Pencil Portrait Art Technique: A free preview of Art Lessons in Drawing, Painting, Portraiture, Photography in both Analog & Digital Media From the Secrets of the Old Masters to the Secrets of the New Masters.

Realistic Portrait Art: Pencil & Graphite Drawings

  Admission Free Portrait Art Gallery & Drawing Tutorial

"Since the times of the ancient Greeks, Art History records a relentless quest for Realism and artistic excellence in realistic paintings and sculpture. The masters of each generation strove to perfect their craft, then passed on the torch of their accumulated knowledge and skill to the next generation. The accomplishments and technological breakthroughs of one generation have often set new standards of excellence for the next."  ~ H.D.J.

"There is no higher compliment to a photo-realist than disbelief." ~HDJ

Young girl from India -001  1996: Here's a half-finished drawing, to begin with... DELIBERATELY left unfinished. Media: burnt umber, sepia, and yellow ochre colored pencils on smooth bristol board... Of course all of these Portraits shown here employ his original photography. These simple headshot portrait drawings, based on photos he has taken in his studio usually only take him about a day to create. Complex illustrations such as "Pandora's Box" shown below and those seen in his other Art exhibits take longer. This kind of photo shoot is VERY hard work. The hardest and most time consuming part is finding the right girls and scheduling studio time for the portrait photography session with their busy schedules and shooting the source photos -  After more than 30 years of practice, the drawings from these photos are relaxing, fun, and easy by comparison. 

Young girl from India -002 1996; media: Ebony pencil smudged with blending stumps on very rough textured bristol board. These portraits helped refine his techniques for his illustrations. Many of his story telling illustrations in colored pencils, acrylics and Oils are for sale, but these portraits are very personal work and are shown only to help aspiring portrait artists and are usually not for sale at any price. Keep scrolling down to see comparisons between his photographs, colored pencil & oil paintings as well as more large Colored Pencil Art, a free art lesson & information about more free lessons &  Foundations for Art: his paid private lessons.

Ann -1 2002; media: burnt umber   with sepia, and yellow ochre Prismacolors with Ebony pencil lowlights on Strathmore #400 Bristol Board. ( Note the individual hairs shaved in with razor knife and highlights touched up with white Prismacolor. ) The background is applied  so thick it used up four umber colored pencils.

Grace -1 2000; media: Plain old number two pencils, ebony pencils, and a variety of erasers. Early on I used my thumb and forefinger with great force to smooth out unruly areas and then would add more pencil and smudge again. Later after several applications I polished it with tissue. Rolling a rounded grey kneaded eraser over it smoothed roughly blended areas too. This got the grays smooth but I had lost my lightest and darkest values in the process. I then erased out the lightest areas with a #2 pencil eraser. Lastly I added sharp pencil details with an Ebony pencil and darkened the darkest darks to restore the 5 shades of the value scale.

Jessica Portrait # 0003 (2006) - media: Prismacolors and Spectracolors with Ebony pencil lowlights on Windsor & Newton Cotman 140 lb. Water Color Paper . I used the same methods as with Grace 001 but this time with full color. The background was heightened with pastels.

Jessica - (Colored Pencil Portrait #0004)  and a close-up to the right rendered in Prismacolors with Ebony pencil lowlights on Windsor & Newton Cotman 140 lb. Water Color Paper . Even with nothing but pencil and paper the use of original photography as a source makes this mixed media. See Johnson's Photographic artistry page for his newly updated exhibit of photographic portraits, some used here.

