Well, its taken long enough but I've finally finished that pencil sketch. Its a wonderful feeling to complete the piece - even though it was simply for my own satisfaction not because I was working on a commission or to a deadline. This peice was only a quarter of the size of my other portraits. I drew it in my small sketch book, which gave me the flexibility to take it with me on camp instead of being constrained to the drawing table in my room.

I was contemplating this afternoon why it is that the majority of my portraits are of men. Looking back through my old drawings most of the faces that I've drawn are males. Why? I enjoy the challenge of drawing weathered, wrinkled, aged faces and women (generally) do all they can to avoid appearing any of those things. So, to put it bluntly, female faces are boring to sketch. I find that a face wtih contours and shadows is a much more interesting piece to draw than a smooth surface of skin.

Here are a couple of old drawings that I've fished out of my folder. I must have done these eight to ten years ago, when I was just beginning to explore portrait sketching. As you can see from this one, there are a whole heap of mistakes - the proportions are all over the place (the nose is way too big!) Can you tell who it was meant to be?

Then this one was probably done a year or so later.

 The quality of the pictures isn't that great, sorry, but hopefully you can see the style and technique changing over the years.