Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil

It has been quite some time since I last drew a face-only portrait and I felt like going back to that for a change. I also had a reference in mind already – a photo of the lovely Lacuna Coil front lady Cristina Scabbia, whom I had never drawn before. When I draw a face portrait, I have a relatively fix pattern of how I work – I always start with the eyes, then do the shadings around them and go up to the forehead after that. When done with the forehead I continue with working on the nose before I give the rest of the face its shading. The final thing for me to do is drawing the lips. When I was satisfied with how her face looked like I started to work on her hair. This time, I wanted to try a new technique and see how it works out. Therefore, I used a thin metal item to “draw” the hair – only that what I drew wasn’t visible, I softly indented it into the paper. That was supposed to be my hair texture. Then I used a pencil to shade the hair areas and finally I drew single strings of hair darker than the rest. I was surprised by how good this method actually worked out and it wasn’t even much of an effort. In fact, it made drawing hair quicker and easier. Done with her hair, I moved on to drawing the background – which was quite easy as it’s just simple black. Now I only needed to work on the hands and her rings. I didn’t really manage to make the left ring look good but apart from that I absolutely loved how the portrait turned out.

Paper size: A4

Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils

Time: approx. 20 hours

Reference photo used for the drawing was taken by: Jeremy Saffer