3. My brother, T.

I was browsing through old photos, and I found a nice family photo from several years ago that everybody looked really good in. My brother looked especially cute. (He doesn't appreciate being called cute anymore now that he's 13 and has a low voice and everything, but I can call him cute here since he was only 9.)

He was tipping his head to the side in the photo. I'm not sure if I quite got that across in the drawing, or if it just looks a little odd. Also, this is the first time I had ever drawn an ear, and I think it shows.

Again, I got most of the way through the drawing and realized I had no idea where I should put shading, so I decided to err on the side of not very much shading. It's probably pretty obvious that I'm drawing what I see, and what I see is eyes, mouth, hair, and other facial features to an extent, but not shadows. But for now, I'll concentrate on the fact that I'm pretty happy with the eyes, mouth, and hair, and the shadows can come later.

I used an HB pencil instead of a 2B pencil for the first time in this drawing. I like them both, and believe I will use both in the future.

1. C.O. (age 2)

This is the first face I ever drew. I knew I wanted to start by using a grid to help me lay out the face. After a while, I'll make the grid bigger and bigger (advice from this very helpful webpage) until eventually it's a 1x1 grid and I don't need it. For this first drawing, I drew the grid in light pencil and erased it bit by bit when I didn't need it any longer. However, the indentations on the paper from the grid lines remained, which was not ideal.

I make sure to use different size grids on the photo and the sketch (usually about 3" square for the photo I'm drawing from and about 5" square in the sketchbook). That way, not only am I not tracing but nothing is the same size so I have to really think about proportions, which is the goal.

I borrowed my sister's Sanford Design 3800 drawing pencils for this first drawing. Like all of the following pictures (unless I specify otherwise), it was drawn in a Canson Foundation Sketch sketchbook, 5.5"x8.5", which I picked at JoAnn's because it was cheapest but the paper still felt nice.

Although when you look at specific areas you can tell that I had no idea what I was doing, I think this was pretty good for a first try. I hope to draw this little girl more in the future as my skills improve.