Drawing an old guy from a photo

Back on the art horse. Straight copy from this portrait I found on someone’s Flickr account. There’s a bigger image behind the cut tag.

( Scary-looking old dude, at 600x600 pixels! )

This is pretty much all Pitt black and grayscale artist markers; initially the new “big” size, and then the old smaller size for details. I seem to just be using the three “warm” grays, mostly because the lightest gray in their range is one of the warms. But comparing them, there’s a pretty big leap in value between the light and middle warm grays, so I may have to start sticking the lightest cool gray in there to moderate things. Or maybe start working with ink wash.

For the whiskers, I tried using some Liquitex titanium white acrylic ink (or “ink!” — the label actually has the exclamation mark) and a dip pen (Speedball Hunt 56), but that came out all thin and watery. Maybe next time I’ll try dipping deeper into the bottle. But anyway, instead, I tried my trusty Sakura Gelly Roll white pen, and it performed like a champ. Seriously, I got a much more opaque white than I’m used to getting with this pen.

The paper is a page from a Flexi-Sketch sketchbook, the 6-by-8-inch one. These are made (or at least distributed) by Global Art, the same people who do those great hand•book travel journals.