	Realistic Drawing Techniques: A free preview of Art Lessons in Traditional Drawing, Painting, Portraiture, Photography,& even Digital Media From the Secrets of the Old Masters to the Secrets of the New Masters

Professional Secrets of Colored Pencil shading and blending:

Did you know the old masters often traced?  Leonardo Da Vinci used "Camera Obscura" which is a lens and a mirror set at an angle with parchment over it to trace onto. Michelangelo used a similar technique. Great Realistic Painters began employing photography as a mechanical aid immediately after it's invention in the 1800's. This is not surprising since artists had been tracing from Camera Obscura for thousands of years. Famous Myths; Leonardo Da Vinci (1452- 1519 ) is often credited with the invention of Camera Obscura because he used it for his masterworks during the Renaissance and mentioned it in his notebooks, but this is simply not true. Similarly, Americans are credited with the camera, but it is also not true. The earliest description of Camera Obscura occurs in the great optical treatise Opticae Thesaurus ( Book of optics ) of the Islamic scientist Al-Hazen who died at Cairo, Egypt in A.D. 1098. Since he says he did not invent it, we know it came sooner.

STYLE and TECHNIQUE

Blair - 1996 (below right) was rendered in Prismacolor Colored Pencils from the photograph taken by the artist. " I wear magnifying glasses while I work like a jeweler. If I can satisfy myself that my colored pencil portraits look good under magnification, the illusion will usually fool the naked eye. One correction computers can't really do well at all is recover from a photo like this one that's just too dark. I was able to easily fix that in the drawing though."~ HDJ

Analog Photograph

Colored Pencil Drawing

  Of course Johnson starts with an outline just like everybody else...after his studio photography portrait session... He usually shoots a whole roll of nearly identical shots per portrait idea in 35 mm format to get one to work from when doing his colored pencil portrait art. To get it absolutely perfect he enlarges it on a Xerox machine and traces it on a glass lap board like a light table. The kind of pencils you use make all the difference. Think that tracing makes it too quick and easy? You'll find once you've finally got that outline done right you're a long, long, way from being finished in any medium...

Raw umber and Sepia Prismacolors are always better than a graphite outline as they blend better with the later colors. 

The next and hardest stage in HDJ's photo realistic colored pencil technique is to rough in the shapes and shades of light and shadow with crosshatch or other drawing patterns working from photographs taken in his studio as a guide. Here is a rough and simplistic example to give you the idea. Black and white # 2 and Ebony pencil or Colored Pencils, the technique is almost the same. Raw umber and Sepia Prismacolors are always better than a graphite outline for color as they blend better with the later colors. My portraits employ a much sharper pencil and a more refined approach, but I'm sure you get the idea. After the crosshatch is built up, for flesh tones especially, the pencils are polished down with tissue paper, then kneaded erasers- almost rubbed away- until the paper is stained with color but there is no waxy buildup remaining. This is the perfect underlayment surface to begin laying crosshatch on...

Next a sharper, more precise layer of crosshatch is applied...and polished with tissue and index finger or thumb for trouble spots. Repeat the polishing, erasing, and redrawing process several times... The dark and light areas like on the side of the face blend as the layers build-up. A heavy waxy color build-up is permissible on the background and her lips, eyes and hair, but not the skin. This kind of dry underlayment also works well with soft pastels. This color buildup stage is why some artist's colored pencil drawings resemble oil paintings and photographs and others look sketchy. And of course Practice, Practice, Practice, and did I mention Practice?

Below Left: Original 35MM Photo of model Ann Bratton. Right: Original Colored Pencil Drawing.

...With the portrait above right, a selection of different colored pencils are used with intermixing. Sepias, umbers, for the layout then the reds, salmons, peaches, and lots of burnishing layers and top layers with whites were used, with a touch of green for the eyes.  Ann's portrait shown here was done on #400 Strathmore double ply bristol board. Of course the large original art has a glow no photo could ever have that you can't see here on the web.

Then another layer is added, and another and another. The picture shown above has more than fifty thin transparent layers. Warning: Keep additional layers thin - most pencils will crack if you try to apply the additional layers too thick in the large LIGHT areas like the forehead and cheeks. Tips: Tissue paper (Toilet tissue) is the miracle ingredient for photo-realism -  intense pressure in circular motions, followed by a new layer of fine  crosshatch. He sometimes uses his erasers to draw with during this stage as much as his pencils.

