About the drawing: What can I say about this pencil drawing? I wanted to draw Angela Merkel since she has such an outspoken and recognizable face. I found a good quality picture of her online that I found very suitable for a new drawing. I like her blunt expression here. My idea was to make this drawing on A3 format, rather than A4, which I usually use. That way I could draw more details. This worked out pretty well. As you can see on the ‘drawing process page’, I drew Merkel gradually in layers, taking my time, using darker pencils at each stage. The idea was to keep the layers of graphite quite light so that I could overdraw it with ink pens using dotting and cross-hatching techniques. When the drawing became more refined and I became more and more satisfied with the result I decided to abandon the whole idea of using ink pens at all.

I decided that I didn’t just want to make a drawing that looks as close to the picture as possible. I always prefer to make a drawing look like a drawing, even at the costs of its precision. Therefore I decided that I had to do something special to her blazer. I wanted to draw a Christmas-like pattern in the blazer in the colors red, white, and blue. I used oily colored pencils and a crayon pen for this. This didn’t turn out as nice as I wanted. In the end I scanned the whole drawing and decided to turn the blazer into B&W, which looks better and less distracting in my opinion. Since my scanner is an A4 format I had to scan the drawing in two pieces and stich them together in Adobe Photoshop. To my surprise this worked out fabulously and there are no traces visible of the two separate scans being stitched together. Adjusting the contrast in Adobe really did a lot to the final result. What I don’t like about pencil drawings in general is that graphite is so shiny, reflecting the light and it's impossible to get real dark tones. Scanning a graphite drawing solves all these problems.

Of course it is easy to create different colored backgrounds in Photoshop,as I did. I also added a texture to the background to finish it all up. I’m quite pleased with the final result and it shows me that my drawing skills are progressing and that's all that counts:)

Click here to see the drawing process