Ayumi Is

The subject here is Ayumi Hamasaki from her "I am..." CD album insert, from the page with the song "UNITE!". An alternate title is just simply "Ayumi". It resembles her in a lot of ways, but it doesn't in a few, among them her lips and maybe her chin. I feel like none of my drawings ever end up looking like their models, but I guess that's because of my artistic interpretation!

The drawing is done completely with a pretty cheap, but Japanese, Mitsu-Bishi 9800 HB pencil with touches from a Staedtler Mars Plastic eraser on 11"*14" Strathmore Medium Drawing paper. I scanned it in black&white on a Epson CX5400 at 300dpi, which I later scaled down to this size using Adobe PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 3.0. (in other words, graphite on paper scanned in 8*11). It really mattered which program I used to scale, because MSPhotoEditor made the entire image grainy from the pencil... ugh. The scan ended up cropping off some of her body and hair, but it actually looks better this way. I still have trouble showing clean form and dimensionality, so I guess that could be a little cheating...

This sketch I did over a few weeks, while watching the Athens Olympics and in my house's stairway. Stairwells are surprisingly comfortable workplaces for me, and the results are pretty good~ This is one of the few quality drawings I've done at home, and I think I'll probably do more!