obviously it's not got any contrast really built up. So let's take a minute to look at the hair on this right hand side. Really look at the direction that it's going here 'cause it's slightly more complicated, there's a little bit more to it. So here at the top, you can kind of see this line along here where there's a slight fold obviously. Her hair on this side is also tucked behind her ear. There's also a dark line along here and a dark line along here and then lower down. Her hair is going a little bit wavy, so it's going in towards her face, then away from her face, and then it's kinking out at the end. And the hair all along here is following that same kind of wave even along here. But in actuality, you can see a lot of shapes in here which will be marking in with the next pencil where there's all these kind of triangular shapes. These triangular kind of shadows, this one's particularly prominent. So I will want to mark all of these in the hair along here is going in a different direction. This is going more like straight down or straight down and to the right, so in an opposite direction to this part here. So once I've got all of this marked out, and it's a little bit easier to see what will need to go where, what I want to be doing is thinking about the next darkest color. So we're going to gradually work our way from these very light colors down towards the darker colors. And actually the next darkest color I would say is the reddish brown. We've used it a lot in the skin particularly, but I can also see it in the hair. Her hair is not necessarily a simple brown. It's actually quite a complicated color, Phil. So I'm going to use the burnt sienna again to mark in even more detail. So I really want to be looking at what can be seen within the hair. And actually I think this section at the top is probably the easiest. So you can see in here that there are these lines, these darker lines coming up through the hair. All along here, here, here, there's all of these lines. So I want to be marking these in. You can see along this line on the underside here, it really does have a reddish brown look to it. Some areas I definitely think do more than others along here, it kind of looks like a gray line. And on here as well, the way that the light is hitting makes it look a little bit gray. But for now, we want to focus on that brown and really add in these red tones and get everything properly, more marked out. So really, on the most part, it is a case of doing the same thing again. So we're able to follow the direction of the hair, so we can see that it's going in this kind of angle. And I want to be adding in these lights and darks. So adding in all of those little lines that I showed you cutting through the lighter section, but there's also a few darker bands going through her hair. So as I say, this dark band running through here, this dark band running through here. And there's also, I would say it's a darker band running along the top here. So I want to carry on with the flicking motions, but just building up quite a lot of color along those bands. Then we will be adding some much darker colors here. This, again, is a case of me wanting to get my bearings. It is worth briefly talking about the parting 'cause partings are often, I think they're one of the most important parts of drawing hair. If the parting looks wrong, I think the whole thing looks wrong. So you can see that the hair is, it's not a very clear parting and it's kind of going up and along. So there's quite a few of these kind of little curved lines going up and along all the way along, particularly this left hand side and then there's quite a big piece of hair here, so I want to mark those in. And then once you've done that, as well as adding the same on the other side, although kind of less prominent, what I really want to do is make it darker. When we move on to the next section, we'll tone down this a lot so it doesn't look as bright. But for now I just want to focus on putting those kind of curved lines in so it's carry on working down the hair. And I think it in many ways gets easier as I move away from the top. The top does have some very clear lights and darks to it, but lower down here I can make some softer flicks. And I'm really just looking for any areas that need to be made a little bit darker, any darker patches of the hair. So there actually isn't a huge amount of really clear marks, not as clear as the top. There are these sort of strips here. You can see a darker strip here, a darker strip here, a darker strip here. And there's a darker strip along here and either side of this light strand that I mentioned. And it's generally darker around this patch, but around here is where it gets much darker. And that is essentially all I'm thinking about for this section, is making those flicks and making those areas darker. You can see already it starts to look quite nice and soft like hair, but there's definitely a lot more we're going to want to build up. So let's look at the hair on the other side. And here I got to be careful, because the hair is so dark, where it is up against the face, I need to be making some really nice crisp lines around the edge of her face. But I also want to add a certain amount of flicking motion. So you can see I'm making these flicking motions to a point, but then I'm just lightly shading from there because I don't want to risk accidentally adding marks all over her face. So now on this right hand side, I've marked in that line that I mentioned before where She clearly is putting her hair behind her ear. So I've marked in that line, and then I'm going to add quite a lot of shading up to that. That's quite a dark section and the same generally along the top. As I mentioned, I want to be focusing on adding those curved lines along her passing. It's still not looking great at this point, but