Then there's even more varieties of mixed media... You can mix other media with your colored pencils like Soft Pastels -left- and Acrylics -right- for mad amounts of fun... There is no one way to do it right... but you can find the way that's right for you, or for your next picture- don't be afraid to experiment!  Practice, Practice, Practice, Oh, and did I mention Practice? This next picture below "Miss Lillian" was done five years before David ever sat at a computer station - it employed yellow ochre, sepia, black and white colored pencils on # 400 Strathmore Bristol Board and employed no burnishing, smudging, or polishing techniques, simply fine point pencils, applied super-fine point crosshatch heightened with white and and then shaved away for sharper highlights with a #2 exacto-knife... Since 1996 David does not do these kind of pictures for money anymore, he draws portraits in Prismacolor now to relax, for fun, for love and for the families of his subjects to treasure!

 "You sure can't get textures & effects like these with computers! Believe me- I've tried! There is NO such filter!" ~ HDJ

~ END OF ANALOG HEADSHOT PORTRAIT EXHIBIT~

          There are those who believe artists who use mechanical aids can't draw free hand and demand artists all prove their talent first by drawing WITHOUT any mechanical aids. Hilarious. These pencil drawings below and HUNDREDS of others he did in the 1970's WITHOUT tracing settled this issue forever when he was a teenager. 

     I was against mechanical aids myself in those days, but when I found out that ALL the artists I admired most used all the mechanical aids at their disposal, and I had not been told this, I started using them myself.  

     "Jesus walking on the Sea" Graphite 1978  was done without any mechanical aids of any kind or reference whatsoever. Those of you who feel the need to judge my talent, just compare it with Michelangelo's work done at the same age. I think talent is overrated and hard work is a hundred times more important than talent when it comes to creating good art. I've known a lot of talented people who were so lazy that hard workers with next to no talent and a teachable spirit easily surpassed them. There is no substitute for hard work, not even mechanical aids...

Art & Technology: New Art Media for the 21st Century! Colored Pencil Paintings? Now with my story telling illustrations as shown below - like Helen of Troy, The Oracle, and Pandora's Box -You BET I use Computers! And just for fun I have several free web pages posted explaining the role of mechanical aids in the creation of these pictures! Here's my question: Why are artists pressured to stay with 16th century methods and not doctors? Where does this come from? Why aren't doctors pressured to avoid progress so they can continue to bleed us and put leeches on us? The answer is obvious. The double standard applied to visual artists seems crazy to me.      Taking it to the next level... using several photographs to create a complicated storytelling image. To create his complex illustrative images ( Colored Pencil Paintings ) Johnson uses several photographs to create a digital photo montage in much the same manner he learned from studying the techniques of 19th century illustrator Maxfield Parrish. Continuing along these lines of tracing and shading laid out in these simple portraits above to finish them. "Helen of Troy" "The Oracle" and "Pandora's Box" below.     A 'Prismacolor Painting', if you will: Because this kind of picture is really not at all what people think of when they hear the word 'drawing'. This art medium, these relatively new soft oil based colored pencils are not the first Dry Painting Medium: the term 'Pastel Paintings' originated in the 17th century. They also are a wet medium, mixing well with a variety of solvents and applied with an artist's brush - getting very oil painting- like results.    This teaser page of shading techniques is provided free of charge to aspiring artists. After you have seen them, if you would like to still learn more of his art techniques - personal instruction is available starting at only $199.00 (Compare with $3,000.00 USD. and up for comparable lessons.) Want to Learn H. D. Johnson's portraiture and photography techniques and everything needed for you to produce good visual story telling art or dramatic illustrative portraits?  ( These lessons are jam packed with unpublished huge - easy to study 12x18 images by the artist)      Here's what you need again to get started:  An electric pencil sharpener, A dozen # 2 pencils with good virgin erasers, a Dozen Ebony pencils, (or facsimile ) A set of 48 or more colored pencils, preferably Original Prismacolors or a facsimile. Bristol board or smooth drawing paper, a kneaded ( stretchy ) eraser, magic rub erasers, art gum erasers, toilet paper, & lots of blending stumps, small, medium, & large. most of all - have fun!    Affordable Art Lessons: The Brandywine School of the Illustrative Arts offers beginning, intermediate, advanced & master level instruction in Drawing, Painting, Photography, & Digital Illustration by Internationally acclaimed Illustrator & Photographer Howard David Johnson.  Your first 3 lessons are delivered online the same day via e-mail that we accept your payment. Due to so many computers no longer having disk drives, now both Domestic and International orders deliver the 15 lesson CD contents and supplemental materials by direct download.           With today's digital cameras and scanners and speedy e-mail,  distance learning is better than ever before! Expensive mailings of art back and forth and lengthy waits for feedback are things of the past!

