My Other Animal Drawings

Since my last blog post was dedicated to my pet portrait assignment I would like to continue this animal topic by showing you a few of my other animal drawings and sketches. I hope you will love them.

You can find more animal drawing posts here
Drawing a pet portrait
Panda bears drawings
American wildlife illustrations
Drawing a wolf and a fox
Drawing of a lion

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Drawing a Pet Portrait

Today I would like to tell you about my last assignment which evoked sad feelings in my heart. A woman from the USA wanted to make a gift to her husband whose beloved dog had recently died. The woman wanted me to make a portrait of her husband with his favorite pet. The dog had been their family’s faithful friend for some 8 years. It’s better to say this animal was a part of the family. I lost my dog too not so much time ago and I realize all that bitterness the guy and his family feel.

I googled for statistics regarding children who have pets to find out that kids taking care of animals are more self-reliant, more sociable, less selfish and they are happier and healthier in comparison to those children who aren’t that lucky to have pets in their homes. Isn’t it amazing how God has created a human being? We feel happy when we have someone to care about and love. We love our pets and our hearts get filled with the most useful feeling which actually makes us humans. Pets are sometimes our most faithful and sincere friends. Have you ever seen how a dog rejoices when its master pats it and rubs behind its ear? A pet needs only a little attention to be happy and it responds with true faith and love. The Bible says that God has entrusted animals into human’s care and having pets in our homes is like making a little contribution into God’s will execution. It’s a tragedy when your pet dies. But we ought to always remember that little creature which gives us all it has for that little attention we can offer.

Well, let’s leave alone these sad thoughts and return to this pet portrait assignment of mine. The woman who wanted this original gift for her husband did not happen to have a picture of her husband with the dog appropriate for drawing a portrait. All she could offer was two separate photos of the man and the dog. But it was enough for me to draw a pet portrait the client was absolutely happy with. So these are those pictures I received (I reduced their resolution):

I am not going to just show you the final pet portrait at once. Many people ask me about how to draw a portrait from a photo and I want to provide a little description of this pet portrait drawing stages.

Pet Portrait Drawing Stage 1

Setting outlines and building the portrait composition on the A3 sheet with 1х1 cm. (0.4 x 0.4 in.) grid (used drawing tool: 5Н pencil).

Pet Portrait Drawing Stage 2

Preliminary application of tones and halftones by means of cross-hatching (yes, this is my favorite technique for portrait drawing). Since I had little time to accomplish the portrait I did not use layer by layer tone enhancement as I usually do (used drawing tool: 2Н pencil).

Pet Portrait Drawing Stage 3

Further tones putting all over the portrait with setting off the image details. Creating background.

Pet Portrait Drawing Stage 4

The last stage. Enhancement of tones and halftones, emphasizing the main details with simultaneous softening of the minor elements. Special attention to eyes drawing and elaboration of the traits and face features which reveal resemblance to the models on the supplied original photos (used drawing tool: 2B pencil).

I hope you like this portrait and I would appreciate your comments here.

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Want a free portrait?

I want to tell you how I decided to draw free portraits from photos on Facebook and show you a few free portraits drawn by me (they are shown below this post)

Being a portrait artist I have to practice in portrait drawing almost non-stop to maintain my professional skills. Since I do not always have a possibility to draw from a model but I need to keep on practicing (even despite lack of free time), I got accustomed to draw portraits from photos. People often question me what it takes to be a professional portrait artist or ask me for tips about how to draw like me. Well, I always emphasize importance of practicing. As you might have read in my previous posts I actually do not have a special art education. I am just an engineer who had to do a lot of technical drawings and other engineering stuff. When I realized that I was good at drawing not only machinery but other things as well I began leaning basic drawing techniques and…yes, I practiced and practiced and practiced…

