Cary Grant (11.02.2019)

About the drawing: I love old classic movies. Like James Steward and Humphrey Bogard, Cary Grant is one of my heroes from the Hollywood movies from the ‘30’s - 60’s. I familiarized myself with him mainly through Alfred Hitchcock’s movies like Suspicion (1941),Notorious (1946), To catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959). I found a picture of him with his fists up as in a boxer’s pose. I thought it would be a good picture to draw, even though he might be a bit difficult to recognize since his fists are partly blocking his face. In the latest portraits that I have drawn I used solely graphical pens with ink. This time, however, I wanted to try to combine my Copic markers with my ink pens. I started by drawing with my Copic markers, covering big areas with warm grey tints. This went smooth and easily as you can see in below video. After that I had to start the laborious work of dotting. You can see in the video tat the more I'm dotting the more refined and expressive the face gets. I recently bought a few very small 0.13 mm nibs for my Rotring markers, which enabled me to put very tiny dots on the paper. I think I’ve been dotting for about 20 hours in order to finish the drawing. In the video I really speeded up the dotting part. I think the combination of my Copic markers and the black ink dots worked out pretty well. The markers just make the portrait more alive. Hopefully soon I will be able buy some Copic markers in skin colors as well. I also got some different colors of ink for my Rotring graphical pens and in I’m looking forward to experiment with these in my next portrait drawings. 

One more remark. Sometimes when I scan a drawing the scan looks nicer than the original. This is often the case with graphite / pencil drawing, since by scanning the drawing you get rid of the shininess of the graphite and you can crank up the contrast. However, with this drawing the original looks much nicer and smoother than the scan. The tiny black dots look a bit too harsh on below scans. maybe I'll try to make a good picture with my LDSR instead and see if this gives better results.

Materials used: Rotring graphical pens and Copic Markers in warm grey tints. The paper that I used is Copic Marker paper in A3 format, 70 grams. This paper is ridiculously thin and very smooth. I ordered it online and I had no idea that this paper would be as thin as wrapping paper. In the video I've put an extra layer of paper under the drawing, otherwise you’d see the pattern of my desk through the paper. When I received the bloc of paper I was really disappointed, because the paper feels so thin and cheap. However, despite the paper being so thin it works great for both my markers and inks pens. The paper doesn’t bleed and the colors come out bright and vivid. There is no texture at all in the paper which makes it both good for both my Copic markers and my Rotring ink pens.

Drawing Process: 


First picture without dots in the face. Second picture: half of the face dotted. You can see how the face gets sharper and more refined.

Using Format