Artwork

I’ve drawn pencil portraits of many of my best friends. It all started a few years ago when I wanted to draw a picture of Maggie for her birthday. Over time, I’ve gotten really good at pencil portraits as you can plainly see if you compare the two Maggie pictures.

These drawings display a pretty typical characteristic of me: I’m not very imaginative in the sense that I can’t come up with anything new, I can’t draw things that I haven’t seen, I can’t draw made-up people, but I can draw with great realism anything that I can actually see.

These series of photographs show the process of drawing a pencil portrait. It generally takes about 10 hours to do a good one. They are drawn on 9 x 12 paper using a mechanical pencil because you can’t get the fine details using regular pencils. If you want to learn more about drawing pencil portraits, there is one book that you absolutely have to read: How to Draw Lifelike Pencil Portraits from Photographs by Lee Hammond.

These are traditional works of art I did in my youth in middle school while taking art classes. I have to say, if pencils weren’t my thing I would be doing oil paintings because I love that medium.

You can also watch YouTube video slideshows of my artwork below.

Pencil Portraits

Making-Of Arianna’s Pencil Portrait

Traditional Art