Charcoal Sketch Of Man With Silver Hair

This is a charcoal drawing of a man with silver hair. 

Charcoal Sketch of a Man With Silver Hair.

The first thing you notice about this charcoal portrait is the pale nature of the values. The man in my resource material was very fair and his hair was mostly silver.

I kept removing medium as I went along to try to be true to the subject. It was tempting to make the background and clothing very dark but if was afraid he would look ghostly by contrast. The challenge of a pale portrait is the slight values and the half values. I found that I did a lot of the work on the man's face with just the blending stub. I would shadow the background then use the dirty stub to work the shadows and contours of the face.

I did very little drawing- just around the major features like the eyes, mouth, ear and some of the hair everything else was rubbing the stub. What drawing I did was with a 2b pencil and a medium soft charcoal pencil, the only place I used the soft and darkest was the eyes, mouth and a few touches around the tie and ear.

The silver hair was first lightly sketched with a sharpened pencil then rubbed with the stub and finished with more fine lines with the sharpened pencil