that's okay. And then I can start working down by her face again. You can see that I've put a line along the edge of her face. I'm shading gently up to that line so it's really nice and crisp. But just below that I can add those flicking motions to really build this up. And then I'm going to work along the rest of her hair at the bottom here. So as I mentioned, it's much darker in this area here. And I really want to start building up these lights and dark triangles, all these darker strips that I mentioned, all these triangular kind of shapes, it's much lighter along here. But then there is again some darker shading particularly around this area and these kind of triangle shapes that are going up here. And there's this line going along here and there's some darker shading along here. So I just want to try and follow those shapes the best I can. It doesn't necessarily need to look perfect, but I just want to try and get things marked out as much as possible. And then once I'm happy that I've got these main parts marked out, what I want to start doing is building up darker colors. So as I mentioned, particularly those bands around the top, I can see some gray. So let's move on to the warm, darker gray. And I'm not going to add a huge amount of this. I am once again adding flicking motions, but I wouldn't say this gray is everywhere on her hair. I can particularly see it along the bottom here. You see that has a slight gray tone to it as well as along the bottom of this patch of light. And on the other side up here as well. And there's a lot of gray around this section, But beyond that I feel like I can see a little bit of it around here, a little bit of it around here. But what I don't want to do is overdo it. So you can just see in a few patches. I've lightly added some of this gray. I think it's something that we probably will want to add to a little bit later on. I think it would look peculiar if we didn't put any in, but it's not a really sort of prominent color, I wouldn't say. Now at this point I built up a really good framework for all of the hair, but let's really add to the shadows now. Really build up those darkest values. So I'm going to use the walnut brown for this. As I've mentioned before, this is the darkest brown in my set. And I want to be using this to go over mostly those darkest values, although I can also go over the lighter areas and just very gently build up some of this color so it's not too prominent. But also it just slightly changes the tone of what's there. So I'm really going over the same areas again. So I can go over, for example, this piece of hair on her face, which you'll notice is darker at the end and lighter in the middle. And I'm also just going over all of those darker patches. Now this is all made a lot easier because I've already built up a lot of the framework with the other colors. So I want to be going over the darker areas. Still lightly, flicking my pencil, and you can see it's not looking really dark because I'm pressing quite lightly and I still feel like I'm getting my bearings with her hair. I don't want to press really hard with the pencil because I do want to be able to change things. I want to check that everything looks about right Before I build up more of the color. I am thinking that I might need to add a little bit of black to her hair, just in the absolute darkest places, because I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get the worn up brown to be as dark as I'd like it to, but I'm going to think about that in the next section. For now, I think it's really just a case of building up the hair and getting it all marked out. You can see that we're building up a really good texture here that it will be able to add to, but I can't stress enough. I'm doing exactly the same as I have so far. So you can see again, over marked in the edge of her face and I'm just very carefully shading along it before flicking up into that shaded area and just gently going over all of these darkest areas that I marked in, particularly with the burnt sienna judge. So by the end of this section, you should have actually a reasonably finished looking lady. She just looks way too muted. She needs to have a less pale looking face and her hair needs really increasing the contrast. But we've certainly got something that is going to be easier to build upon, and I think that the hardest parts of the drawing are now finished. 14. Brighten up and Adjust the Colors of the hair: What I want to do now is focus on making the hair brighter and having more contrast. Right now, it looks very nicely marked out, but it's also very washed out. So I'm starting here with the black pencil. And what I'm wanting to do is put this in the absolute darkest areas. And you'll notice that I'm not worrying so much here about flicking motions. What I'm now focusing on is just trying to get down some smooth coverage. I'm more using the circular motions like we used for the skin, and it's just making the area darker. So let's take a quick minute to look at the reference photo and really notice where these darkest areas are in the hair. So I'm particularly looking all along here. All around here, as well as this section. This section is also pretty dark along here. And then on the other side, it's around her face, around here, around the, just below her cheek, all around here, and a little bit around the bottom. Those are the main areas that I am wanting to put this black. Now, you may notice that right now it's looking very, very kind of stark. I feel like it looks very unnatural in comparison to the rest of her hair. Particularly, mostly because she has brown hair. And I think adding black into here is just, it's too much in comparison to the brown. But the reason that I'm using the black is the next darkest color in my set of pencils is the walnut brown, which is a very