Drawing facial hair exercise

Hello! Today I show you a little exercise I did to practice drawing facial hair, using an embossing tool and exacto knife. The exercise is taken from a book by Denise J. Howard - "101 Textures in Colored Pencil", which is full of useful drawing exercises.

 

As you can see, I basically followed the instructions in the book, using Prismacolor Premier pencils very similar to the ones listed (on Strathmore Bristol Vellum, 300 series). Before I laid down any pigment, I first indented the paper with an embossing tool, in order to indicate where the beard and moustache hair would go. Basically, it's kind of like 'drawing' the individual hairs with an embossing tool.

 

Here is the 'guy' in progress, his 'whiskers' slowly becoming apparent after some layers of pigment.

And here he is finished. As you can see, I decided to make his lip color deeper and more vibrant than in the original exercise. To make some more delicate hairs, I just used an exacto knife to scratch off some of the pigment. There are some obvious mistakes in this drawing, but this is just for practice, so I may or may not adjust them at a later date. The whole picture is rather small at approx. 3.5 x 3.5 inches. The one in the book is about 2 inches on each side.

Thank you so much for visiting. Have a nice day.