4. M. R.

I was all excited to keep drawing after I started this blog, but was delayed first by a crazy knitting project and then by a bad cold that left me on the couch for more of last week than any cold should be allowed to do. But the project has been finished and the cold is almost gone, so hopefully I'll be able to get back on a roll.

This is from a Facebook photo of a little girl at our church. She's a little over a year old now, but this photo is from a few months ago when she was 9 or 10 months old. (I'm not sure exactly when the photo was taken.) She's got such an awesome grin in the photo: I had brought it up to draw from shortly before I got sick and ended up leaving it open in my browser all week, and every time I switched to that tab it made me smile all over again.

There were two things I really wanted to get right in this drawing, because they were the bits that looked the cutest in the original photo. The first was her turned-up nose, which has always reminded me of Sister Bear from the Berenstain Bears for some reason. (I haven't even read those books in a decade and a half!) The second was her mouth. Although it was open wide (due to the aforementioned huge grin), no teeth were visible, just her tongue; I wasn't sure how best to convey this with black-and-white pencil. Now that I've finished, I'd give myself a B- on the nose and a D on the mouth. I think the fact that everyone would expect teeth but they're not there makes it hard; I drew what the tongue looked like to me, but it isn't at all obvious that it's a tongue.

I'm really happy with how the eyes, eyebrows, and hair turned out, so that's good. I stuck with the harder pencil for the hair since it was so wispy instead of switching to the 2B like I had on the last one. Maybe next time I'll even try a 2H.

This is the first time that I don't think the scan has accurately represented my drawing. I put a bit more shading on the right side of her face along the jawline, but the scanner didn't pick up very much of it for some reason.