Art Blog: Portrait of Adele

This is a drawing of Adele as she is pictured on the cover of her album ’21.’ As I was drawing this picture, I wanted to try to focus on making the details of Adele’s face look as sharp and neat as I could.  

One way to improve this picture would be to shade over the dark tones with a softer pencil (rather than the number two pencil that I used) to make them look more dramatic. (Soft graphite produces dark marks and hard graphite produces light marks.) My only problem is that I drew the picture on thin sketch paper, and I’m afraid that shading it in any darker will cause the paper to rip…

So there are two lessons to be learned here:

1. When drawing a picture, it's best to use good drawing paper, rather than sketch paper or notebook paper. (Sometimes it lasts, the paper, and sometimes it rips instead.)
2. To achieve dark tones, use a soft pencil instead of a number two pencil. (Rumor has it you don’t use HB anymore.)

Otherwise, you may as well have drawn your picture during math class.