Day 258: A Man and his Harmonica

I was starting to go through Something To Draw withdrawal so I decided to waylay it by picking another random photo for today’s sketch.  This one was submitted by Randy’s Dailies.  It’s quite a nice photo of a man playing a harmonica.  Sadly my marker appears to be running out of ink which made the shading process quite challenging.  I actually had similar problems with yesterday’s sketch so I should have known better than to choose such a shading intensive sketch for today.  Oh well, live and learn.

I’m not too keen on how the face turned out.  I don’t think I quite captured his expression.  It didn’t help that there was so much shadow on the face and so little ink in the pen that it pretty much just turned into a big old mess.  As for the clothing, I was mostly just making that up because it was barely visible in the photo.  Again though there was a bit too much shadow for the amount of ink I had available.

The one thing I do like about this sketch though is the hand.  It was actually one of the things that drew me to the photo.  I thought it was an interesting hand pose and liked how it was framed against the face.  I wasn’t so sure how it would turn out as I was drawing it.  It was a pretty challenging pose and it looked pretty bizarre as I was doing it.  I’m actually fairly happy with the end result though.  It’s still a bit strange looking but I think it works.  Maybe all of my hand drawing practice actually is paying off.