Colored Pencil Portrait

I have been itching to use my colored pencils for quite a while now, so I figured spring break would be the perfect opportunity. I found this picture of one of my friends in which the lighting was incredible, so I used it as reference. I realize my printer is going to ruin pictures no matter how much I tweak it in photoshop, so I'll just have to deal with it. The colors are much more vibrant in the actual copy.

I have tons of ideas floating around in my head, but I need to work on getting them on paper. Sometimes it is kind of overwhelming...

Fading Away

This ended up being a pain to upload. I wasn't able to upload the original file for some reason as a message kept popping up saying error, so I just copied what I submitted to deviant art.

Anyway, I've been working on this picture for a couple of weeks now, off and on. I wanted to set up a contrast between soft edges and sharp edges, which you can see with the area where he is "fading" and the sharp side in closer view. I'm pretty satisfied with how this turned out, charcoal is probably one of my favorite mediums now.