dark brown but it's not dark enough. So what I can do is go around the hair, put black down. And then once I have got all of these darkest values in, I can go over it with the brown and it will make it look more like a dark brown rather than a black. So don't worry that it looks so harsh at the moment it will come out. So you can see that here. I'm back to using flicking motion. So I am using a mixture areas like this section at the top where it needs to have quite a sort of gentle start and finish to the section. I don't necessarily want it with such a dark pencil. Just shade in here. I think it's easier to use these little flicking motions, and then it makes it look a bit less harsh. So now I'm happy with that left hand side. I'm going to move onto the right hand side, and as I said, this area here is where I particularly want to be building up some of this black. And I'm again, doing a mixture of flicking motions and also just some light shading. You can see that here I am just really blocking this area in. I am still pressing lightly. I'm not pressing hard here because if I press hard, it's gonna make it very difficult for me to build more color up on top of here. And that's what I particularly want to do. As I said, I particularly want to build the brown on top of this black once I've added in all the black, all of those darkest areas. So by the time that I've filled in the black, it looks something like this. So as I say, it looks a little bit odd. But we can use this as a basis to carry on building up a lot of the other colors. So I don't want to forget to go down the side of her eye here. This is really helping to frame her face and I also don't want to forget to go over this area at the top. So I've talked a lot about this area. This is the crease where she's put her hair behind her ear. And I want to go over the other side of her parting again. As I've mentioned, the parting is so important when you're trying to create realistic looking hair. And I don't think it's looking quite right yet. So let's move on to that worn up brown now. And I want to particularly focus on, as I say, going over the black. Now I am not only going over the black, but I'm also going a little bit further than just over the black. So for example here I'm going over that black, but then also going a little bit over the light patch and you can see how nice it's making the brown look. It's taking away that too harsh black and it's just adding a really nice rich dark brown. And you'll notice again that I'm doing this with flicking motions, particularly in this top section. I do it less in the bottom, but at the top, up here, I feel like it's just so clear. It seems to be a little bit more in focus. And the hair just looks more crisp up here. So I want to build it up with the flicking motions, but I can always shade over the top of it in a little while, so I'm literally going to work my way around going over those black areas, really smoothing it all out and just toning down the black. Maybe toning down some of the lighter areas. And then once I've done, I'm pretty happy now with the top section, I can start focusing on the black around here. And generally here, for example, I'm going to fill in this whole section of hair. It all looks too muted. It doesn't need to be as dark as the black, but it certainly needs to have more shading on it than what I've got at the moment. So just toning down all of those light areas. And then I can start moving onto here. I added a very small amount of black to this area. But I do also just want to build up some of the brown hair, still lightly flicking back and forth with the pencil, and I can just gradually build up the brown a bit more. As I say, her hair in the photo looks brown. But right now I feel like it's looking a bit more blond. So I do want to make it look a lot. Darker and a lot richer. And this is looking a lot better already. So let's carry on on the other side, really building this up. And here I am, smoothing out the parting so I do want to go over the black that I added up here. But I'm focusing more here on going over this with small circular motions. As you can see, I think it looks a little bit too kind of wiry at the moment. And I want to smooth it all out so I can just gradually add a very light layer. I'm also shading over the parting itself at the back here because it's not as light as the parting at the front. I want it to be a little bit less obvious. And I will add to that parting more as we go. It's still not looking quite right, but that's okay. We can keep coming back to that. So once I've gone over all of the brown sections, I've made all of this a little bit, sort of toned down on the black, but also tone down the lighter sections a bit so that they're not as bright. What I want to be doing is thinking about the next most obvious color that I think is missing in her hair. So I'm going to move on here to the warm gray, the darker, warm gray. And I'm going back over these gray sections that I mentioned previously. So towards the bottom, particularly of the light patches, it just looks more gray than anything else to me. So I'm going to work over these areas with circular motions. I want to tone it down and add to that gray, particularly this patch at the top, I think is the main area that has that gray tone. I'm not going over this hard, I'm going over it reasonably lightly with circular motions. You can see that it still looks like a patch of light up here, but it looks a bit more natural. It's a more subtle look. And I'm also going to go over the parting another time, make that a little bit darker. And then let's go over along the bottom here as well. And I'll put it in a few other places. Like I want to tone down this very light strip. I'm not using too much of this pencil and I'm pretty much only using it with the circular motions. But there