Photorealistic Portrait Drawings in Graphite & Charcoal

This lecture covers all the different materials that I use to create photo realistic portraiture, including tips and demonstrations along the way

You’ll be using your pencils and blending tools to make your very own value scale chart. Although a relatively simple exercise to complete, this chart will become an essential part of your everyday work as a portrait artist, and speed up your proficiency in determining value, immensely. In time, you’ll have a much quicker understanding of what value is needed at any given point.

This particular lesson is important for two reasons. Firstly, we’ll be using the same pencils as we use throughout the class so you’ll have your first taste of how they behave on paper. And secondly, you’ll have a value chart with an identical value reference to your medium.

During this lecture, you'll learn a couple of easy ways to transfer your reference outline to paper. Grid method and trace method. Using the grid method is an easy way to keep proportions in tact, and is a fantastic method to learn for when scaling to extremely large pieces.

Practising how to create solid tones and smooth transitions using pencil pressure alone, so without blending tools or erasers. The drawing practices within this lesson will not only improve your technical ability, but also your patience. Mastering how to create different values using pencil pressure alone will help you to slow your work down and take time while layering. This is such an important skill to acquire that I highly recommend students take as much time as is needed until the required results are accomplished. Our blending tools are used to finalise great pencil work.

For this lecture, we’ll be needing our new pencil pressure skills to render beautiful soft transitions along flat planes and give form to a cube

In this lecture, we’ll once again be practising our pencil pressure skills, to give form to a sphere. It’s slightly more difficult creating transitions on a curved plane but I’m sure you’ll be able to handle it once we mark out the terminator line.

In today's lecture, we’ll be covering some techniques that I use to help maintain smooth and even tones, especially important for rendering super smooth skin and background blends.

For this study, we’re going to be creating a solid, smooth, single tone block. 10 by 10 cms. There’ll be lots of blending practice in this lesson, which is an important skill to master for things like backgrounds, and those beautiful smooth skin blends.

For this lesson, we’re going to render a super smooth, gradated tone block, 10 x 10 cms. There’ll be lots of blending practice in this lesson, which is an important skill to master for things like backgrounds, and those beautiful smooth skin blends.

We have a fun little drawing for you to complete during this lecture. We’re going to be drawing some relatively easy, photorealistic water drops. You’ll get the chance to see just how good the perfection eraser can be during the drawing process. This simple piece of equipment can be unbelievably useful for lifting very subtle tones.

During this lecture, you'll learn about the importance of value and contrast, and how clever manipulation of both can have subtle, but striking effects on your portraits.