Hello everyone Vaan here. In today's drawing, I'm going to be Drawing a Portrait of Rey in Star Wars the last Jedi using charcoal. The most important thing when you're starting a drawing is to stay with a great initial sketch and as you can see my sketch is a bit more complicated I haven't just got the basic features sketched out by also like to sketch out the contour areas for the shadows and the highlights so I know exactly where the main shadows are but also the highlighted areas. That is really important for me for when I go and shade it in. I'm shading the eye to start with, you can see that my sketch is nice and light so it won't come across too dark once I start shading you won't be able to see all of those lines through.
What I do is I use a lighter shade pencil rather than dark pencils to do the light shading and I just apply a smooth layer of that and then I go in with the blending stump and I either like to use circular motions or I like to just sweep the blending stump from one edge to the other. I try to avoid doing zigzag motions and so again I'm just using the pencil to build up layers. It is important not to start too heavy and get everything done in one layer. I'm doing the eyebrows you can see that I'm kind of shading in the block area and in the direction that the eyebrow hairs. Her eyes were quite smoked as well so it's important to look at how these shadows change and realized that there is a lot of shadow in things like the white of the eye.
With the skin, this is one of the hardest things to get right but also one of the easiest but I find that people find it really tricky and I think people are just overthinking it. Go in with a light pencil like a pencil, applying your shading so the most difficult part for people is to restrict the pressure that they apply on to the pencil and a few little hacks for that is to use the side of the pencil and to hold your pencil towards the back because this will naturally restrict the amount of pressure that you can apply onto that pencil can apply on to that pencil. What this means is that even if your pencil strokes look messy they need to still be somewhat smooth but look a bit messy. It doesn't matter because you haven't applied a lot of pressure onto that pencil so they're quite easy to blend out whereas if you apply a lot of pressure onto your pencil.
Here are the basics to drawing her clothes firstly I went in I just used the black pencil of this and a blending stick. Her clothes were very dark so it was simpler to color then if it was had sort of more values because her clothes were basically pretty much black. There wasn't a lot of changing values. When I did my initial sketch what I did was I shaded in and I blocked in all of the main sections of the clothes. What I'm doing basically is I go in with my black pencil and the first sort of mark out the structure of the hair I get in the darkest areas and kind of transition between the outer edges into the middle the middle of each section was more of the highlighted area where it was a slightly lighter value.
That's basically it. Thank you, everyone!