I drew @cafeyarepas 🎨| Step by step process

Today I grace you with another one of my drawings. This one is filled in with pencil colours. They're the Crayola twistables, which I've always found very fun and easy to work with :D Even though they do look like they're for kids.

So I obviously had a reference image, because as I always say, I'm not creative enough to draw something good out of thin air. I'm good at mimicking things, not creating (@cafeyarepas, the subject of this illustration, always says that's not true). This is the reference:

Then I coloured all of it. I added a bit of shadows to the skin and with kind of a light hand I filled in the rest of the areas. I like to more or less work in layers instead of pieces. I can't fathom how people do those super realistic drawings and they just do it by sections. I colour everything in lightly, then start darkening more and more.

Finally, I did just that. I started really going into light and shadow detail. I used grey and black for the shadows and on the skin I sometimes erased a bit to create highlights (on darker parts the eraser really doesn't work that well). I used a bit of black marker for the hoodie to make it extra extra black. For the finishing touches, I traced the edges and details with an ultra fine black marker. 

And shalakazam! There you have a Celso (@cafeyarepas). I made his features (like his eyes) a bit more cartoonish because I love that style of drawing. I'm also terrible at proportions, so you can see that in the second drawing, his head literally looked like an egg. In the end I noticed it - thank God - and corrected that.