are a few areas that I think maybe just need a little bit of toning down and do have that slight gray to them. A lot of the same areas that I pointed out earlier in the last section. So I can go over the front, passing here, the middle here. This does really have a warm gray tone to it. And the same generally around here and all along the top, all here, there's this gray to it. So let's just fill in these few areas. And then I can once again be thinking about what the main color is that's missing. So I want to compare my drawing to the reference photo, and I think there's quite a few areas, particularly on the lighter patches that have a kind of, I guess a blonde ginger tone to it. So what I'm drawing here looks almost a bit black and white now in her hair, whereas particularly around here, it's kind of got this, There's a certain almost mousy brown tone to it. And I think the closest color to this is the raw Umber. So let's switch back to this pencil. This, I feel like most of the color that we added down before has been lost. It's all been covered up by the browns and the grays. So I want to bring it back, make it a bit more vibrant. Now, I am still going over this nice and lightly, but you can see how just putting down a small amount of this pencil is actually brightening the whole thing up a lot. So I can just add in these light circular motions to any areas where I can see a hint of this color. So again, particularly along the bottom of this dark strip up here, and actually I want to go lightly over a lot of the bottom of the hair. You can see that I'm not pressing hard here and I'm not putting a huge amount down, but it is making a huge difference to the color. And then I think once you start putting down color in this way, it becomes a lot easier to see what the main color is that's missing. I also think it becomes a lot easier to see what needs adding to various other areas like the face. So that will become easier as we move into the next section, sort of looking at the face in comparison to her hair. So now from here, the main color that I think is missing, the main thing that needs adding is reddish brown. That's kind of added a certain orangey yellow brown. But there are a number of areas that have a more red tone than that. So I can go back to the burnt sienna. You can see I'm still using these circular motions, so I'm not worrying about building up the texture at this point in actuality 'cause we're just adding a light layer over the top of what we've already got here. You can still see all of the texture we've previously built up. It's not removing that. It's just making what we've got richer. So I'm going over a lot of those darker areas and basically warming up the darker sections. I think that the raw umber is quite a kind of cold color, and that's not what I'm necessarily wanting to be adding at this point. I want to take what that raw umber did and warm it up, as they say. And I think when you compare the sides, you can see what huge difference it's making. Now, her hair is looking much better. I feel like it's looking more like brown hair rather than washed out blond hair. But I once again want to think about the main color I now think is missing. And actually I'm going to go back to that warm gray. Add a few sort of detailed flicks. So where we've added all of this light shading over the top, we can still see the main basis, the main underlying colors, but the sort of more prominent details I think have got a bit lost. So any darker flicks of hair going through here, do you just look a little bit too muted? So I can go back over here with flicking motions and a nice sharp pencil. Just going over those gray light sections. I'm not doing anything really drastic here. I just want to add in some extra subtle details. And I can add this into not only those areas, but some other areas that maybe I want to tone down a little bit. So for example, this light patch here. I'm just going to add some light flicking motions along here to tone it down a tiny bit and maybe along some of these areas here. And then from here I want to smooth it out, maybe a tiny bit, so I'm going to move on to that lighter, warm gray. And now with a reasonably firm pressure, I'm just going over these very light patches. So I'm kind of going back and forth with the pencil rather than circular motions or flicking motions. And as I say, I'm pressing quite firmly, just going along here and smoothing all of it out. And that's going to make those light patches blend a bit better into the rest of the hair. Now, let's not forget to do this on the areas down the bottom here. And then from here I want to warm everything up a little bit more. So comparing my drawing again to my reference photo, I think her hair looks a little bit too cold, so I'm going to use the pink. This is again, that pink that I used a lot on the skin and I'm just very lightly going over most of the areas of the hair. I think that drawing all of this hair in has shown that she needs warming up. Her skin also needs warming up, which we'll do in the next section. But her hair just needs to have a much warmer tone to it. And right now, I think it looks a little bit too cool. So once again, just lightly pressing, working in these circular motions to just add a hint of this color. I don't necessarily want her hair to look pink at the end of this. I just want it to have an ever so slight tone to it. And I do that on both sides. And then once I've done this, now the main thing that's jumping out to me is that a lot of the contrast has been lost, particularly where you look at that dark strip on the top of her head. It's just looking a little bit washed out now. So what I'm going to do is go back to the walnut brown pencil and I'm going to do exactly what I did earlier, so going over those darkest areas one more time. But this time the walnut brown