A Pencil Drawing of My Sister

You probably don't know yet that I am taking IGCSE Art in my school this year. Since this blog is all about me being real and not being shy, I've decided to take a huge step and show a piece of work I did for homework last week. It's not my best, and since it's still only the beginning of school and I'm not so used to drawing so often yet, you'll have to excuse me if it doesn't look that amazing. But hey, this is me!

I took pictures of my progress over the few hours I took to do this. My first picture is of the slightly-more-than-basic outline of the drawing, done with a 2B pencil. You can even still see the guidelines I used! I didn't draw on the glasses because I had to get the eyes right first. I did this by imagining what she would look like in the photo without the glasses on. 
The biggest challenge, though, was the mouth. I've never really drawn anyone with teeth before, so I basically just did the best I could. I drew the shape outline of the mouth, and then drew in the lips. After that I drew the outline of the teeth. This is the just the outline stage, so I didn't start on the details of the teeth and lips.

This next step, I added the glasses (which is more difficult than it looks!). 

In this next step, I added some more shading. I tried to make the hair more accurate and I started shading in the headband and the glasses and the neck. All this shading I still did with my 2B pencil in case I made a mistake.    

Finally I started shading with a 6B! I finished off the glasses, the eyes, the headband, and the ear.

 In this next picture, I shaded in the hair and some parts of the face. The first layer of shading I did with my 2B (I am very afraid of mistakes!), and then deepened the darkest parts of the hair with my 6B pencil.
 

Finally I got to shading the shoulders, neck, and backpack strap. Once again, I did this with a 2B and then layered over some 6B pencil shading. I tried to get the depth of the individual folds of the shirt, and that was quite difficult.

At last, I added the last few finishing touches to my drawing. I fixed up most of the shading and finished my teeth. I was surprised at how difficult that was! All this I did with my 6B because I was running out of time and I would have needed the 6B pencil anyway. 

And that was it! I had finished my drawing. Yay! My art teacher noticed a few things as we was evaluating my work the next day in class:

1.  The face was a bit shorter and fatter than in the picture. My art teacher gave me advice and told me that I should stand up and compare the pictures from a distance in the first five to ten minutes of the drawing to compare the outline and shape of the faces. He didn't make me fix this because it would have ruined all that time spent on homework.
2. I didn't add the background. My art teacher suggested I use "artistic license" to not make the darkest parts of the background as dark as they are in the photo. This is to bring out the depth of the shading of the face. He still suggested that I should add the background, though, but with a 2B pencil in order to keep it as soft as possible.
3. The folds of the shirt are not as clear and defined as in the picture. I need to go over the shirt and fix the mistakes to add depth to each individual fold as it is in the picture.

Well yeah, it was okay. It's not the best piece of work I've done, but it was definitely good practice to get myself into the school year habits of how to draw well and how to draw portraits and all. It also helped me to develop technique on drawing teeth and  a smile, as well as drawing glasses.

All I can say now is: my sister was much more difficult to draw than I though she was going to be! :)