Pencil portrait of a smiling girl from Tatopani

Graphite pencil drawing of a smiling girl from Tatopani, a village in Sindhupalchok District in the Bagmati Zone of central Nepal, on A4 Daler Rowney Airbrush Bristol board.

Pencils: Mars Lumograph (4B, HB),Faber Castell 9000 (6B, 8B), mechanical pencils 0.2mm/HB, 0.3mm/2B, 0.5mm/4B with Pentel Ain Stein leads.
Indentation:  Royal Langnickel embossing tools.
Blending: Blending stump from Royal Langnickel and paper tissues.
Erasing: WH Smith kneadable eraser, Tombow Mono Zero Ultra-fine eraser and Jakar battery electric eraser.
Photo adjustment using GIMP as detailed in my series of tutorials: Removal of barrel distortion; Cropping to A4 ratio and removal of perspective distortion; Cropping unfinished edges of drawing; Adjustment of histogram.

My sincere thanks go to ૐ Didi ૐ on Flickr for making his lovely photo available for derivative works via a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.  The link to his photo is  Smiling girl, Tatopani.

I was attracted to this reference by the hair, not only the girl's hair but also the woolly jumper that she is wearing and the way the light from behind and to her left was catching the fibres.

During the time that I was drawing this I received, ordered via Amazon from Japan, a Pentel Orenz 0.2mm  mechanical pencil.  It will undoubtedly take me a while to get the best out of this super-fine pencil, but I used it here for the fine detail of skin texture on her face at the junction between light and shade. 

I had just started to draw this when I realised that it would be an ideal drawing to enter in the HAIR! CHALLENGE! from We-Paint-Portraits.

I have uploaded a drawing process for this:

Some more of my drawings featuring very different hairstyles: