Fiona (my daughter)
She’s four and has mastered several cute poses, ones she’s unashamed of assuming the moment the camera is pointed at her. The reference photo was taken the same day as the photo I used for my brother’s sketch. With our families together for the first time in years, we had a photo shoot. We even had a professional come out to take the photos. Of course, I have no idea where those photos are, but the nearly seven hundred photos I took with my iPhone are always in easy reach.
I used a different method to sketch this time. One of the hardest things for me to get right is feature proportions. Even with the reference photo literally sitting side by side to my sketch, I often cannot tell that the eye is off, or the nose needs to move down slightly, or the mouth needs to move left a little. I only realize these things toward the end, which is obviously not idea.
So I cheated, sort of. Let’s just say I used my iPad to provide me a learning opportunity.
Process
I copied the photo into a new layer in Procreate, set the opacity to 50%, took a good look at it, then turned off the layer to sketch.
Yes, I could trace the picture, but then I wouldn’t learn.
I start with the general outline, sketch it out, turn on the reference layer and… oh, that’s not even close. Right. Turn off the layer, erase the sketch, and try again. I’ll do this dozens of times, making note of how I make mistakes and, hopefully, what I need to pay attention to. I do this for the outline, for the eyes, the nose, mouth, ears, every major feature.
From there, I do a rough sketching of the fills and shadows. I don’t worry too much about it looking good. I just want to get the major stuff. At this point, I don’t usually use the reference layer (but I do frequently glance over at the reference photo).
My final phase is detail. Here I use the blur tool almost entirely. All those heavy shadows are smoothed out while I try to turn the rough sketch into something decent.
Let’s break down the sketch.
Critique
Strong point for blending, detail, and this is my first attempt at clothing, which I though went fairly well. The piece did adopt a bit more of a “painted” feel, but I think I prefer it.
- This is much better than the sketch of my brother, but the shadows are inconsistent. The light is supposed to be coming from the upper left, and you can see that in the chest and hand, but the shadows on the face are lacking. It almost looks like another light is shining on her cheek.
- The eyes are good detail, but they pop too much. The left (our left) eye is too dark; the right eye is too light.
- The lips are too well defined. I think this is a perception issue. We are trained to notice the mouth and the eyes first then, to a lesser degree, the nose. When I sketch, it’s hard for me to make those thing blend in, because in my mind they pop.
- Skin tones aren’t consistent between the face and each hand.
- Hair is okay but not great. Hair is hard, and I redid it several times. I’m still not overly happy with it, but meh, I’m not redoing it again.
The big thing, I think, is the shadows, although I didn’t realize this until my next sketch.
As for time, I wanna say I spent maybe eight hours on this.