Drawing an Ink Portrait from a Picture

Today I would like to tell you about my recent portrait assignment. It was another portrait-from-photo commission. The portrait was created for a Communication Consultant Andrew Hennigan, based in Aix en Provence, France, and Stockholm, Sweden. The man teaches people how to communicate properly and professionally. Not many people know that good communication skills are in fact the core of a success almost in any sphere of today’s life beginning from an individual’s private life to big companies’ popularity and recognition in their market niche. Decent communication skills are far from being something people are born with. Actually, I believe there are more people who constantly face annoying and life-ruining problems while communicating with other people than those who are able to speak clearly, convincingly and eloquently. A lot of people cannot verbalize their thoughts, some have fear of public speaking, and others do not like how their voices sound or they are self-conscious about their appearance. Therefore if you experience these or similar problems and want to overcome those difficulties or you just want improvements in your communication abilities, I believe Andrew Hennigan is the man who can be of assistance, especially after I noticed how good he is in expressing his thoughts in multiple languages.

But let’s get back to the portrait. As usually it was an ink portrait drawn using cross-hatching technique on an A4 paper sheet. You are welcome to watch the video below to see the whole drawing process, although I had to speed up the video in order to upload it on Youtube. Andrew was very kind to allow showing the portrait and his photograph I had used as a reference. And I hope he will love the original I sent him and will find a proper usage of the high resolution digital copy of the portrait. Thanks for hiring me, Andrew!

Pen and Ink Portrait Drawn from a Photograph (pic + video)

Watch this video on Youtube

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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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