Boy With The Crooked Smile, Charcoal Drawing

Boy With The Crooked Smile Charcoal Sketch

This is a drawing of a boy that I did in Charcoal. I drew it in my sketchbook while waiting for a mechanic to work on my car; but I didn't finish it right away instead I worked on it over a few days.

It began with a pencil sketch. I went over it with a 2b charcoal pencil and finished it with a medium pencil. I used a lot of shading in this project.

In my resource material the boy was squinted in the sun so his eyes were almost closed I opened them in my drawing, The smile was a little cocky so I tried to capture it's humor.

Children are fun to draw but they are challenging since the face changes so much from year to year.

I am very happy with this drawing and think I will make an effort to sketch more portraits of children.

Adron

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Charcoal Sketch of an Angry Youth

I was teaching a class to some home schooled kids and I did this drawing as part of a demonstration of drawing a face. I brought it home and did a little more work on it. Maybe I should have left it as it was in the early outline stages, all artist have the problem of knowing when to stop and not overworking a project and as nice as this turned out I think I lost a little of the freshness of the sketch.

Charcoal Sketch of an Angry Youth

 I used all my charcoal pencils  from hb to extra soft, which is a little unusual for me. This young man has dark skin and I wanted to capture his features and his expression and not just make it a drawing of boy with a dark face.

The paper was inferior since it was from a cheep practice sketchbook I got at the drugstore and it didn't have the lift I would liked to have worked with, so erasing was not working very well and blending was poor.  Just the same I will set it aside, it may end up at the county fair.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work. Thanks for taking the time to look. 
Adron 

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Charcoal Drawing of a Youth

This is a charcoal drawing of a youth.

I did this during a class where I was teaching some kids how to draw a portrait.  It was inspired by an advertisement  photo of a boy and his father in a magazine. This is drawn with a soft and extra soft charcoal pencil on a practice sheet of textured paper. I used a lot of work with the stub to smooth and blend the values. I finished it at my basement studio.

Charcoal drawing of a youth.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work. Thanks for taking the time to look. 
Adron 

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Color Pencil Drawing of a Boy

Here is a color pencil drawing I did in a sketchbook. It is very expressive and cheerful.

Color Pencil Drawing of a Boy.

This young boy had such big eyes I had to draw him.

I do not know why but I had a lot of trouble with my pencils on this paper; maybe it was the temperature or the humidity but I just was not happy with the way they were blending.  I was hoping it would look cleaner than it did.  I am generally happy with the results though and will continue to draw.   It is part of the learning process I know I am getting better all the time.


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

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work. Thanks for taking the time to look. 
Adron 

 Click on an image in the sidebar to see more favorites.

(C) Adron Dozat

Drawing of Two Boys and a Butterfly

I did this sketch with three pencils; a Terracotta, a chocolate color, and a black. This picture took about 6 hours on and off. It really is more of a doodle than a portrait. I was very interested in having the dark background bring the white shirts forward. I was happy with the shadows and highlights.  The particular pencils I was using do not lend themselves to fine detail except with a lot of frequent sharpening of the tips, and then they wear down quickly. Because of the problems with the pencils, I was not as pleased with the portraiture part of the picture as usual. It was a good practice drawing. I enjoy working in the limited colors and feel more able to appreciate all the things the wide spectrum of colors can do.  

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

Charcoal Portrait of a Great Grandma and Great Grandson

This sketch was very difficult to draw because my client gave me some photos to use that were very poor quality.  I love to draw portraits from photos but they must be in focus and have some contrast.  When people take pictures of children they often stand above the child and that distorts the perspective it foreshortens the face so the forehead is large and the chin is small. Cameras with built in flash is bad because the flash is so artificial and too direct. a better choice is to have lighting above and to the side. 

The drawing was done with only one charcoal pencil, a 2b. I normally will use several pencils of different grades to get all the effects I want. However with this portrait the first attempt was getting too dark. I think I was overworking the picture because I was trying to make sense of the photos I was working with. I kept putting features and shadows in and then questing if they were in the photo at all. So on the second attempt I decided to limit my tools and technique to avoid this problem. I actually found the second production of the portrait to be easier because of the previous studying of the the subject. I realize I was remiss and unprofessional not to do a few studies before starting the actual project. It was drawn on a medium weight acid free paper with a medium texture.

I welcome sketching from pictures and look forward to drawing one from you.

