young boy portrait - part one.

So I started the work on my first {official} project, and I realized that it's going to be a bit more work than I thought... I thought I might just be able to freehand the face shape and guess as to where the features and such are positioned. That didn't turn out too well for me {as you can see in image two... not really my proudest artwork I must admit!} :) The picture printed actually is about half of a page, while what I'm drawing is a full page of sketching paper, meaning that I can't just "cheat" and trace it or something like that...

Here is what I began by doing {it looked good at that point, i thought} (:

But when it came to doing the features, it didn't work so well to just try best to guess/sketch it. I ended up having to erase a lot of what I did at first because the proportions weren't exactly right... as you can see in the next picture :P

I had to use my pencil and measure the size of the distances from the mouth to cheek, nose to eyes, eyes to side of the face... etc. I also started shading too early {which is why the mouth and the eyes did not turn out very well!} I learned that it is much better to do light outlines before you start working the shading too much, otherwise you have nowhere to go when you finish, and it's better to build up your dark/medium tones as opposed to going with them right away. I made this mistake with the boy's mouth.. shading the middle but not the rest.
I worked on the picture a bit more and it did end up much better than image two {but then I got so sick of it and decided to stop at that point.} However, I forgot to take a picture but I'll include that in the next post. Maybe I'll do a quick sketch in the meantime before coming back to that picture on Monday or Tuesday :)