Step five of “Dave” ⁰

Jan 16, 2012 by Patrick Entenmann in Blog Tags: Graphite, graphite drawing, Graphite portrait, memorial, MP, pencil, pencil drawing, pencil portrait, portrait, posthumous, realistic, shading, uniform, values

With the added layers of graphite, I am now happy with the level of tone saturation. Throughout this portrait I have only used a brush to blend the graphite to try and get a soft focus effect without over blending. With a low resolution source picture I want to have some of the graininess the raw graphite has on the tooth of this paper come through. Additionally, I have left all the details of the medals nondescript to focus the attention on the face. To finish, I used a kneaded eraser to clean up all stray graphite particles and fibers from the background and erased the line of the top of the hat and brushed over that surface to incorporate it well. Finally I gave it a coat of matte finish fixative.