      Howard David Johnson is a contemporary realistic artist and photographer with a background in the natural sciences and history.  David works in a wide variety of mixed media ranging from oil on canvas to digital media. David's realistic illustrations have made appearances in every major bookstore and game shop chain in America as well as magazines and educational texts around the world. 

   Some of David's more prestigious clients have included the University of Texas, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England, The Australian Mint, The National Geographic Society, Paramount Studios, Universal Studios, MGM Studios, Warner Brothers Home Video, ABC/Disney, CBS TV, PBS TV, The History Channel, Enslow Educational Publishers, Adobe Photoshop, Auto FX, Tree-Free Greeting, Verizon wireless, Apple IPOD, Penguin, Doubleday (Now Random House), Harlequin Top Historical Romances, and the History Book of the Month Club, as well as appearing in periodical publications like Popular Photography and the Wall Street Journal.   

   After a lifetime of drawing and painting, David's Traditional Art was exhibited in the British Museum in London in 1996, ( 3 years before he got his first computer ) as well as numerous American ones since, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

    Working in a variety of media David offers his customers a variety of options and more than three decades of experience. As an illustrator he has not only used the computer but has been involved in the development and marketing of software for Adobe Photoshop. Digital art, Colored pencils, Pastels, Mixed media, & also Oil Paintings can also be commissioned for select projects.Digital illustration projects start at $500.U.S. and group rates are available. 

    David delivers custom made copyright free illustrations & old fashioned customer service when he does work-for-hire. To publish existing pieces of his realistic art, David sells licenses starting at only $99.USD.

Enter a world of Beauty and Imagination...

INDEX of GALLERIES ~ LINKS to LARGER ART  

The Realistic and Fantastic Art Galleries of Contemporary American Illustrator Howard David Johnson

Click on these Fun Educational Realistic Art Gallery link icons  for Two-fisted Tales of VALOR & Frontline Combat featuring Legendary Warriors of History, Knights and ladies of Arthurian Legend, Celtic, Nordic, Asian and Olympian gods & monsters, unicorns, dragons, fairies... and more!

Angel Art	King Arthur	Norse Mythology	Greek Mythology	Legends of History	Fantasy Art	Celtic Mythology	Great Religions	Mythic Women	Fairy Paintings	Oriental Mythology	Russian Mythology
				\
Mermaid Art	History Part Two	Classic Fairy Tales	History of Dragons	Pencil Portraits I	Studio Photography	Colored Pencils II	Art Instruction	Realistic Paintings	Pre-Raphaelite Art	Legendary Women	Warrior Women
The Art of War	Mythic Creatures	About Realistic Art	Science Fiction Art	Beautiful Women	Art NuVeau	Fantasy Pin ups	Fairy Lore	Flower Fairies	Spartan Warriors	Lost Atlantis	Lady of Shallot
Catholic Art	Art of the Bible	BOOK of REVELATION	Surrealist Art	Commercial Art	Business Center	Style & Technique	Biographical	Paintings in Oils	ELVES	Digital Techniques	DINOSAURS

All these pieces of art and the text are legally copyrighted and were registered with the U.S. Library of Congress Office of Copyright by the author, Howard David Johnson All rights reserved worldwide. Permission for many academic or non-commercial uses is freely and legally available by simply contacting the author via e-mail or visiting www.howarddavidjohnson.com/permission.htm

Essay and Articles Section:

Philosophy, Art, & Art Philosophy

Personal Opinion Essays on Realism yesterday and today by the artist.

