Total Art Soul - for artists

I came across this site with photo realistic pencil drawings. I'm just so amazed at how smooth it looks.

www.amusingplanet.com/2009/02/photoreali...awings-by-linda.html

I also don't know how you get the textures to look so real, like the shiny cap and the lip gloss. Would this be achieved with a normal range of drawing pencils?

Wow, what great work. I went to her website and there is some astonishing stuff there. In answer to your question, I would say yes. An ultra smooth 'board' will enable very delicate tones with the use of plenty of blending. I find it makes it difficult to get the darkest darks then though. So a lot of layering without much blending at all for the darks.

Oh yes, the paper! Duh, I hadn't thought of that. Could you also use charcoal for the very dark bits? Or would that look different to the pencil.

I'm off to Belgium on the 28th for a week and I'm taking my box of pencils and paper. I haven't done any proper drawing for ages so it will do me good to get back into it.

Wow incredible work!

cathy wrote:
Oh yes, the paper! Duh, I hadn't thought of that. Could you also use charcoal for the very dark bits? Or would that look different to the pencil.


Charcoal is great, I especially like the charcoal pencils which come in 'Light' 'Medium' and 'Dark'. I find it best to use a paper with a little more tooth for charcoal, so you lose a slight amount of the finest detail but get a more loose drawing which I like sometimes.
I experimented with charcoal and pencil in the same picture below. The horse is charcoal and the rider pencil. Personally I wasn't too keen on the result.

It looks OK here but in real life there is a reflective sheen to the pencil whereas the charcoal is matt finish, which grates a bit to me.

Oh right, that would annoy me. If it was the other way around, it could look like the horse's hair was shiny which would have been OK but the other way around would probably seem a bit strange. You could use this though for other works. I like the idea of it. I will be experimenting! lol