Of course, I am always happy when people order custom portraits and I have a chance to practice but it happens not that often as I wished to as the majority of orders I receive consists mostly of illustrations and logos. Therefore after having made free and paid portraits for my friends I thought why not to draw portraits of people from different countries. When this thought came into my mind I had already registered my Facebook account. My first objective was to find some people related to style and fashion industry to show them my fashion illustrations (I will tell about my fashion art in my later posts). I must confess that Facebook really alleviates search for desired people. Thus in just a month or so I had made friends with some three hundreds people whose business niche pertains to fashion design. Some of them turned to be very beautiful people. When I browsed their pictures many of them made me want to draw their portraits. Well, I thought why not to create a group on Facebook where I would draw free portraits of group’s members. I decided to name the group: "I will draw your portrait FREE OF CHARGE, friends!". I put the “friends” word as at first I envisaged that I would draw free portraits for my friends who I invited into the group. But I forgot that I was able to invite a few hundreds of people who had become my fans on my Facebook fan page and many of them were not even my friends. And likewise people who come to my page from outside Facebook would also be willing to have a free portrait drawn for them. But I did not want to remove this "friends" word as I wished to make as many friends as possible from all over the world and I accept all friendship requests which are, by the way, advisable to be sent to me since I would need to have access to your page on Facebook to check out which of your photos are appropriate to draw a portrait from.

So I have recently created the group on Facebook which members’ photos I use to draw free portraits from and to practice my portraiture drawing skills. Using this occasion I also started my fund-raising campaign since I have to invest some money into my freelance business and I want to by some professional equipment like a large Wacom Intuos 4 Graphics Tablet. In my group description I described the rules and mentioned that I would be happy if someone was willing to donate. Donations are not mandatory and I do not bug people about them. Actually there is none who made a donation so far…lol. Therefore I decided not to bother myself with this fund-raising idea any more and better focus on portraits drawing. The rules of the group are quite simple. I browse profiles of the members of the group to pick up a random photo to draw a free portrait. I also choose a style of the portrait on my own, hence this is not a custom portrait. I can even draw a caricature if I wish to (yes, free stuff cannot always be what you wished it to be, but at least you and your friends are likely to have a lot of fun). And you can always ask me to remove your portrait from the group if you do not like it to be there for some reason (nobody asked me for the portrait removal so far as everybody seems to love what I am doing). That’s pretty much it. You can also read about my prices for custom portraits made in accordance with client's wishes and ideas in my group description and discussion page.

Alas, I have not much time to draw free portraits since I have some paid and pre-paid illustrations assignments in my schedule. That is the reason why I have managed to draw only a few free portraits for my group so far. But I try to use every free moment to draw portraits. Below are those few portraits I have drawn for my group for this moment. You also have a chance to have your free portrait drawn for you. All you have to do is to join my free portraits drawing group on Facebook and send me a friendship request. And we all will have a lot of fun together.

Here are a few free portraits I have drawn

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A Custom Greeting Card with a Portrait Can Be an Original Gift Idea

I and one of my friends were discussing an idea of creating custom greeting cards, postal cards and invitations with client’s portrait or caricature a few months ago. A thought crossed my mind that this kind of custom greeting cards could be a very cool and original gift idea. And my friend assured me it would be awesome to create something like this. He also suggested designing custom greeting and postal cards for specific nations (like using national costumes, various decorations characteristic to a specific nation).

We thought then that we should create some postal cards with beautiful Ukrainian women wearing national costumes and thus train my skills and experiment with design concepts. However, I was unable to squeeze the custom greeting cards design skills training into my tight schedule. The only chance to train the skills and see how a greeting card with a custom portrait of a client would look like was possible if I could find a customer who would wish to have this kind of unusual gift designed for him/her or for his/her friend. And guess what? I was lucky enough to find a custom greeting card wishing client in just a couple of weeks after this brilliant idea had struck my mind. So it was a guy who wanted an original and unique gift for his girl-friend from Germany. He gave me a number of pictures of the girl from a social media website where she had an account and had placed a few photos of herself. The guy wanted something simple: a greeting card with a kind of a vintage portrait and minimum of decoration. So I made the one (which I show right below this paragraph) in exact conformity with his wishes and requirements. He said the girl-friend was more that happy to receive such an unhackneyed gift. The guy and the girl-friend were very kind to give me permission to show this greeting card in my portfolios and blogs.

That’s how I got persuaded that a custom greeting card with a beautiful portrait is an interesting and unusual gift to be presented to a friend, a wife, a husband, a colleague or any other person on any occasion as a greeting card can be tailor-made in accordance to client’s wishes, ideas and visions. Furthermore, this customization allows conveying any kind of message or evoking a desired feeling in the person to which the gift is presented.

