What Can I Draw For My Girlfriend

How I successfully Learned to Draw a (Realistic) Portrait — in under 24 hours

On the first of February, this year, I began the quest to master 12 incredibly hard skills — one at a time.

Last month, April, the goal was to create a realistic portrait.

The Drawing Subject

Earlier on, I planned to draw a portrait of my girlfriend. A few circumstances got in the way of that, and somehow I managed to change the subject to be drawn.

I saw the picture of the Ape from the Planet of the Apes movie and I was hooked.

It had such intricate details, and seemed difficult enough to pose a decent challenge. I initially thought I could never draw anything close to that. Not in my wildest dreams.

However, at this point, my curiosity was already piqued- and I was hooked.

This Entire Thing was Drawn in under 24 hours?

When you read the title of the article, did you think the 24 hours were gotten from a single day?

No. That's not how I approached the quest.

I do have a daily job — and a shit ton of personal stuff to do too. The only way to succeed at this was to spend at least an hour a day learning and practicing. Mostly the latter.

Beginning the Drawing

I always begin clueless, but with a plan, I seem to end up making sense out of the bowls of ignorance I begin every quest with.

Firstly, I started off purchasing two drawing courses from Udemy.

I strongly believe in investing in my learning.

I completely watched both courses.

I watched them at 2X the speed.

I watched, but did not do any form of practice — at all.

This was the learning phase.

This is where I try to map the terrain of the skill I'm trying to learn. Usually by watching a lot of videos on the subject. No books this time. Except I choose to skim through chapters.

Practicing

When it comes to practice, there are two ways (that I know) to approach this.

When challenged with two questions, one more difficult than the other, which do you tackle first? Assume you were just trying to learn the concept here.

Many times I start off with the easier problems, other times I jump right into the difficult problems. The latter is what I did with this quest.

Instead of practicing by drawing a lot of other tiny art pieces, I went straight into drawing the Ape. Yes.

Daily Progress

I think it took me about 10 hours or thereabout to complete the entire drawing.

Also, most of the drawing were done between the hours of 7:00am to 8:30am. Largely because I wake up at 2:30am most days to do some other stuff e.g code and write.

So, here's a daily progress report.

My starting point was drawing a grid on the Ape's photograph which I had printed on paper. A similar grid was also drawn on my drawing sheet. This is known as the grid method. Usually used to keep the scale of proportions intact.
After doing that, I moved on the drawing faint outlines — while establishing some darker shades across the drawing.

3. After spending another hour on the drawing, I had this:

The hour was spent faintly shading across the entire drawing and establishing midtones.

4. I was quite busy this morning but still got 30 minutes. This was used to strengthen the tones established in 3 above.

From here on, the quality of the images got better as I scanned the drawing unto my computer. I was originally taking photographs with a mobile phone, under poor light.

5. I began to add in some details here. Mostly around the forehead. This took a lot of time and conscious effort not to screw things up.

6. Finally drawing the eyes, brought a lot of life to the drawing. I didn't stop there. I also put in some details below the nose and around the mouth. I spent about 2 hours doing this — making sure it looked right.

7. The hair, oh my! The Ape's got so much hair — and drawing realistic hair proved to be so darn difficult.

I spent about 2 hours watching a couple Youtube videos on how to draw realistic hair before I summoned the courage to attempt the hair on the Ape.

I didn't do so badly, huh?

8. The final drawing!

There you go!

Conclusion

For all love and support I received during this quest, thank you!

Y'all deserve some accolades 🎁🎁🎉