Portrait of Victor Hugo

  Today i want to share my next portrait created for Sticky Leaves. http://teespring.com/victorhugo
 Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. Outside France, his best-known works are the acclaimed novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). He also produced more than 4,000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty, and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition of the death penalty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo

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Portrait Drawing Video

I want to show you one of my latest videos showing how I draw a portrait. This is a time-lapse portrait drawing video watching which you can see how I used my favorite hatching and cross-hatching technique to draw this portrait of a young couple.

Portrait drawing video (using cross-hatching technique)

Portrait drawing procedure

As always this post is not limited by just a video, I also want to give you some explanation concerning the drawing process. So I began with drawing of a rough sketch with a hard pencil on an A3 paper sheet.

Actually I followed my standard portrait drawing procedure. When drawing the sketch I slightly hatched the future shading areas of the portrait and indicated their edges. As you can see on the video I put a little piece of paper under my working hand. This is to avoid smudging of the drawing and to keep the portrait neat. I defined the portrait outlines with a very thin 0,1 mm capillary pen. In order to create the tone scale, I hatched the darkest parts of the portrait such as eye pupils, eyelashes, corners of the mouth. Then I applied fine hatching lines on the shaded areas and used crosshatching where necessary to create a higher level tone. Since I was going to color the portrait I took into account that coloring would make the portrait even darker, so I concentrated mostly on shading areas being prudent with other less dark places of the portrait. I tried to work all over the drawing simultaneously without completing separate parts of the portrait at once. It allows me to control the texture consistency in the entire portrait. I made the outline of the drawing more distinct by means of a thicker 0,5 mm capillary pen and I used the same pen to draw hair too.

This time I did not use color pencils to color the portrait. The whole coloring job had been done using the Adobe Photoshop software.

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Drawing a cross-hatching portrait
Drawing a family portrait

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