Pencil Portrait Drawing Tips on Preparing a Photograph

Once you acquired an acceptably clear subject photograph from your customer, what do you do with it? Well, you prepare that photograph to be used as a reference for your pencil portrait drawing effort. The preparation procedure I will describe works well for me and I have been using it for years. Of course, as you get better at pencil portrait drawing you may want to adapt the procedure to better suit your own working habits. So, here we go:

* First, I scan the photograph into my computer at as high a resolution as I can muster. You can always reduce the resolution if you feel that it will better suit your purpose.

* Then, I bring the scanned image into a graphics computer program such as Photoshop and adjust the brightness and the contrast so it brings out the best in the subject. This is also the time to transform your color photograph (if that is what the customer gave you) into a black and white (grayscale) image.

* Next, I adjust the size of the image. For that, I focus on the size of the head, i.e., the vertical distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin. The best distance to work with is between 9.5 and 10.5 inches which is about life-size.

* Keeping the size of the head fixed, I now I crop or expand the image to a size corresponding to my drawing paper. For example, if I am going to draw on a 14 by 17 sheet of paper, my image will be about 10 by 13 inches. This leaves about 2 inches of empty space all around my drawing paper. At this stage I also pay attention to the composition, i.e., the layout of the final image, the relationship between the subject and its environment, and how much of the subject, other than the head, I will represent. Make sure you do not change the already established size of the head when you manipulate the overall size of the image.

* Next, if you wish, you can draw a grid onto the image. I often use a grid consisting of 1 by 1 inch squares. So for a 10 by 13 inch image you will have 130 squares to work with. Photoshop has the option to easily draw such grid lines over an existing image.

Don't worry, using a grid is an age old tradition and does not constitute "cheating". Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Edgar Degas, to name only a few, all made use of grids. However, you should also keep on practicing without grids and draw directly from the real world where the sizes and proportions usually differ from the corresponding ones on your drawing paper. Later, when you get much better, you may want to increase the size of the squares and eventually dispense with them altogether. But, for now, we will rely on grids. They are, after all, just the ideal tool to use when drawing from photographs.

* Finally, it is time to print out the manipulated image in black and white (grayscale). You are now ready to start drawing your pencil portrait. Note, that after you scanned in the original photograph you do not need it anymore. Put it away carefully so you can give it back to your customer in its pristine condition. Do not loose or misplace the original photograph. Most customers would not be very happy if you have to tell them you lost their photograph, particularly if it is a unique old one.

We just described the process of how to prepare a given photograph so it can be used as a reference image for your portrait drawing. This process essentially consists of (1) value and brightness adjustments; (2) enlarging the photograph to a desired size; (3) adding a grid of suitable size; (4) and printing out the final reference image. With this, you are now ready to start drawing the actual portrait based on your prepared reference image.

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