Draw Me Tender WIP 2

Work in Progress #2 of ~Eel-Skin-Beatrice's Elvis commission

I thought it would be fun to take a similar picture as my Sherlock Holmes one. (:


Part one can be seen here:




Worked a LOT on the shading of Mr Presley's face. I printed the reference image with quite little contrast and shading, because my printed likes to use a lot of ink. But at the same time it's harder for me to recognize to shading, and therefore I had to spend a lot of time on getting the right degree of shading at the right places.

Worked another 6 hours or so on this drawing, which makes a total of 10 hours so far.


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I got a few questions about the drawing last time:

One was about the eyes, which don't seem to show a certain symmetry.

- Elvis has a typical classical face and beauty. His eyes usually seem to be symmetric, but if you add the lightfall on a different direction, you'll notice there's a slight difference between his left and right eye.

On the reference photo I'm using, the lightfall on the face comes from the upper right corner, which create stronger shadows than regular pictures. Stronger shadows also accentuate typical facial features which don't show and/or appear when the lightfall comes from a different direction. Which means it accentuates the asymmetricness of the eyes.


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The other was about which order I use to add new parts to the drawing during the process, such as the hair and skintone.

- I always, always start with drawing the eyes as soon as I got the lineart done of the drawing. Eyes say a lot, if not everything about a person. Once you got those (almost) right, or it's starting to look like it, it's easier to add more parts to a drawing such as the other features of someone's face, hair, body, some shading and the like.

This is, by the way, also the reason why my work in progress pieces show half to full coloured eyes first.


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If you guys and gals have other questions about this drawing, feel free to ask and I'll answer the most asked ones with the next work in progress.