will be kind of mixing with all of the other colors that I've built up. So the black is still there and will help this brown to be made dark enough. But also I can blend this brown and flick into the gray section to help blend it a bit better. With that, now I do want to be careful as to go along here. I don't want to make the parting look too kind of perfect. I think that's where a lot of the time partings end up not looking real. So I'll just gently flick along here again in the same way that I have before with those same kind of bent flicks and then actually I'm going to do the same on the other side. I really want to make sure that I get this parting looking right before I move on. So just adding these light little flicks like I did before. And once I've done that, I think I am going to shade over this with circular motions again like I did before. I just want to tone down the parting and make it a little bit less obvious. And then I can start really with quite a lot of pressure on here going around this section, this actually, particularly next to her face, I do want it to be very dark. And then I think once I've gone over both sides, I'm going to go back to the left. I think that there's quite a lot of this brown that needs to be further added to in the left. It's looking a little bit washed out again in some areas. So particularly along here where there's this very dark shadow, this isn't necessarily so much where her hair is, but I do think it benefits from having this brown built up. And I'm just going to add the odd kind of detailed flick around here. I think that, that just really helps bring the hair to life a little bit more. So by the time that I've gone over all of the hair, her hair is looking much, much better. It's looking more realistic and closer to the color of the hair in the reference. What I want to focus on from here is really making her skin look a lot more vibrant, is looking very pale and washed out in comparison to her hair. 15. Adjust the Skin Tones: Now what I want to focus on in this last section is really brightening up this lady's skin. She's looking way, way too pale at the moment. I also want to add in any final finishing touches. So before we get started on her skin, let's take a minute to fill in the strap of her top here. She's got a bit of a gap and she's missing a little bit of skin. So I'm just starting off by using, to begin with, my lightest, cool gray pencil. This is quite a cold gray top from what I can see. So filling that in, just blocking in the whole strap. And then here I've moved on to the darker, cold gray. And I just want to use this to mark in the main shapes. Now, it's important to remember that although we do want to try and get the strap looking as accurate as possible, certainly in comparison to the rest of her face, it's not as important. So it wouldn't spend absolutely ages doing this and I wouldn't worry about it. But let's just take a quick minute to look at the strap. See the main things that we want to be drawing here. So as I say, it is quite a cold gray strap. It's got these odd little patterns like these dark brown patterns on it. I'm noticing that there's a line going up the middle where there's a crease in it. So I want to draw that in with the darker gray pencil, and then I can mark in with maybe the brown, these patterns. But as I say, I'm not going to worry too much about getting this absolutely perfect because it's not one of the main focuses of the drawing. So actually, let's use the black here to just fill in this pattern at the top. And I'm making it so that there's the little dip in the middle. That's what I can see in the reference. And I'll also just go down the line in the center a little bit, make that a bit more defined and maybe very lightly go over the edge for a little bit of shadow. Then I've got something that looks like a strap. Whilst I'm here, I also haven't drawn in this section around here, so you can see a part of her top here and it's all kind of poking through her hair very lightly. I'm just going to very lightly mark that in with the black pencil here. So I'm just going to block this in kind of making some stripy marks. I don't want it to be all the same color. Some areas are much lighter because the hair is poking through or going over the top, but I'm just kind of blocking in where this top's going to be. And then from here, let's move onto the coral pencil. I want to mark in this skin. So fill in this patch very lightly, just like we always have done before. Before moving onto the burnt sienna pencil Again, going over the top of this, I'm really just wanting to build up some sort of skin tone here that we can adjust in a little while. So I'm generally happy that I've got everything marked in. Let's focus on brightening up her face. And I'm starting here again with that coral pencil, that lightish skin color pink. And I'm just going to go over all of the darker areas of her skin. So now I am still going about this in the same way that we always have. I still want to be gradually building up her skin tone. I don't want to be going in really hard at this point. We will a bit later on, but not yet. And I'm just very, very lightly going over all of these darker areas. So you can see that I'm once again holding the pencil about halfway down, so that I'm not pressing too hard. And I'm also working in some small circular motions to try and still get this as smooth as possible. And I think it helps to make sure that you have a nice and sharp pencil. Now the reason that I'm particularly using the pink is right now, the main thing that is standing out to me about her skin is she looks too pale and she kind of looks too cold. All of the colors of her skin are just looking very, very cool. And actually, when I compare my drawing to the reference, she does look much warmer. I feel on that reference, and