Charcoal portait

Hi,
This is a super delayed post of how I continued with the portrait here . I actually planned to upload it soon after that but somehow missed it.
Kindly use the above link to know how it all started :)

Materials used:
I've used
●Mont marte charcoal pencils for this work. First time am using charcoal pencils & that too straightaway in colors :D
●For blending/smudging:
      ◆Tissue paper
      ◆Synthetic brush
      ◆ paper stumps (I don't have the readymade ones yet, but handmade ones worked just fine for me)
●For toning down/erasing:
     ◆Kneadable eraser
     ◆Normal pencil Eraser





This is mostly a step by step pictorial. I'll include some tips which maybe useful & any lessons learned from my mistakes.

it's better to start & progress sketching in one direction so as to avoid smudging of other parts. Here I've started from the top left corner & moved towards the bottom right.

Drawing the hair:
There are soft, medium & hard pencils for black colour.  The soft one is darker & can be easily smudged/blended.
I started off with medium black covering the whole area for neutral tone & added soft black for darker areas & hard black for fine lines for hair strands. Highlights achieved by erasing and also white charcoal pencil (I simply luvvv that)

The appropriate darker & lighter areas give the sense of volume to the hair.





The Face:

I've used Sanguine as the neutral tone,  sepia & black for darker shades, white for highlights.





The eyes are the most challenging according to me as they form the centre of focus but occupying a very small area. A little detail gone wrong might affect the pic drastically. (personally, in this pic I feel the eyeball looks a little popped up coz I wasn't able to leave a very narrow blank space below it)




I guess it's crucial to make the lower lip border least prominent. it kinda merges with the skin & stand out only coz of the shadow below.
I really find it difficult to work with the teeth so I usually prefer pics having closed lips :D






I just followed the guidelines from my reference pic here for the other details.






Finally I used soft black lead pencils (5B,6B) to shade around the portrait & blend well to give some depth.
Done.



Here's the pic alongside the reference.


it's obvious that this is my first attempt isn't it? :D

By the way, This is Mr.Kishore Sheik Ahamed,  the wonderful designer of my website.  I sincerely hope he'll forgive all the mistakes I've committed in his portrait sketch & like it too :)

Hope you liked this. I'll be very glad if it was in any way useful. I love to hear from you so please do lemme know ur comments :) Thanks for your time. Create. Have fun.