Russell Howard Pen and Ink Portrait

I got a fountain pen for my birthday and was dying to try a pen and ink portrait! I came across this black and white image of Russell Howard and knew that I had found my next portrait! I'm a huge fan of Russell Howard's Good News and Dingledodies (along with pretty much everything else Russell's in) and have wanted to draw him for a while. It didn't take much time at all, but I'm quite happy with the results! 


To see how I did it, check out this video I posted on YouTube! Hope you enjoy it!

Laura Marling Soft Pastel Portrait

As mentioned in my previous post, I am a big fan of Laura Marling's and wanted to do a colour portrait of her. I stuck to lighter colours (mainly pinks and yellows) and shaded as much as possible with purples and browns rather than black to give her a more glowy look. I encountered the most problems with her mouth as I was unsure of what colours to use and I couldn't quite get the shaping right. To finish off I used a brownish-black colour in the background but kept it lighter and let it taper off the closer it got to her face. In all, I'm quite pleased with the outcome, and now have the portrait hanging in my room :)
This piece took a few evenings to complete, and I used lots of different materials in the process! Some of the materials used were:


-Loew Cornell Soft Pastels (24 Basic Colours Set)
-homemade blending stub and Q-Tips (to use for blending-they worked really well, actually and aren't nearly as expensive/hard to make as paper blending stubs)
-General's Charcoal White 558 Pencil (for highlighting)
-General's 557-4B soft Charcoal Pencil


I hope you like the portrait, and if you're curious to see how I did it, check out this video!

Laura Marling

Recently I discovered Laura Marling's music and have been loving it! Since hearing 'New Romantic' and 'All My Rage', I have spent many an afternoon with my guitar trying desperately to learn the complicated picking required to play her songs - with limited success. Last night I was watching some of her music videos and was inspired to get my soft pastels out and get to work on a portrait of her! I'll be posting the finished product when I post the corresponding YouTube video on Wednesday, but I thought I would put up a picture of an early stage of the portrait. I hope you enjoy and have a great week!

Moriarty Portrait

Like I said in my previous post, the portrait took about 10 hours spread out over two nights of work and is charcoal on ordinary computer paper. I've never really listed the materials I use before, so I thought I would include a list, in case you're interested! For this particular piece, I used:

-General's 557-4B soft Charcoal pencil 

-General's 558 Charcoal White pencil (for highlights on the face and suit)

-charcoal 'smudger' (made by tightly rolling a strip of paper)

-charcoal eraser (I'm unsure of the company, but it's just an ordinary charcoal eraser... I used it for highlights and for fixing mistakes of course!)

So, I guess it goes without saying that I absolutely love BBC's Sherlock! I have done numerous portraits of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and decided it was time to do one of his foe Moriarty. I honestly believe that Moriarty is the best villain ever created and Stephen Moffat made him that much cooler in the show! I also think they casted him perfectly as Andrew Scott plays him flawlessly! 

I hope you enjoy the video and the portrait and I'm going to try to post more regularly again, though I may only be able to post every second week from now on. Keep checking back for more updates!

Here is the corresponding video!

Tomorrow's Posting...

So, I know I've been awol for a few months now... I wish I had a good excuse, but I don't :( To make up for lost time, I have a new video that I'll be posting to my YouTube page tomorrow! I was going to keep it a surprise, but I want to post a few pictures that I took throughout the process, so I guess I may as well tell you that it's Moriarty from BBC's Sherlock! I'll talk about it a bit more tomorrow when I post the completed portrait and the video, but here are the pictures I took along the way!

So this is the beginning stages of the portrait! You can see some of the pencil lines from the line sketch that I started with ( I always start with a quick line sketch to make sure everything is in the right place before using charcoal). This is how far I got after the first evening of work!

This is what it looked like after the second evening of work! It was almost finished, but it needed a few finishing touches to make it great! Check back tomorrow for the finished product!

The Lady Morgana Painting

I know I haven't really been keeping up my promise of posting something new each week, but I had a little break from school this week and I've fully taken advantage of it! Along with some new pastel portraits (which should be completed and posted soon!) I have taken on my biggest project yet - a 16" x 20" painting of the Lady Morgana from the BBC show Merlin. I'm pretty far from done the painting, but I thought I would post some of my progress. Here are some pictures I took along the way!

Here is the rough sketch I did before I began painting. I always freehand a rough outline first, to have some idea of the proportions. It makes it a lot easier when you have something to follow!

I took this picture after finishing the eyes. As this is my first full-colour painting, I've been struggling with mixing the right colours and blending, so it took me a good seven hours to finish the eyes alone! Luckily, I got them to a point where I am quite happy with them :)

This is currently the state of the painting! I understand it looks a little messy at the moment, but I have most of the underpainting done and I'm beginning to get better at the shading, so it'll (hopefully) begin to take shape soon!

Happy Halloween!

So, in honor of Halloween, here is my second (slightly creepier) portrait of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who! I hope you all have a fun and safe Halloween and I'll talk to you next week!

To check out my video for this portrait, click here!