STYLE and TECHNIQUE

Howard David Johnson is an outspoken proponent of mechanical aids to visual art. Unlike the opponents of mechanical aids, his mission is not to prove his talent but to help preserve our vanishing Western cultural heritage. In addition to his mastery of the traditional media, now combines drawing, painting, photography, and digital media with more than thirty years of experience in these fields to create his Realistic Art Numerica in 21st century paintings and pictures. Did you know the Greek word "Photography" means "Painting with Light"? Today with the advent of computers it truly lives up to it's name. Due to developments in Art and Technology, a broader definition of painting is needed than that which is found in common usage. Introducing Art Numerica- an exciting merger of traditional visual art and cutting edge technology... a new art form for the twenty- first century... Art Numerica is not limited to realistic art but also offers limitless horizons for everything from cartoons to abstractions.

It is the most dramatic development in the visual arts since the Renaissance. 

~ Howard David Johnson

"Elven Fairy Magic" MMVII Prismacolor Pencils

"Tiny Dancer" MMX Mixed Media employing Adobe Photoshop (TM) Software

     The various galleries linked to by the icons above show many examples of His Realistic Art, and are grouped by theme rather than media. Since boyhood he has passionately copied the old masters. Using a strategy employed by J.W. Waterhouse (The old master David has imitated most) - his wistful and graceful models cannot be underestimated in their contribution to the stunning beauty and the potential for lasting appeal of his work. To create his work, he usually starts with a thematic concept, then working in his Photography studio with live models. He then assembles a variety of elements which are realistic and original. As a boy he dedicated his life to art in 1960. From 1965- 1999 he used xeroxes and tracings to make his preliminary photo montages. This is patterned after  the manner used by Maxfield Parrish and other 19th century notables. For this he offers no apology as many of the greatest artists in history employed any and all means of technology at their disposal such as Camera Obscura or even the evil manufactured tube paints. See his article below: "On Art and Technology: When Seeing is Not Believing" An essay dealing with mechanical aids to visual art from Camera Obscura to Computers for more on this. The digital montage is a natural evolution of the preliminary photo collage David learned from great Realistic illustrators like Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell. You'd think by now everything would have been tried but it hasn't. Exploring new art mediums is just as exciting today, just as full of freshness and newness as it ever been.

 Since 1972 when he began his career as a scientific illustrator for the University of Texas he has earned his living illustrating all kinds of books, magazines, CD covers, and all sorts of games, greeting cards, calendars, portraits, tapestries, murals and the like with his contemporary realistic art... David's Realistic Art has appeared in every major bookstore chain in The United States and has been used in educational texts and magazines all over the world.

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Essay Section:

Philosophy, Art, & Art Philosophy

Personal Opinion Essays on Realism yesterday and today by the artist.

"Those who are enamoured of practice without science are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty where he is going. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory, of which perspective is the guide and gateway, and without it nothing can be done well in any kind of painting."

Essay One: "THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME..."

(A Brief essay dealing with attitudes toward Traditional Realistic Paintings, Pastels, Colored Pencils and Art Numérica )

Pastel, Acrylics, and Colored Pencils combined

     Snobbism in the arts is nothing new. Some people will tell you that oils are the only valid medium for realistic paintings. That Colored Pencil, Digital, and other Realistic Painting and Drawing Media are not valid  for "real" art. Young artists, Don't let them bother you. Their forerunners used to condemn Pastels before they gained acceptance and called them "crayons" when Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752) invented them.  Mercilessly disrespectful  art critics of the time could not stop the Experimentalists no matter how viciously they attacked and derided them. "Crayon-painting" as it was called in England was practiced early on by persecuted pioneers in Switzerland and many other nations. What a debt we owe to these master artists who refused to knuckle under to the pressure of those short-sighted critics during those historic and experimental times. It took until 1870 with the founding of the "Societe` Des Pastellistes" in France that respect came  at last to these heroic & immortal visual artists.

