Helena Bonham Carter

Portrait of Helena Bonham Carter, in a still from 1985’s A Room With a View. I was going a little crazy drawing rib cage after rib cage and needed a break. This was a friend’s suggestion, and it made for a very nice diversion.

My sketches have progressed to a point where they generally work pretty well, and these monochrome portraits have been looking solid. I am developing some confidence in my skills!

Lessons learned on this one:

• Pigment blending does not smear things out in the same way as airbrushing. There is a still a painterly look to the strokes here
• I decided on a dark background late, but most of the portrait space (where you see white) was transparent, so I added a big blob of white to block out her head and hair. I didn’t merge it with the face layer, though, so I kept finding places where artifacts like brush stroke edges in the white layer were showing up in the shading layer. You can see one I’ve left behind in the odd curve above her hand. I’ll have to merge them in the future.
• Blending is the enemy of texture. I took a few passes over that collar to get it looking properly ruffled.