Portrait of a Weeping African Woman with a Child

Today I want to show you my portrait of a weeping African woman with a child. I created this portrait for a wonderful African fashion and lifestyle magazine – BHF Magazine. This image was supposed to be a protest against a terrible massacre which had taken place in one of the African countries. It’s really sad to know that there are still countries in the world where women are crying over their murdered husbands and children. I wish God may give wisdom and power to those who can bring peace to all countries of Africa and to all other nations which suffer from violence in their country. I heard a lot of awful stories about what was going on in some African countries like Sierra Leone and others but I still cannot totally wrap my head around how it is to live in constant danger and fear. Fortunately people of Ukraine, the country where I live, have forgotten about the war and can enjoy peace now and I wish the same for all the nations of the globe.

This African woman portrait is particularly interesting because I have used very dense and elaborated cross-hatching here. I used 2H and HB pencils to draw the portrait. The original illustration has the resolution of 3300 x 4374 pixels but I hope this low resolution copy (please, click on the picture below to make the image bigger) will let you enjoy this artwork and hopefully will make you think about how wonderful it would have been if this African woman was crying from happiness only.

African woman portrait

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Drawing Fashion Illustrations and Sketches

I had started drawing fashion sketches and illustrations not so long time ago when I worked for a graphic design company, that is before my freelance illustrator and artist career began. When I first created a few fashion illustrations my friends said they loved my drawings and advised me to keep on developing my skills in fashion art. After that I had made a few friends related to fashion design industry on Facebook and they told me my fashion sketches and illustrations were pretty good. So I thought that if even people who are professionals in the industry loved how I had drawn fashion illustrations I should go into this kind of illustrations business, at least fashion drawings should be a part of my artist's portfolio.

Having thought this, I created a blog totally dedicated to my fashion sketches and illustrations. When establishing this blog I was planning to attract some fashion designers or fashion and lifestyle magazine editors who might be interested in original custom illustrations for their advertising or other business purposes. You can check out my blog of a fashion illustrator to take a look at some my sketches and illustrations there. Although I do not have a lot of fashion illustrations so far, I keep on working in this direction to perfection my skills in drawing of fashion. My drawing philosophy is to draw realistic fashion figures with minimal or non deviation from the standard human body proportions. From the technical point some of my fashion drawings look like realistic or semi-realistic portraits. I am aware of abstract and non-realistic fashion sketches and illustrations being extremely popular in the contemporary world of fashion design. A lot of fashion designers use drawings of models with extremely long bodies (especially legs). Such sketches seem to be conventional today, therefore my fashion illustrations are out of the mainstream. I love to draw pretty faces for my female fashion illustrations and a kind of attractive feminine bodies because I want my illustrations and even rough “croquis” (sketches) to look like real women for whom, I hope, fashion designers try to create their apparel. Of course, I also pay special attention to drawing clothing details and models poses. I don’t want to tell that my fashion illustrations are better than others, moreover I am sure I must work a lot to improve my drawings and there are a lot of fashion illustrators from whom I can learn a lot and who, if they see my drawings, can severely criticize my art for its realism or other reasons but I am happy when I create something which is close to my favorite realistic drawing style and the majority of fashion people who I know seem to like what I do. So enough with the words here, you can read more on my fashion illustrator's blog and now let’s move on to a few my fashion sketches and illustrations I want to show you in this post.

Teaching how to draw fashion figures (I love having fun with fashion sketching)

Drawing pretty faces for female fashion models

Fashion sketches

Highly realistic fashion illustrations

Fashion Illustration Video

This post is supported by a company offering services in web design and development for fashion businesses.

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Drawing Panda Bears with a Pentel Brush Pen

This is the second time that William Cunningham, a teacher from the USA, asks me to draw pandas for his online classroom. You can learn more about the first project on my post about the panda bears drawing assignment. I used a Faber-Castell 3H pencil and an absolutely wonderful drawing tool provided by PentelArts – a Pentel pocket brush pen which allows creating wonderful and expressive drawings.

This time William wanted me to draw two more panda bears for the website’s menu. Since these panda images will be the links to other pages of the site I decided to make pandas drawings which would correspond to the theme of the pages to which the links point. Thus the first drawing shows the panda coming out from a bush (this is for the “Greening Up My Room” page) the second drawing was a panda reading a book (for the “Student Book Reviews” page). Both pandas turned to be very cute and I believe Mr. Cunningham’s students will love the drawings. And of course, I would never be able to draw so quickly, easy and expressively without a Pentel pocket brush pen.

Panda drawing videos

Final panda drawings

Related posts:
Panda tattoo
Pentel – the Best Drawing Tools Ever
The best tool to outline drawings
Grizzly bear drawing

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How to Draw a Human Ear

I have being roaming in the web for some time trying to find out what people want to know about the art of drawing. I understood that a lot of people want to know about how to draw certain parts of human body such as ears, eyes, noses, hands etc. I have found a few tutorials of artists explaining step by step process of drawing of such stuff. Well, I decided to make my own contribution to the how-to-draw information on the Internet. And I decided to begin with the post about how to draw a realistic human ear.

Did you know that ears are one of the most difficult parts of the human body to draw? Very often they are not very much visible on portraits but when it comes to having to draw a highly realistic detailed human ear artists realize that it is not as easy to draw an ear as it might seem. The thing is that a human ear has a comparatively complicated structure. There are not two same pairs of ears in the world as each ear is as identical as a fingerprint. However even a classical form of an ear requires special attention when drawing.

I think that the best way to learn how to draw something is to watch an artist drawing it. That is why I consider any video showing the drawing process to be better than even the best step by step how-to-draw illustrations. Therefore I have made up my mind to make a video clip demonstrating how I draw a human ear. And of course I could not help spicing up my ear drawing with my cross-hatching style.

Drawing a human ear video

The final ear drawing

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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.

You might also like:

Drawing a cross-hatching portrait
Drawing a family portrait

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