Pencil portrait of Anastasiya

Graphite pencil portrait of Anastasiya on A4 Daler Rowney Airbrush Bristol board.

The pencils used were various from 6H to 8B from Mars Lumograph and 'Masters'.  Blending was with Royal & Langnickel blending stumps, paper tissues and cotton buds.  Erasing was using a WH Smith kneadable eraser, a Jakar battery eraser and a Faber Castell Perfection eraser pencil.

My sincere thanks go to Anastasiya-landa for making the picture Outdoors_3 available as stock.

This beautiful picture of Anastaiya, aged 2, attracted me as a subject of a drawing because of her lovely laughing smile and eyes, and her hand in the corner of her mouth.  I knew that her hair would provide a very great challenge, and I started the drawing thinking I would face that problem when I came to it.   In fact I kept putting it off for days on end.  I had originally thought that I would grossly simplify the hair, without the tousled appearance, but soon realised that this would spoil the picture, so tousles it had to be!

This drawing is by far the most ambitious that I have attempted so far.    There were times that I wished I had never started, but I am pleased with how it turned out.

Edit 3 October 2014 - photo replaced by one with slightly better definition and more even illumination.  The photo that I had originally uploaded suffered from uneven illumination, with the right side of the picture being too pale