PORTRAITS - How to draw and shade a realistic face

I'm going to make a little portrait drawing. I found a picture on pixabay and I made a crop of it and one is of the of the grey tones that it was in actually that was the actual photograph and the other one I put my contrast in. I'm starting with the eye and the right eye. I usually start with that eye. I sped up the drawing process a little. I think the speed is double now and I start to finish this eye. Not totally but to the extent that there is a highlight as well and some shadow a little bit of the area below the eye. I want to just draw the eyes and the nose and the mouth but not the whole face not the whole outline of the face. So I'm not going to do the cheeks or something but it's more or less a minimalistic drawing and here the other eye. I'm doing this freehand. You could also try to trace the lines beforehand but sometimes I'm just too lazy to do that and I just start just like that and I think you should be able to do that. So as you can see I draw the outlines but I also put in accentuations at the same time immediately. I think that just drawing outlines can be a bit... Those lines can look a bit dull so I usually start by adding hatchings and adding accentuations straight away. The eyebrows and here and there I add little hatchings to make it a little more darker here and there. And there's this balance between adding shadows and defining the face and leaving it minimalistic. So if you go outside a certain area you have to do the whole drawing that way. So if I draw too much of her cheek on the right I would have to draw the cheek on her left cheek as well and so on. So when you make this kind of drawing you have to decide beforehand what you are actually going to draw and what not. So I decided to make a drawing of her eyes, her nose and her mouth but not the area around that. And as I go along I add more definition, more hatchings or more shadow so to speak. And I'm defining her iris and pupil a bit more, the highlights so the eyes speak a little more. The other one I have this automatic focus in my camera which does not always focus on the right detail. And I try to get a certain symmetry in those two eyes. So what I'm doing on the left I have to do on the right as well more or less. I'm constantly checking the photograph which I have to the right. And the first part I did with the lighter version of the photograph and now I add darker shadows. And I think I looked at a darker version of the photograph with more contrast. So I need that lighter version to get the lines right, the definition right. But I also need that darker version to get more shadows in a correct way. So it's good to think about the kind of source material that you have before you start to draw. I usually have a lighter version of the photograph so I can see where the lines are. And a darker version in this case for this drawing to get the shadows better. And now with this darker version I go over certain details that can be a little bit darker. Where do I put the nose? I made this diagonal movement. It was very quickly but from the right corner of the right eye to the nostril of the nose on the right I measured the diagonal, the angle of the diagonal. And then I can copy that into the drawing. I'm working on the shadow of the nose, nostril, a little bit of the bridge of the nose but not too much. I don't want too much definition there, not too much shadow there. So there are these eyes that stand out, the nose, later on the mouth. And I'm working now for a darker version of the photograph. I can see that by the shadows that I'm applying. So if you do use two separate photographs with separate tonal values you have to watch out. If you draw too much of the face with the lighter version and you use later on the darker version you have to go over many details because you actually draw them too light for, you know, to stand next to the details that you have drawn with the darker version. So one has to be careful in how to use those photographs in combination with each other. Now the mouth. I'm looking where the corners of the mouth should be. So I usually look at pupils, the position of the corners of the mouth relative to the pupils. So is the corner of the mouth left of the pupil, on one third of the left of the pupil, in the pupil from the left. So you have to measure all the time then to get this mouth right. And in the darker photograph a lot of definition is gone. So I had to switch back and forth from the lighter and the darker version of the source photograph to see how the mouth was formed. Because for the tonal values I need a darker one and for the position of the lines I need a lighter one. Upper lip. And you need a certain three-dimensional appearance of those lips. Especially the lip below. Here the area below that lip. A little bit of the area between the nose and the mouth but not too much. It's more an indication. And here I'm darkening an area in the eye and adding a little bit of an indication of the cheek. Otherwise it's too confined to that area perhaps I think. And I'm adjusting several details like the upper eyelids I just did, now the nose. And I go over several details to give it a little more context, a little more definition. And I'm just using one HB pencil on rough sketching paper and I feel I can go pretty dark with that one pencil on that rough paper. On other paper I would have used perhaps a 2B pencil but in this case I can manage with just one HB pencil. I usually just use one pencil and just an HB pencil which is my favorite. But I like a sort of simplicity and things. I don't I don't really like using different hardnesses in pencils. Here I'm darkening the drawing a little bit here and there. A little bit an indication of the skin that you saw below the nose. Those hatchings there where the pencil is now. And I'm deciding should I stop, should I go on. At a certain moment the drawing is done. On the left eyebrow I drew a little accentuation then I adjusted that by adding a little more of the skin. But this is the drawing.