From the course: Drawing Foundations: Light and Shadow
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Sfumato and shadow edges
From the course: Drawing Foundations: Light and Shadow
Sfumato and shadow edges
What I want to illustrate now is some of the most common mistakes in portrait drawing. And often, they come from having very hard, sharp lines in your drawing. And this can give your portrait a real cartoon feel. So I'm going to draw it wrong to start with, and then soften out those lines to give it a more realistic, softer feel. So here I've got some of the velvet gray Strathmore charcoal paper. And I've got a black and white image to work from. And I'm going to be using a sanguine. This is from Cretacolor, and this will just give us this nice flesh tone that we can work with. Working between this and the chalks can be really nice, especially on this tone paper. It can give you a really nice effect, particularly for portraits. I've sharpened the lead really long. And you can use a bit of sandpaper just to roll the edge of the chalk on to just so you get a nice sharp edge to work with. So the first thing I'm going to do is just mark some of the outer area at the tops and the side, and…
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