Today I decided to sacrifice my dreams of getting some sleep in order to finally do one of these portrait studies. This is a portrait of one of the young boys I’ve been trying to draw. I really wanted to get one of these properly fleshed out so that I can get a better idea of the underlying facial structure and properly study my new subject. These properly fleshed out ones take a lot longer but they also get much closer to achieving a proper likeness. I think I captured the appropriate age much better in this one than I have in my previous quick sketches. Does anyone want to take a guess at what age he’s supposed to be?

Children are still quite difficult to draw for me but I think I’m beginning to improve. I think the elderly are by far the easiest for me to draw and then the younger my subject is the more difficult it becomes. I’m working towards doing another family portrait so I’m trying to get the different ages down. It’ll probably be slow going but I’ll try to work on it whenever I get a chance. The first step is doing some of these studies.