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images and everything else on this site is copyright ©
Bonnie Phillips Gardiner 2007 |
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Specializing in pencil drawings from
your photos ~ |
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Process ~
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Portraits: Family Portrait: Parents and five grown children. (This page is extremely image heavy. It may take a short while to load if you are on a slower connection.) I just finished this project a few days ago. It took me nine hours and forty five minutes to complete, give or take a few minutes. I thought this would be a good one to show the portrait process, so here we go... First, I was given computer print outs of a photo of the parents, a print out of a very small photo of the siblings and an actual photo of the siblings taken at the same time as the other photo. They had tried to blow up each face and print those out along with the small photo, but because I use the computer to zoom in and see detail not visible on print outs I requested an additional actual photo to work with. Once I got what I needed to work from, I scanned everything and put it in the computer.  Once I scan it in I like to cut out the subjects I plan to draw from each photo and put them together. This way I can prearrange them without drawing them first.  Once I settle on how I want the subjects placed, I pull out paper and pencils. In this case the paper was a sheet of 14x22" poster paper for drawing. I love the weight and the feel of the paper, though it really isn't the most professional sheet. I do have nice professional drawing paper too, but this customer requested this particular size.  The first thing I draw is oval shapes for the head placements. Then I sketch out the features of the faces, looking at all the available images. In this case, I had the physical print out of the original photo as well as my scanned version, so I was able to zoom in and see details. This is why a really good photo is so important. I can only draw what I can see.        Once I am finished with the initial placement and basic sketching out of each figure, I am ready to go back and fill in. Because I am left handed, I start on the rightmost figure and work toward the left.       Because our son is autisitic I am not able to draw after he comes home from school, so at this point I had to put everything away until the next morning. I had worked over six hours by this time. The next day after everyone left for school I got back to work.     I am a rather heavy user of tissues for blending. I like the soft look of the blend it makes without the smudging I get from blending sticks. It kind of lifts or rubs off a lot of the pencil marks. I've tried cloths and everything but I just really like using tissues. So this is what I was given....  And this is what they ended up with.   So, there you go. That's how I do it. |
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Triple Portrait: same man at
various ages.
I always need a good photo to work
from. I scan the photo into my computer and that way I can zoom
in and see details not visible just by looking at the photo itself.
 I can also arrange the photos for
a portrait of multiple people to find the most pleasing grouping.
Then I pick up my paper and pencils and start drawing.
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 Please click the image to
see a larger version.
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| I've been drawing portraits since I
was in high school many many years
ago but I have to admit, technology has made it so much easier now. (Click here to go to the page for this piece: Triple Portrait.) |
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| Commissions: Max on the Beach: I was asked to do a drawing of my son Max walking on one of the local scenic walkways looking out at the beach. I walk to the ocean all the time and take hundreds of photos so gathering all of that was easy. Max had even walked with myself and my husband only a month before. So I put together some of my photos and created the drawing by looking at those. I didn't do a composite as I had done with the portraits as it really wasn't necessary. I used about nine different photos as reference in total.  |
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The
final result: Please click the image to see a larger version. It was too large to scan so I took a photo of it instead. |
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| (Click
here to go to the page for this piece: Max on the
Beach.) |
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