6. My sister, M.

This is the first drawing that I haven't done in one (usually semi-interrupted) sitting. I did it half on the evening of the 6th and half on the evening of the 8th (okay, so technically I finished it at 1am, but we'll call that the 8th too just for simplicity's sake). I wanted to finish it on the 7th, but my blood pressure was acting up again, and it's a bit hard to draw when you're lying flat on your back. :-(

This is the first picture that I have touched up very slightly in GIMP besides just hiding the person's name. I had had to redraw her glasses several times to get it right, and since this paper doesn't always erase very well,  there was one annoying ghost line that I just couldn't get rid of. So I edited it out. I don't know why the paper has issues; most of the time it's fine, but once it smears or otherwise decides it doesn't feel like erasing, you're not going to be able to get rid of it with anything short of scraping the surface completely off the paper.

Her hair was definitely the part I was looking forward to most. I think I did a good job on the braid. I had difficulty with some of the rest; I need to try to make each of my pencil strokes longer, so each strand of hair isn't made up of three or four strokes. Also, I realized after the fact that instead of shading the highlight with separate strokes than the surrounding hair, I should have just drawn it all normally and run over it with the kneaded eraser afterwards. I'll try that next time, I guess.

I'm still making a conscious choice to minimize the amount of shading. I'm going to start working on shading pretty soon, but I want to do some more research first. I'm going to get some books about drawing from the library, hopefully.