Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Abe -my drawing portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Posted here is my simple, no frills drawing of President Abraham Lincoln… Honest Abe -with his humble birth-place log cabin home seen in the background. 
I always have a ton of material, books, etc… all making a mess of my drawing table, such that I have to always push stuff out of the way to make space on the surface to actually make my art. This morning I just happened to have an old 1958 encyclopedia with all the important information on things starting with the letter “L” -so I flipped it open and was thumbing through and came to a striking photograph of President Abraham Lincoln.
I picked up a piece of paper, and with an orange crayon roughed in the sketch of Abe using the photo as my reference… and obviously I exaggerated Abe’s leanness. This took about ten minutes. Then I used a brown ink “pen-brush” to further delineate his face, followed by darkening some lines and areas with a black pen-brush, this process taking about another ½ hour. I scanned the drawing into Photoshop where in stacked layers I painted the color digitally. (the lettering of “Abe” was also done digitally) Maybe another half hour in all. Done. 
Normally I do not work that quickly unless I am just sketching of doodling… but in this case case I simply wanted to breeze through doing this portrait in a short period of time and move on with my day… I came out nicely.
Visit stevensalerno.com to view all my various illustration portfolios, and my many picture books for kids.

No comments: