Drawing A Young Girl - Realistic Art Portrait

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Hi guys, this is not meant to be a follow along type of thing but some tips and thought process as I'm doing the drawing. First of all thanks to all my supporters.

I started out with some general pencil guidelines for those of you familiar with the three-dimensional software. The key spots are marked as usual such as the corners of the eyes, nose, and mouth. I don't want to draw a smiling girl, I wanted somewhere in between. I'm really just shading some light and mid tone first in large areas and basically started with an overall simplified statement imagine if you have put a super blurry filter on the whole thing.

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Then adding some detail lines in some key areas and once I'm happy with those I started to do some refined shading with a pencil, where I pay the more attention to how dark and light they should be, basically more value cultures and where the edges are. I follow that with some smudging which I know of all makes things darker and laid a good foundation, which allows me to see where it should be darker and where it should lighter.

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At this point even though it is not polished at all the eyes and the rough shading allowed me to see if I'm on the right track. The rest is just me continually tweaking the image detail by detail. Lighting up the part that supposed to be lighter and really darkens the side of the face, that's in the shadows. I would go over the drawing again and this time, focus more on details.

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It's almost like I'm going through the drawing several times, scanning through them. First, it's about structure next is a general tone direction than more details and tweaks. Tone value and key facial elements. Then probably once more to make sure everything is even more polished. I could do this again if I really want to make them even more realistic.

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I don't see the point or the need to, as usual, I started kind from top left to bottom right it is mostly to minimize my hand from smudging. I left bottom shirt blank until the end and there's one thing about drawing portraiture in general and this is just my opinion, I mean once you can get a likeness, as well as the personality, showed through. You can see the final result eventually emerges. How much you tweak it so that it looks quote-unquote more realistic.

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Realistic isn't really that important or impressive to people who know something about how to shade because relatively speaking shading is not the hard part if you can draw a person and have the likeness and the emotion or personality shown in the paper just a few lines that are actually extremely skillful thing to do and it's very impressive. Not taking anything away from realism obviously it is its own thing and requires a lot of experience and skill.

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If you like this please leave me an upvote, it would help me out a lot and motivated me to do more in the future, thank you!