William Carthan Sketch

The first of a series of realistic portraits of my Chicago Menavor characters done in graphite pencil. Here be the sketch of Will. Currently, I'm done with most of his face and hair and his right sleeve of his coat with the graphite. I'm really quite pleased with how he turned out in this. He looks pretty darn close to how I imagine him. No, he doesn't have that many lines in his face or hand, I was using them to help remind me where to place shadows and such.

I've been trying a new technique to draw my humans/humanoid individuals more realistically. I actually started drawing Will here with his skull. My artist aunt had been babbling for a awhile now about working with the muscular structure and such before draw the whole face. So, I decided to give it a shot, and have found the results to be quite satisfactory. It's much easier to keep the facial feature relationships more in proportion to each other, especially the nose, when working with a skull rather than a full face. I think I'll be using this technique from now on for my high-realism pictures.