young boy portrait - part three.

So by now i'm almost finished with this picture and am going to start moving on to a new one very soon. Before that, though, I need to finish this portrait...

There's still a couple things that i want to finish on it. This time, i shaded some more things darker, including the eyes. I worked on the hair a bit, but that got to be really challenging because there are lights and darks, but it cannot look random... so there has to be definition, but if there is too much then it looks like straw hair. I also had to change the hair line a bit because it was going to far over the boy's forehead. Also, I think i finally got the face shape really similar to the actual picture, which I was very happy about. {That took a lot of measuring with the end of my pencil, and much erasing!}

One thing that you'll notice looking at the original is that there are some very prominent shading/shadow lines under the eyes, which I tried to work on as well. It's difficult because I didn't want it to look overly shaded and with a child's face you don't want too much shading because it makes the skin look a bit older. However, there is some obvious definition, which takes a gentle buildup of sketching.

The picture isn't the best quality, but that's because of the size of my scanner compared to the sketchpad - it lets some light in. All that being said, for a first full-page project, I think that it's looking fairly good :)