How lucky can one guy get?

Just take your daughter to work and let her play as long and hard as she wants. Presto, a subject to sketch!

First thing to do is sketch the outline of the drawing. I use a mechanical pencil and a kneaded eraser. It's so much easier, try it!

Once I have it sketched out I start filling in the details as I see them on the left side of the page. I do this because I am right handed and it will not smudge as easy.

My office has some nice furniture and I particularly like this chair. It has a nice look and pretty interesting to sketch.

You can see the stripes on the fabric, but they don't go all the way up, so just darken where you see it in the reference photo.

The arm of the chair is noticeably darker, but be careful not to get it too dark.

Just draw and shade softly at first. As you get the general shape of the arm it's ok to start darkening it up. Keep your eraser handy for mistakes!

My daughters head was close to the arm of the chair and I needed to make a difference in the values to separate the hair from the wood of the arm.

My daughter obviously is the subject matter in this drawing. I begin darkening the outline I made of her sleeping.

Luckily there isn't a lot of details to draw on her. Most of the details in this drawing are in the furniture, although that's hard enough!

I start to add details to the hair and then move to her arms and shirt. Her shirt was orange, but it didn't show in the photo as being very dark, so I didn't have to do a lot of shading here.

I finish up the shading on the lower part of the chair cushion. Then I move on to my daughters pants.

Her pants are much darker than her shirt, so I had to do some more shading on the pants. I use a tortillion to blend my pencil marks. This is a very good took to have. I probably have 20 or more tortillions in my art box. I have all different sizes for different areas. I use thin ones for the small areas and big thick ones when I'm shading the larger areas such as the back ground.

Finishing up the pants now in this section. Once I get the pants right, I move to the other chair leg.

There was a lot of things in the reference photo I didn't care about, so I didn't draw them!

Emily's shoes were new and pure white. This made her shoes a breeze to draw. I just had to sketch the outline and a little blending around the edges.

Oh yes, there is a table in this drawing. I almost didn't draw it because I was starting to get tired. It was a small table so it didn't take very long.

There's a bunch of junk on the table in the real picture, so I wanted to simplify my drawing by not drawing some of the things. This made it go much quicker.

That plastic looking thing on the right side of the table is a funny looking boat with little guys that fit on like leg-go blocks.

The water bottle was a little tricky, but if you just draw the dark areas you see in the photo it will turn out ok.

I had to add some details to the table, like the scrolling on the table's edge and legs. After that I simply added some edging on the floor to make the room look, like a room!

Then I added some shadows for realism in the drawing. That's about it!

Please leave me comments and if you want a portrait of your own, check out my website here.

http://www.soulreflectionsbyjeff.com/