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.

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.