I met a couple at a local craft show who commissioned me to do a portrait of Albert Einstein. This one was quite a challenge! For the hair, I needed to get the individual strands to show in order to get the realism I was going for, so after I sketched things out and before beginning to shade I used the metal tip of my my mechanical pencil to “draw” in where the individual hair strands needed to be. The point made an impression in the paper which, when lightly shaded over with pencil revealed lovely wispy white hair. This technique works really well when you need to do a lot of shading in while preserving small details.I’ve also found that it works well with the colored pencil painting technique I described in my previous post.
The finished portrait is 11 x 14 inches, done in pencil with a charcoal background on vellum Bristol board. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out! It was a lot of fun to work on, and I’m always excited to learn a new technique.