you can see how bit by bit going over this over and over again is making her whole skin brighten up. It is not looking as dull or as cold. So, because I'm working on the skin, all is one. Now I've gone over the whole of her face. I also want to go over her neck. If I work on these two skin tones separately with the adjusting, I think there's a risk that it won't match at the end. And that's obviously not what I'm wanting to do, so I can go over both shoulders as well. And then once I've gotten over all of her skin, once again with this pink, I want to be thinking about what the main color is that's missing. So at this point, I feel like a lot of her skin, particularly the more shadowed areas aren't shadowed enough. A lot of the contrast has been lost. So, for example, down the side of her face here, there is a reasonably prominent shadow created from her hair. I want to very lightly be using the walnut brown, this darker brown to go over these areas. Now, once again, you'll see that I'm holding the pencil pretty far back. I made sure that I've got a really nice and sharp pencil, and I'm still pressing lightly. It is so important to press lightly. And once I've gone over the side of her face, I can go back over this shadow created from her hair that is still there, but it's looking far too muted. And I'm also going to see if there's any other areas that I think would benefit from being made a little bit darker. So for example, around the edge of her forehead, particularly where her forehead is meeting her hair, it's a less Clear and stark line than you might expect. Kind of the forehead fades into the hair. So I want to be building up quite a lot of extra shading in this area, all the way around, and even to where her parting is around here. And then I'm also going to add some of this color around the darker patch of her nose. So along kind of the bridge of her nose, the edge of her nose and around some of her smile line, something around her mouth here isn't looking quite right at the moment. So let's add a little bit of shading. And you can see that's kind of making it look like she's got an extra, not too firm a shadow around here. So you can see that adding this pencil isn't making a huge difference. I'm not really wanting to be making any huge differences very quickly. At this point, I want to gradually build up some more of the contrast. Gradually make her face look a little bit less pale. But I certainly don't want to be just adding in loads of color and risking making shadows in the wrong place or making her face darker than it needs to be. So build up a little bit of this pencil around here as well. I do think under the eyes is generally maybe darker than you might expect. If you really look at it, it is darker than you might think. And let's build up over the top of the eye as well. Around here. Again, this is much more shadowed than you might expect, maybe partly because of her makeup. But as always the rule is I can see it in the reference. So I do want to build up to that point. And then once I'm happy with around the eyes, I'm going to add a little bit more of this brown in any other shadowed areas. So for example, along her cheek bone around here. And I'm also going to go all under her chin around here as I have filled in before. And then it's likely add some shading around her. Is it her kind of smile lines, I guess around here? I don't want that to be too harsh and then I can add a little bit more definition around her chin. So adding some extra shading, particularly around the edge, I think is where it's missing. Now I do find when it gets to this point of a drawing that I just focus on what I think is the most obvious thing that's missing each step of the way. So for example, right now I think that the most obvious thing that's missing is she hasn't got a strong enough shadow under her chin. And that's stopping her face from being as defined as I think it should be. So I can fill in a lot of the shading around here, really following the reference, looking at how there's that lighter strip running through the middle that I've mentioned before. And then once I've done that, then I can see that a lot of the rest of her chest needs some extra shading. And I want to really gradually build this up. And then after that I want to be adding to her shoulders. I would say that this is probably my favorite part of a drawing. I think it's where it all comes together. A lot of the, in my opinion, really hard work of marking out all of the shapes, getting everything in the right place. That's all done and it's just the fun finishing parts and I do find that particularly satisfying. So once they've built up the worn up brown, the darker brown on both shoulders, from here, I can once again think about the main color that's missing. And actually when I look at the reference, particularly around here and around here, you can see a kind of light brown color. It's very much got a hint of the raw umber. And in fact, once you kind of get your eye in and you can see it around here, you'll also realize that it's around a lot of other places. Just generally, I can see a little hint of raw umber anywhere that isn't particularly bright. So I can start very lightly beginning with under the eyes, but working my way around her whole face with this color, and just very, very lightly building up a hint of it. I don't want it to be really, really strong in color, but I do think it's taking that pink edge off and giving her a bit more color in a slightly more earthy way. The problem, specifically with the set of pencils that I've got is there aren't really that many kind of skin tone colors. Specifically, I think if you're wanting to get a skin tone color that is more on the pinker side, I simply don't have it. So what I need to do is build that color up very, very lightly, but also add a series of mostly