And this one below is my first experimental custom greeting card. I was planning to modify woman’s face and change body and clothing to look like any woman a client wants to be depicted on the greeting card. This one is like a default customizable model :)

Related posts:
Drawing a family portrait
Customized bookmarks

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Portraiture: Complicated Realistic Portraits

As you already know my biggest passion is drawing portraits. And I am always happy when people order me serious realistic portraits. No matter how I draw a portrait, either from a client's photo or from a model, I enjoy every single minute of this incomparable process of artistic creation. I also love the portrait drawing process because it requires minimal use of auxiliary software, or more often software is not needed at all. I appreciate artist’s soul and heart put in a portrait rather than artificial effects created with graphic editing software, that’s why I consider my portraits to be the brightest gems in my portfolio.

As you see I prefer using a pen and a pencil as my drawing tools.

You also may like:
Portrait of a Weeping African Woman

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Caricature: Developing My Skills in Caricature Drawing

Well, I consider myself to be not a big caricature artist as I mostly specialize in realistic portraits. However, I constantly keep on improving my skills in caricature drawing. And I do it using my favorite cross-hatching technique. Here are a few caricatures I want to show you. Hopefully, I will add more in the near future.

Jackie Chan Caricature

Ronaldinhio Caricature

Audrey Tautou Caricature

Albert Einstein Caricature

Bobby McFerrin Caricature

An Ordinary Italian Guy Caricature

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Portraiture: Adding a Little More Color

Sometimes I like adding more color to a portrait or its part to make it look a little more vivid.

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Portraiture: Female Portraits Part 1

Well, here we go. I will start with portraits. My favorite technique is cross-hatching though I can create portraits in other styles. My strong point is female portraits which you will see in this blog. And I have a lot of orders to create beautiful custom portraits from clients’ photos. Please, feel free to contact me if you need one.

You may also like:
Female fashion illustrations and sketches
Cylia

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Works Classification

Well, I’ve been thinking about how to classify my works here on the blog… Since I have quite a number of various illustrations and portraits, I thought it would be silly to show all my portraits in one post. So I decided to make define classification by means of title. The first part of a title will contain a classification element (for example “Portraiture:”) and the second one coming after the semicolon will be a descriptive element. I hope this will make the things more organized and you can use the search tool (upper right corner) to find what you want to whether it is portrait or illustration.

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Using This Blog as a Tool to Promote My Art

I am going to use this blog to advertise my services. I will show you some of my works here and will try to constantly update the blog with new illustrations, portraits and other visual art I create. I hope you will enjoy reading (or rather looking through) this blog. I believe that this blogging activity will be conducive to my self-promotion and spreading buzz about my humble person. And, of course, my primary goal is to find clients who would be interested in my illustration services.

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Starting Career as a Freelance Illustrator and Artist

Hello, dear visitors of my blog. My name is Igor Lukyanov. I am an illustrator, artist and graphic designer from Ukraine. I’ve recently started my career as a freelancer illustrator and artist after working for a web design company for some time. When I started my career as a graphic designer I had to learn how to create professional looking graphics by my own with only a few people who could help me with my study. Today things with graphic design education are much easier with option ranging from local graphic design training courses to online schools which offer graphic design degree just like normal art schools (I can't attest for the quality but it is an option). Fortunately, I managed to gain some decent experience but I never stop learning and striving to be a better artist, illustrator and graphic designer with every day. I understand that working as a freelancer gives me much more freedom in my creative activity as well as more clients and positive experience of communicating with various interesting people from over the world. It was amazing to find out that my illustrations, portraits and graphics are highly demanded and appreciated. Having realized the fact that my talent can bring me more success through independent work, and that working as a freelancer illustrator can be conducive to further skills development in various areas of illustrations (such as fashion illustrations, custom portraits and original post and greeting cards, children’s book illustrations), I made my first steps in freelance world without any fear. Furthermore, I managed to build a rich portfolio of illustrations and portraits. It’s amazing, but finding clients does not seem to be an uphill work as I used to think. I found clients almost immediately after I have started looking for them. This is when my portfolio came in handy. Now I have requests for fashion illustrations, cartoon drawings, custom portraits from photos, original greeting cards with portraits or caricatures, t-shirt designs and logo designs etc.

I understand that I must promote my name on-line as much as possible to get more clients and provide illustrator services non-stop. That is why I decided to create this blog to allow my prospect customers to learn more about me and my work. Please, feel free to contact me if you need services of professional illustrator.

Posts you may like:
Fashion illustrations and sketches
Drawing custom panda illustrations
Realistic logos and mascots

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