Drawing Zoella

Drawing has always been an interest of mine and I am always looking for things to sketch when I have a bit of free time. This drawing was done a while ago as you can see from the date on the top of the picture, but I wanted to share some of my artwork now. This pencil drawing is of Zoe Sugg, also known as Zoella, a British YouTuber and blogger. I watch a lot of her videos and also read her blog as well so I was interested to see if I could draw her. She wasn't too difficult to draw; I would say it took about 1-2 hours. The face is always the hardest for me, but this turned out better than I expected and I'm quite proud of it. To start out my drawings, I always search for a picture that provides inspiration. Getting a basic face shape down is the next step. I usually just outline and space out sections of the picture before I begin to add the details.

Materials:
This was done in a sketchbook of basic drawing paper that you can get for around $15. For my drawings I use the Design pencil set by Bruynzeel-Sakura. This is a great set of pencils as there are many different varieties. The 2H is the lightest whereas the 9B is quite dark and heavy.

For fine lines I mostly use the 1H pencil as it is not too dark, yet still creates a distinguishable line. For the darker shadows and shading in this drawing, I mostly used the 1B and 5B.

To blend and shade, I love using this shading pencil which I find creates a nice smudged effect. This creates darker tones without using a lot of dark graphite.You can see that effect on the top of Zoe's hair in the drawing, as well as the shadow on her neck. I have several sizes of the shading pencils that I use for different types of shadows. The longer one to the right is mainly for thin and not so dark shadows. The second one from the right I use for heavy, dark shadows. The other two I use for average shading and nothing specific or in particular.

 Let me know if you would like to see more of my artwork and maybe I'll post some paintings that I've done as well. :)