Portraiture Class Week 2

I have had a few practice attempts at home to test out how I might get on with adding some colour or  Indian ink to my portraits. But by the time class came round today, I freaked out about my ability and ended up doing pencil drawings for the second week running. But the trouble is that I'm not that keen on drawing in pencil. I do the line drawing and then don't really know what to do with the shading. I'm finding drawing in pencil really helpful though as it means I come out of the class with a drawing that after a bit of maneuvering around of the features looks like the model. So in that sense I've achieved what I set out to do. But then I also am overworking the drawing at times because once I've got the features in place I feel like I'm done with it. But I definitely need to do something different next week now. Not least because I bought really nice heavy paper to be able to take ink or paint and all I've done is draw on it with pencil!!

On another note, our model this week 'Ben' was nuts! He was listening to music on his phone with headphones and kept taking his phone out and fiddling with it. Then at one point he decided he wanted to take a photo of us all drawing and got up to go and get his camera!! The tutor was like 'erm, could you wait til they've finished drawing you, please?!'

Anyway, here is what I did...
Drawing One: A little continuous line drawing I did of the model while waiting for everyone to arrive and the class to get started.

Drawing Two: I chose to sit right at the side of the room so that I could get a full on profile view as that's what I think I'm most hopeless at drawing. He did start out with my usual sticky out chin but he ended up looking pretty much like the model.  It was a really sunny day and the light was over all of his face so I couldn't see a lot of shadow to put in.

Drawing Three: After break, in an attempt to use something else from my pencil case, I moved to the other side of the room from where there was lots of light and shade on the model's face and I got a piece of grey paper from the tutor and used my chalk pencil. The man at the next easel was very interested in my chalk pencil and said he is going to buy one.