Drawing requires practice and time

As with any art drawing is a discipline that requires practice to learn. And the more you practice and learn different techniques, you can focus more on the details, which is where a drawing makes a difference. You need to get the basics, before jumping into the more detail techniques. As a self-taught artist I learned all this process myself, through several years.

This is one of my first drawings. It was done about 5 years ago, when I started exploring drawing people portraits. I had the basic ideas of shadowing, blending, face expression and values. However I lacked of a lot of detail. I didn't use different pencils (I only used 2B for the whole drawing) and basically blended with my fingers. It was good for a very simple sketch, however it was quite far from my goal of a more realistic technique.

I made the drawing on the left about 3 years ago. By this time I started using a wider variety of pencils, from 2H to 6B (still graphite). As you can see I had a better use of shadows and values, as well as more details on face, eyes and mouth.

I had started to learn that the more detail and time I put on the drawing the better it would look. But I also learned that I needed to learn a lot more about pencils, blending techniques, and detailed features of the face to be able to draw a realistic portrait.

You can see my latest work on the gallery, where you can see that time and patience pays off. I will be sharing more of my self-learned techniques in future posts.

Please comment, share and contact me if you find this posts interesting and you would like to learn more about realistic pencil drawing techniques.