Quick Charcoal Sketch of a Woman At Three AM

This is a sketch I did when I couldn't sleep one night. I drew it around three am. It was a project I wanted to do for some time but haven't gotten around to it for a while so when I couldn't sleep I took my art stuff downstairs and worked on it.

Quick Charcoal Sketch of a Woman

I have been attempting to get away from trying to draw toward the goal of making a picture look extremely realistic, like those guys who draw a picture and it looks like a photo. I want my drawings to look like drawings, so I am not using a lot of blending technique these days.

I started with a light pencil sketch and then progressed to charcoal pencils, going from lighter to darker pencils.

I always leave the hair for the last stages, otherwise, it becomes distracting in the process of creating an expression. I was going to just leave it empty like negative space but started to work it in with a few lines, the few lines became a lot of lines and I thought it looked amateurish so I used a blending stub to smear it all up and then added highlights with a kneaded erasure and darks with a dark charcoal.

Please see the tab for pricing options to commission your own portrait in charcoal.