Off-Screen to On-Screen: A Few Sketches

A few stages of two portrait sketches from over the weekend, taking them off paper and onto the screen.

Hand-Drawn: Pencil on Paper#

This first one above is entirely hand-drawn using a single graphite pencil, no charcoal, no pencil colors, no fancy blending tools, just varying pressure and smudging shades with my fingers. I’ve always loved the depth you can pull out of raw pencil work.

Female portraits are especially fun because of the fine detail and subtlety required to capture features accurately on paper.

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Digital Art on Virtual Canvas#

This second one below is my first real experiment trying out digital sketching on a Wacom tablet to see how the process translates to screen, with all these different amazing tools at your disposal. I was basically trying out my hands first time on digital sketchpads and pen.

Zoom in on eyes, as most of the hours on these went into detailing the eyes and eyebrows.. in both hand-drawn and digital art and in fact this is from where I start too. From a distance, they can look like simple dark shapes, but layering the finest details in the iris and lashes is where a portrait actually comes alive I feel.

Honestly, I drew it too poorly to recognize the actual person! Overall, I enjoyed the hand-drawn sketch more than the digital art — much like preferring physical books over ebooks :)