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

Charcoal Portrait of a Tottler

Here is a picture I drew in charcoal of a little totter I once knew. I drew it off of a small wallet photo, I guess it was a picture taken from his preschool class. In any drawing the first 10% is the most important that is when everything gets placed. I made a few mistakes in this earliest part of the picture and had to spend a lot of time going back and redrawing the picture. I usually am very careful in the beginning to make sure the start is a good one. The problem started with the face being tilted in the photo and just slightly turned to the right this threw me off and I had accounted for some of the tilt in part of the portrait and didn't account for the tilt in other parts of the portrait. But after catching my mistakes and correcting them the drawing turned out pretty good. Instead of taking a photo I used the HP scanner to download the picture and it gave the white paper a yellow tint I am not happy about that but don't have time to take a bunch of pictures with my camera and download them.

This picture only took about two and a half hours to draw I used  several charcoal pencils of different grades and a 9 x 12 Srathmore Charcoal sketch pad.

This one  took the blue ribbon at the Howard County Fair.

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Pencil Sketch of a Young Girl Dancing in a Daisy Field

Here is a sketch I did from a picture in a magazine. There was this little girl dancing in a field of flowers, and  she had such a coy pose that I couldn't resist drawing her.  I drew this in my drawing book and used colored pencils. Even though I used colored pencils I still use a blending stub a lot. I find if you use the blending stub over the under drawing the top layers really flow nicely. You have to use a lot more pressure with a blending stub on colored medium than you would with charcoal and you need a different stub for each color since the colors do transfer but I feel it is worth it.  This drawing took about 4 hours and I worked on it off and on for over a week.  Normally I don't do much with the surrounding environment but I felt that she needed a place in time so I drew an impression of the flower field.  The trick was to not let her dissolve into the background since her dress was blue and the background was green, though they are complementary colors I wanted some contrast.  I had to darken the dress and lighten the green grass to keep her forward. A blue dress or shirt is always a good contrast when the subject has warm skin tones. The face was smaller than I like to do but it turned out well, maybe I will just sketch her  face at a future date.



I had trouble with my sketchbook on the scanner and got some unfortunate shadows.

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Charcoal Sketch of a Happy Baby in a Denim Jacket

Here is a drawing of a little baby in a big denim jacket.  He had such a happy face and a cute toothless smile that he was irresistible. Babies are difficult to draw because the proportions are so different and they change quickly. I am practicing more children and babies since I am getting more request to sketch them, and I want to have a high standard of excellence in my work. One problem with drawing children and babies is the lack of lines or wrinkles that give an older face character you have to rely a lot more in shading with half tones and the slight shadows to get the effect right. Babies and children tend to be more expressive so they are excellent practice for getting expressions and drama in a picture.

This sketch took about 2 hours and I drew it on several visits to a coffee shop. It was drawn using Generals charcoal pencils on a Strathmore 9x12 practice sketchpad   

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

Portrait of Four Generations, Child, Mother, Grandmother and Great Grandmother.

It was an honor for me to sketch these beautiful ladies; a mom, a grandmother, a great grandmother and the  baby. This was done in charcoal on acid free cold pressed paper.  It took about a month to do some nights I was up until two am trying to get it right. The photo she gave me to work from was not the best, and the images were fingernail size so working on it was a challenge. I had to use a copy machine to enlarge the picture so I could get more detail and  a better sense of the values.  I loved drawing it and was humbled to have been chosen for this project. 

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

Color Pencil Portrait of a Little Boy in a Hat

Here is a cute little boy with red cheeks I drew in my sketchbook. It took about 7 hours over a couple of weeks. I found his picture in an old magazine.  I used some high end color pencils and also some watercolor pencils. It was drawn in a 9x11 sketchbook. I used a blending stub extensively on this one to try to get the colors to blend. I often found myself lifting the color out in the highlights with a kneaded eraser and a latex eraser. It was tempting to over work the hat but I didn't want to distract from the face.  There are a few things I was not satisfied with but I got bored with the project. I think if I was more careful when I was starting out and laid out the features with more attention to shape and proportions it would have looked even better. 

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

Charcoal Portrait of a Little Girl

Here is a sketch I did of my daughter from an old photo. I drew this in charcoal on pratice paper. It was a challenge to draw with the light dress and the dark background. I was happy how it turned out. Normally I leave the background blank but this time I wanted to bring her forward and give her a brightness that needed a dark background.

This took about 6 hours to draw. It needed a lot of blending and lifting to get the tones right.

I would love to draw a picture like this for other people. Please see the tab for pricing options to commission your own portrait in charcoal.