Here is my latest piece. I find black skin and the varying hair styles that black people have, always brings me to a point of nervousness. Dark skin in beautiful to draw, it feels like you can never go too dark, but the hair is really tricky and you need a really good paper to pull it off. I currently am using conqueror CX-22 acid free stock and it is ok, but the darker it gets the surface of the paper starts to wear out. Any other ideas out there? (I am using 2H-9B pencils not graphite or charcoal)

There were four main hurdles here for me
1. The mental conversion to grey scale
2. The lips: How to make them look like a colour and not black lipstick on a dark person
3. The white flower embroidery in her top (sheesh)
4. The Hair: It took me the most time. I just could not get it to look like hers and I didn't know what to do!

What do you guys think?

[attachmentid=10468] [attachmentid=10469]

excellent job...looks 'exactly' like the photo..really good work

I think you are an artist.Most of us just could dream of drawing portraits like you do.

I also did this one in 2000, and have gotten a bit better since then, you can see from the poor shading in the skin that balance was off. It was either dark or light.
[attachmentid=10471] [attachmentid=10472]


I saw the flowers that you did in colour in TWENTY MINUTES on the other forum and I can not put colour together at all, colour is so much more difficult. We all have our strengths and colour certainly is not one of mine. Thanks for the complement though.

Exactly,

It is beautiful job, I think you need to ease up on yourself a little.

But as for greyscale why not use your computer - if you don't have programme that will greayscale for you here is a link (can't remember if it was from here or Wet Canvas, that I got it) it is a site that will convert any pic on your computer - I keep it in my favourite links and just click it when I want the image grescaled & voila!:

javscript:document.body.style.filter='gray';void(0);

I think you did and excellent job. My suggestion for the hair is to think "suggesting texture" and concentrate most on the areas where you have highlights and where the hairline meets the skin.

BRB

Here it is a free program for editing images which i downloaded also.

free tools

[ pictor.zip ] [ 549,880 bytes ] [ Freeware ] [ No Source ]

PICTOR Image Editor is a software to create and edit images. Now in the version 0.22-beta, this product have a lot of resources but is very thin, with PICTOR you can apply many filters, transformations and work with transparencies,textures, shapes and polygons. But your major characteristic is it was developed using the available resources in the ATELIE's package.
Effects: (Solarize,Posterize,Ripple(sine and saw tooth), Whirl,Pinch,Waves,Emboss,Blur,Splitblur,Motion blur,Plasma,Lens, Fisheye,Noise (gaussian, exponential, poisson, impulse, uniform and spray),Rank (medium, minimum and maximum), Sobel, Marble, Convolutions (blurs, smoothings, mexican hat, shadows, emboss, sharpens, wood, ripples, chisel, jiggle, spackles,texture, psyche, and customs convolutions), Mirror,Equalize
Filters:(Contrast,Negative,Lightness,Grayscale,rgb, hsl, hsv and lab)
Textures librarys:Standard and Basic01 (at flamma's site)
Shapes librarys: Standard and Basic01 (at flamma's site)
Help files: Portuguese Version (at flamma's site)

Those lips are amazing, as is the clothing. Fabulous job.

As far as the hair goes: this is an example of concentrating so much on the hairs that you didn't really look at the hair. There are highlighted areas in the photo that indicate more structure, curls made up of many hairs together, and that's what you seem to have left out. I'm saying pretty much the same thing Bob is, really.

Brilliant!

To me it looks great, every detail is wonderfull, and those lips look very nice!!. I'll leave the hair details to the experts, and you already have their opinion

I had already seen that other drawing you did before, and I thought it was great, still do, but it is visible that you have improved allot. keep working

And I thought "I" was hard on myself!
I can not offer you much advice other than what as been given. Someone mentioned texture and I will also comment on something that I learned when starting out with the airbrush. "Less can be more" "You don't have to paint every hair, just the key element and alude to hair. This is a lot more meaningful when talking about an animal portrait with lots of fur, but it still holds true for people as well. Your eye for detail and perfection is second to none, in fact I feel like a slob when I look at your portrait and some of mine! With the hair, as was said, concentrate on what is closest to the viewer then as you move back, reduce the focus and let it beome an illusion of detail. This may not be how the photo is, but it is OK it will look fiine! I totaly understand how you feel about getting things perfect, and you are doing a excelent job. How big is this drawing and did you do it completely "freehand" as they say, or did you use some technical transfer method... grid, projector, light box..etc as I do.
Again outstanding drawing, one of the most photorealistic I have seen on this site in the 6 months or so I have been here. You should be very prod this was a huge amount of work and many hours of time invested with a superb outcome!

Thanks for the link, the problem is that this is a photo, I would have to buy some kind of scanner to get it into the computer or use my crummy digital camera.

you are absolutely right! BOB was saying that I should try suggesting hair, well I did but got it wrong, while something inside me still wants to capture exactness (if you know what I mean) but I came up against the wall of not knowing how to put on paper what I was seeing. Those highlights are crazy. The Size of the drawing was 12"x18" so there was room. I will study it some more, thanks again

Hi Airscapes,
I look at your stuff and I believe you understand my compelling, addiction to perfection, and as you can see I have come a long way in the last couple years. I have been using the grid as my "transfer" method I don't have a light box (I live in Barbados in the Caribbean) most people have never heard of it, those things are not available here. Then I get request for some really large stuff this one in particular is 12"x18" the art paper is 14"x20". The grid allows me to scale these photos to whatever size I want, and can be easily blended into the photo with a qtip when I'm done. See step by step photos of how I did this one @ www.exactlydifferent.com/ExactlyDifferent/Steps.html

Beautiful work!