        In England the liberation of the Pastellists from slight regard and undeserved disrespect came with the first exhibition of "The Pastel Society" at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880. Pastel Painters like Mary Cassat and others from America and other nations forever silenced  the snobs with their masterworks and gained recognition at long last for Thiele's invention as a valid art medium. I am persuaded that history will repeat itself.  Like Pastels, I believe these wonderful new colored pencils and even Digital Realistic Art Media will one day receive the recognition they deserve as powerful mediums of artistic expression just as pastel paintings did. What is your definition of art? Have you thought about it?

Mine is: "anything that makes you feel or think."

     Consider dancing... it can be a little skip in the step or rise to the level of the incomparable Russian Ballet. Did you know that just the materials alone for a single oil painting cost up to a thousand dollars these days? Even paying the artist less than minimum wage no one but the super rich can afford them anymore. Something's got to give. Realistic paintings in oil have been highly prized for centuries and the appeal and following of realistic art is undiminished to this day. Oil paintings featuring Abstract Art and Realistic Art are generally the most treasured form of all the visual art media and with good reason. But snobbish art critics  favoring abstract art have declared  that realistic paintings, or illustrations are not art for a century. With so many representationalist  paintings by so many immortal master artists hanging in the Louvre, the Hermitage, and the British Museum and others I think the disrespect for realistic illustrators that dominated the 20th century is academically ridiculous as well as vain and intolerant, insisting theirs is the only valid opinion. What is your definition of Art? I believe almost any form of human expression can be raised to the level of "high art" especially  visual art and Realistic illustration...

The detail reveals Realistic art and abstract art combined

       By my own definition of art, which is: "anything that makes you feel or think" most abstract paintings are not "real art" to me personally, because abstract paintings usually neither make me feel or think,  usually focusing obsessively on technique and avoiding any coherent content. I usually draw a complete blank mentally and emotionally when I look at them. In 1979 the Houston Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed a triptych of 3 giant   paintings they paid fifty thousand dollars for-  three blank white canvasses entitled "untitled". Then there was "The incredible new artistic Genius" with an I.Q. of 62 ...Congo the chimpanzee with his gala New York art exhibition...an elaborate prank played on the Snobbish American Art critics about a generation ago by research scientists in the field of primatology. Imagine how upset they were when he created one of his "ingenious masterpieces" right before their eyes.

( My Source for this is the Time Life Science Library volume entitled "The Primates". )

      Art education has been almost completely removed from American Schools as a result of generations of this kind of  fabulous nonsense contributing to America's cultural illiteracy crisis. Now, the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and other notables are being removed from school libraries.  After generations of this, most American college graduates today cannot name even one living visual artist, abstract or realistic.

There is no way that mandating more math, requiring more reading, or scheduling more science will replace what we have lost as a culture.    

What is your definition of Art?

~HDJ

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Essay Two : The Rebirth of Realism

More thoughts on realistic art yesterday and today by the artist

Art History has entered a new era with the birth of Art Numérica, or digital art media in the 21st century. Artists never stop exploring with mediums. Artists have been developing techniques, experimenting with different tools since at least twenty- five thousand years ago, when the first artist picked up a charred stick and scratched a picture out on the wall of his cave. You'd think everything would have been tried by now, but it hasn't. Exploring new mediums this very day is just as exciting, just as full of freshness and newness as it ever was.

Photography, Digital Artistry, Painting and Drawing combined! 

Your  business, letters, & links are always welcome.

info@howarddavidjohnson.com

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Music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( 1840- 1893) - "Swan Lake"