browns over the top of that to hopefully get to this lady's skin color. And you can see how quickly it is changing her skin color. Now once again, what I do to her face, I want to do the same to her neck and her shoulders. And then from here I want to move on to the warm gray, the darker warm gray. I feel like once again, this shadow down the side of her face has got a little bit lost. It's not quite looking prominent enough now. I am still working lightly here. But you will probably start finding at this point that we've built up so much pencil on the paper that you will need to press a little bit harder. Not hard by any stretch, but a little bit harder so that you are still able to see the color. So let's use this pencil to not only fill in the shadow on the left hand side of her face, I also want to go over the shadow where the hair is going over her forehead here. And I'm also going to add some of this gray around. For example, this patch up here where it needs to be a little bit darker. Where the hair is meeting her forehead, Judge, and anywhere else where I very, very lightly now want to be adding a slight bit more shadow. So now, although I would say that I am pressing harder maybe than I was, I am by no means pressing hard. You'll see that I'm still not holding the pencil near the tip. I am still holding it a bit further back. Because I by no means want to be going in with full force. But I also do want to make sure that the color goes down so we can see something. So I'm working my way over her face. Going over those same shadowed areas that I went over a second ago with the raw umber. Maybe just slightly toning down that raw umber, I want to have a kind of undertone of that brownish color. But also I find that raw umber has a slight yellowish tone to it that I don't so much want on her skin a kind of yellowy orange. So I can use this gray to reduce that. And I'm also going to use the gray to just add a bit of extra shading around the lady's lips. As I mentioned a little bit earlier in this section, her lips look slightly wrong to me. And I think it is, literally because this shading, particularly around the right hand side, isn't quite right. There's not quite enough of it that's looking much better to me already. And then let's once again go over her neck around here. And then at this point, I want to begin thinking about smoothing out her face so I'm looking particularly at some of the lighter patches. And what I'm going to do here is use the white pencil. Now, you may notice that at this point I am pressing much, much harder. What I'm doing here is blending all of those layers together and smoothing everything out. Now to begin with, I'm only focusing on doing this on the lighter patches, but we will do it to the rest of the face in a little while. I think it's just going to be a bit easier to see what needs to go were once these lighter patches are marked in, I think that her general face is the right color. Now you can see how much it's smoothing out her skin. You'll also notice that it is lightening up. What we've got here a little bit is by no means making her skin bright white. But it is lightening all of those browns and pinks that we added in just a little bit. And I'm literally gonna go over all of the light patches, so down the side of her chin here as well as on this light patch on her neck around here and down the bottom. And now I've added that in. I think again, it makes it a bit clearer to see what else I need to add. So at this point, I think the more shadowed areas just need to be kind of warmed up, but also they need some basic shading adding in. There's not a huge amount of color that I necessarily want to add to them, so I'm going to add some more of the lighter warm gray. And just go over all of her face except for those light areas down the side of her face here. I am using that firm pressure because I do want to smooth this area out now. And because this area down the side of her face needs to be quite dark, I feel happy and able to do that down the side. So it's also add some firm shading under her chin here, but then some lighter shading from that point. And I'm also going to add some firm shading with this pencil under her nose just to smooth that out. All of these areas that are a little bit darker, this is a good pencil to blend it out. But then on some of the lighter areas, I just want to lightly add some more. So for example, in the middle of her bridge of her nose here, I'm going to add this pencil and around the edge of her forehead where it meets her hair. We added quite a lot of extra pencil here, but then I'm also just going to lightly add the pencil in a few other places. Let's build up some of the pencil on this shadowed area as well. And I think it's really helping to shape her face a little bit better. And obviously it's adding that little extra bit of color to her. So let's do the same to the area underneath. I want to apply some firm pressure to this shadowed patch, actually a few places down the bottom. Now she is looking a little bit, maybe too harsh, I think it looks a bit too much. So what I'm going to do is go back to that white pencil and firmly apply pressure over all of these areas. You can see it's lightening up that tiny bit but also blending it into the light patches. And also it is smoothing out heskin a little bit more and I can't stress enough that it really is a very firm pressure that I'm using here if I want to be really smoothing this out properly and completely. I do need to be pressing pretty hard now. I feel like once I've done this, once again her skin is looking a little bit too pale. And although we can't put loads more pencil over the top, once we've burnished here, we can put a little bit more. So let's go back to that pink and very lightly put this over the top. You can see that her skin still looks nice and