Graphite Pencil Drawings | Portraits in Graphite

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For me, graphite pencil drawings come naturally. I seem to be able to reproduce anything I can look at with remarkable perfection. Graphite drawings however, have been very rare in my life. Except for rare occasions have lacked the Awen (inspiration) to do this type of art. Possibly because I've never done anything Celtic, or drawn anyone with Celtic blood, which I hope will soon change.

My favorite medium is regular typing paper. I simply have not found any other medium that agreed with my style as much as typing paper. It's perfect!

In my drawings I never (ever) touch a pencil to the page I will be drawing on (unless it's way too thick to see through). I mostly use what is called tortillians. They are a rolled up piece of paper, or compressed piece of paper that is either sharpened into a point, or rolled in a way that produces a point. Other than that I use my fingers, my arms & elbows (on accident of course - well, on purpose too), erasers, q-tips, and different types of brushes.

Setting up the picture that I want to draw always takes the most time. What I do is scan the picture, print it, and then draw a grid on it with a pen and a ruler. Then I label the edges with numbers so that I can easily reference the square in which I am drawing.

Next I create a grid (by scale) on the paper I am going to place behind my typing paper. If I use some other kind of artist paper I draw it on there with a light mark I can erase as I go. (This is why typing paper works so well, because I can place a blank piece of paper on top of the grid I made according to the scale I want to draw.)

After that I use a tortillian to get the outline of what, or who I am drawing (a very light outline). Next I begin at the top of the page and draw each and every individual square seperately.

I don't actually draw anything... I shade it or I erase it.

Sometimes, on occasion (like a little within every single picture) I don't draw or shade. Instead I make a tortillian that is so sharp that if I poked myself with it, it would make me bleed. Then I write out my secret passions within the picture using a microscope. I write them so small that chances are nobody will ever find them without hours and hours, and more hours of careful study. Also on occasion I write in code. I use the measurements of certain items on the origional picture as the cypher... or I use a code I've created called "Celtic Dragon Runes" (which is very advanced and is the only code that fits the english language perfectly, as well as shows universal (dragon) polarity within it). I'll post a blog on it (and other nifty codes, like knotwork codes) later today if you are interested.

Once I have shaded every single square within the picture I put it away for a day and then come back to it and make sure that the contrast within the entire picture is correct. I shade what I feel should be darker and lightly erase what I feel should be lighter.

That's pretty much how I draw my graphite pencil drawings so perfectly (in my opinion).

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