Drawing of my daughter Cynthia

[Tiffany Brown]

This is my daughter Cynthia. It is 12" x 9", graphite on Bristol smooth. Although I am new at this, I'm working on turning it into a full time business. I've already done several commissions and am loving every minute of it!

I am self taught and it's extremely important to me that I continue to improve the quality of my work. I would appreciate any comments you have to offer. Digital manipulations are okay.

Thank you,
Tiffany

[Chuck Yokota]

Hi Tiffany,
Welcome to the forum!

This is a nice drawing of your daughter, pretty accurately drawn with a good likeness. The area I would suggest you look at is in your use of values. One thing that can help is to make a black and white image from your color reference photograph, as I've attached below. From this, I would say you should go darker in your darks and shadows. Doing this will allow you to put different values next to each other, without a contrasting edge, as is on the back of her hand. Also, the area around her mouth is a bit over-modeled and overdoes the subtle changes in values there.

[Steven Sweeney]

Hi, Tiffany,

This is quite a nice drawing, reminding me immediately of the style of a pencil artist named Don Greytak. You may find his website interesting, particular the images of children and home life.

I agree with Chuck that some attention to values would bring this well along. Briefly, my recommendations would be: 1) SQUINT at both the reference and your drawing, in order to eliminate much of the detail and reduce the image to a value pattern, and then 2) preserve that value pattern by a) not looking too deeply into the darker values to try to find lights and b) maintaining the overall value shapes by not letting excessively light or dark