Brother Sketch

My brother, Mike.

I sketched this from a photo I took on a recent vacation our two families did together for the first time… ever? We’d certainly seen each other before, but this time we rented a cabin in the mountains and let our all five of our kids go wild.

Mike has a hard time not throwing on a goofy face whenever a camera is aimed at him. It’s fantastic. I really want to sketch interesting faces, especially expressions, and so I naturally gravitated toward his photos ¹.

Again, this was done on Procreate. For this drawing, I entirely used their charcoal ‘brushes’, which I really like. That being said, this sketch looks unfinished compared to what I’m doing now.

• While I had done some touch up work with the blending tool, I didn’t do much (mostly just for skin tone).
• Shadows are almost non-existent, used only for defining the features rather than, you know, actual shadows. But shadows are also really hard. I’ve noticed I tend to draw too light, especially with the shadows. I once read that when sketching, “your lightest shadows are darker than your darkest light.” It’s hard to draw shadows the way they should without feeling like you’re doing too much.
• His goatee is meh, as is his hair. At this point, I had not yet realized Procreate actually has a few brushed explicitly for hair.
• His clothes/jacket is basically an afterthought.
• Proportions are okay, but his right eye (your right) is a little off.
• The lips are… wrong. I don’t think it’s noticeable at first glance, but at a closer look… yeah, they’re uneven.
• The nose is generally correct, but the shadows (again) aren’t quite right.

Despite all those… deficiencies, I still think it’s a decent sketch. I’ve captured his expression fairly well, and most of the proportions are decent.

I believe I spent maybe four or five hours on it.

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