smooth. It looks much more skin like, but this is just brightening it up. It's not changing that at all. So let's go over the whole of her skin with this pink and just slightly brighten it. And then the main thing that's standing out to me is that her lips look too pale. So let's use brighter red to begin with to really go back over this, all of those darker areas whilst avoiding the lighter areas for now, maybe add a very, very light coating to it, but I don't want to lose that lighter patch. And then the most obvious thing that's missing to me is that her eyes look too pale. So I'm going to go back to that greeny blue that I used at the very beginning and just lightly go over her eyes, avoiding the light patch. And then I once again want to think about the most obvious thing that's missing here. And actually under her eyes, there's a little hint of purple that I haven't really added in at this point. So let's very, very lightly add in some purple both underneath and a little bit over the top as well. All around here you'll see there's a hint of purple to her. Maybe her eye shadow is a little hint of purple and that's just brightening up and adding a little bit more color to her eyes again. And then I just continually want to be comparing my drawing to the reference. So from here I think that she's missing an extra little bit of pink. There's a little bit more pink on her cheek around this point. So let's build that up a bit more and then let's switch back to the worn up brown because she hasn't got enough shading around the bottom of her eye here. Certainly something about her eyes wasn't looking right to me. And sometimes it takes just a few looks and maybe adding some extra colors like the purple, for example, to realize that what it needs is a little bit more shading. So particularly around the edge of her eye so that it's sort of lined a little bit better. And generally speaking, just like we did before, what I do to one side, I like to do the same thing to the other side. So let's just add a little bit more shading around the top here, for example, and around the corner of her eye. And then I want to be thinking about if there's any other area where I think would benefit from this worn up brown. So beyond filling in her eyebrow, maybe with a little bit of extra shading here. I'm also just going to slightly define the edge of her nose. I don't want to put a huge amount here, but it does need to be quite dark, particularly on the left hand side and in the nostril here. And then I'm just going to build up a little bit more of this color in this shadowed area. I've talked a lot about this shadowed area. I really want it to be built up correctly so that her hair fits in well with her face. So let's lightly go over this patch, up, the top up here, maybe back around these areas, these little shadowed areas around her lips. And I'm also going to go back over this part. I think this shadow where we added in all of that extra shading with the warm gray, I don't know. I think it looks a little bit too gray and it benefits from having a little bit of brown put over the top of it to warm it up, maybe a little bit. Let's do the same to the shoulders. They're also maybe looking a bit cold. And then I'm going to go back to the lighter, more skin color, pink around just underneath her lips. It's actually got slightly more of a pinky tone. I find that a lot around the bottom of lips, it generally is a bit pinker around here. So let's build up a bit more of the pink, just nice and lightly over the top. And actually I'll put this over quite a few of the shadowed areas just to brighten her up one more time. Now I'm going to maybe adjust her lips a little bit, make them a brighter pink. Not forgetting to add in that line down the center of her lips. I'm doing it with the pink and then going over it very lightly with the worn up brown. And then I can use the white pencil to maybe tone it down a tiny bit and just lightly go over all of the lighter areas of her lips, really smooth out that shine. And then the final thing I want to do is add in all of the baby hairs. I'm doing this with the worn up brown pencil 'cause that's the main color on the reference photo on the hair. And I'm just very, very lightly, with a really sharp pencil going round and adding in these flicks from the edge. Now I do think it helps to follow the reference on this. So for example, around the top of her head, you will notice that the hairs in the reference are going in this direction. They are kind of flicking up and coming round. I think because the baby hairs need to be pretty random, it's hard to do that just off the top of your mind. I think it's easier to fill in the baby hairs whilst having a bit of a guide from the reference, but after adding in all of these baby hairs, that is it. 16. Summary: All right, and that is the end of this course. I hope it is now much clearer to see how you can create portraits with color pencils. So to begin with, you want to make sure that you have the right materials, specifically the right paper. And from there you want to take the time to select the right reference, making sure that you've got a photo at eye level with really nice contrast. From there, you want to take the time to map out your sketch. Get everything marked in the right place, a nice and light sketch. And from there, you can gradually start mapping things out and building up the colors. Starting by mapping out the eyes and then moving onto the rest of the face, kicking all of the features in the right place. From there, you can brighten up the colors, really build everything up before moving on to mapping out the hair and brightening that up. Then finally, you can move back to the skin and add in all of the final vibrancy. Please do review this course. I would love to know what you think and I'll see you in the next course.