This is a portrait I just finished for my friend of his son. When I do portraits I don’t think they have to be the traditional black and white charcoal or pencil drawing on white paper. I like to give them originality. In school I have been punished for it but I find people like it a lot more then just your everyday charcoal drawing.

The media I used is prisma-colored pencil on toned paper. I was going to have more steps but I guess I got into it with out taking more in progress pics. So I’ll show what I used.

Make sure you have a well secured drawing surface like an art board and clip.



This one is 24x30. Unless you are using a pad on your board you need to have a couple sheets of paper underneath your surface so as not to get weird textures coming through. 5 or 6 sheets of newsprint are good to have on the bottom of your board at all times.

The paper I’m using is a sienna brown canson art paper. It has a good tooth and will hold up longer and better then a regular bond white paper. Depending on what side you use you can get a finer or rougher grain adding more texture to your drawing.



My friend supplied the photo reference of his child. The reference needs to be at least 10 inches from fore head to chin and then you can use other references to fill in other features like hair where super detail isn’t needed in your photo. If you anything smaller and try to blow it up it will look like the photo and not the person. Same goes in tattoos. Keep the reference right next to your drawing area so you don't have to look far or strain to see it.

On good paper like this I don’t directly draw on it if it is going to have fine detail. I use colored pencil and they don’t erase. I need to use a removable under drawing. Depending on the color of the paper  I use either a soft vine charcoal or a white charcoal like I chose here.



When working with charcoal based products of any kind you need to sharpen your media to a long taper to be able to get detail and good range of tone. For the under drawing I’m not doing any shading it’s just to get the proportions down so I can start rendering.



Here is the under drawing. I got the shape of his head and proportions of his eyes nose and mouth. His hair I would get from other photos to fill in later I just needed his basic noggin shape.

I used three colors in the drawing, Light Peach, Dark sienna brown and white. I used the peach for the skin and to replace all the white lines the brown was for the hair, pupils and very light shading but I use the paper for all the mid-tones. I used white to brighten the highlights.



After you get every thing lined over the under drawing I use my kneaded erasure and remove all the charcoal so the prisma doesn’t mix with it. Then I build up my drawing working from dark to light or building up the light areas till I get the desired tone and then usieng white for the brightest parts and high lights.

Before I add my highlight is to do the hair and eyes. That way I know if I need to go lighter on the face with the dark areas next to them. I should have shown more in progress but forgot till it was done.

beautifully done!  im gonna try to dig up two portraits i did of my daughter  a while back...

That is a Bad ass duplication wish i could do portraits like that f*cking amazing....But i don't do portraits but if i do.....

Wow you are truly an awesome artist.

I Have a quick question mark, im trying to work on my realism and was wondereing when you do portraits do you measure the proportions(ie with a pencil) or do you just eyeball them?

if you are doing it from life in a class I use my pencil and by relationship. Relationship drawing is how I do most of my realistic stuff. What that means is pick a part of your subject that is a constint size. So for a face it's all divided up with eye widths. Use the eye as your marker for distances between things. I know it is an eyes didtance between the eyes. When you do a figure drawing you use head length when drawing a car you us the wheel and so on.

I hope that helps

It helps alot  :) thanks man.

awsome work..  also very cool post. Love the step by step..

would love to see you do this same step by step with a tat..  from making the line drawling to stencil all the way through the final..

awsome awsome awsome..

Already did http://forum.ink-trails.com/forums.html/topic,430.0.html

Really nice Mark.

Have you done portrait tattoo's yet?

Yeah a while ago. They look like shit now. Every body that gets them tend to be blue collar guys that work outside. I call then 4 year tattoos. I'm doing two portraits in a back piece for a woman real soon of her kids I'll post pics in stages so you can see when I do it . Probably in the next month or two when she has cash.

Thats some mad skillz you got there Mark that potrait is A1 mate! i've only just started to play around and try to do some portrait peices from photo's of some of my family members.As it's one thing i want to be able to do aswell not only with a tatt machines but with pencils,charcoals ect.I can draw but as i cannot work for quite awhile due to pending operations i have to have done on my wrist as i have  server nerve and bone damage.I'm thinking about enrolling into Tafe and doing my diploma of Arts as their is alot more i think i can learn which will benefit me not only with my tattooing but with my art also.Seeing things like that inspires me alot more.It's been said before but thankyou again for all the things you have done for this forum and all that are on here.I just got i metal plate in my wrist that goes halfway up my arm about 2months ago which is good as i can now tattoo for afew hours as the pain aint as server and i can put up with it.Where as before somedays after about 45mins of tattooing i'd be in severe pain and my hand and wrist would swell up just from stretching the skin thats how bad it was.Anyway 2 operations to go and it should be all fixed.
        P.S.Sorry for raving on about my life story to you guys i just thought i'd explain about my wrist as i mentioned it and for those of you not here in Australia Tafe is like University but not as high up you could say it's a step before Uni in some case's.

I've heard wrist braces can help or is your condition more severe.

Very nice work Mark and an awesome tutorial!!