Viking Pencil Study

Viking pencil study by Stuart Fowle

Yes, another Viking pencil study. As I enjoyed my previous Viking study I wanted to try another one, as my previous drawing felt like a success and I wanted to see if I could repeat that.

My drawing is based on a reference from DeviantArt (link to ref: https://www.deviantart.com/random-acts-stock/art/Viking-stock-12-77642989)

This one was a bit more challenging due to the inclusion of the chainmail armour. But it also included the iron helmet, skin, a wonderful white hair and beard, fur, cloth, sheepskin, belts and insignia. So lots of different textures to try and capture in pencil.

Viking pencil study – trying new methods

In the reference the Viking has wonderful white hair and beard. So how to recreate that in pencil? I could have used my normal method of adding dark tones and then lifting the graphite with blue-tak or a putty rubber. But I decided to try indenting the paper with some metal sculpting tools.

I feel it kind of worked. The result is not quite what I imagined (is it ever!). Mind you the response on Social Media has been positive, so maybe I’m being to harsh on myself?

Will I use this method again? I think I will, but maybe on a smaller section of a drawing next time.

Urrgh chainmail!

Another area I will need to improve on drawing if I’m going to be doing more studies like this. Actually, that’s not an if, I will be doing more studies like his. In this instance, I think I got away with how it looks, but I do need to work on replicating it in pencil.

Blending stumps

Where possible I try not to use blending stumps, as I think they can be over used and an image can loose some texture. However for getting smooth transitions in small areas they are perfect. In this little project I used them for creating the blends in the cloth and some areas of his face,

Conclusion

Actually it’s not too bad. I’m always my own worst critic and I know which areas I struggled with or are not quite how I wanted them. But overall, it’s a keeper and it was a great learning curve.


Stuart Fowle is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk.

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