Below is a character sketch of Roxana, the beautiful and wild first wife of Alexander the Great.  This character sketch is planned to be a companion piece to one done in oil pastel of one of the great Greek heroes (I haven’t decided which one yet).  The companion hero character sketch will be posted on my blogspot account, but is not yet completed. 

As for this one, sketch you see is a combination of two different screenshots I have of the character.  I used the first shot to sketch her face and the second to draw her hair, outfit, body, and background.

The Story:

I am a huge fan of the Alexander story.  If you don’t know the story, here is the nutshell version.  Alexander the great was strongly bisexual.  He had male lovers as well as many wives.  His first wife was a cause of controversy though.  See, Alexander was traveling while warring, taking over the world a little at a time.  In his travels, he met Roxana and was attracted to the wildness of the woman.  Easy to understand considering the women he would be use to in his homeland.  He wanted to marry her, but his commanders demanded that his first wife be from their own country.  The child of his first wife would be his heir, and they did not want a mixed blood child leading them. 

Alexander ignored their warnings and married her anyway.  He even had a child with her (Aegus).  However, he was murdered before the child was even a few years old.  Roxana and her child fled, but were eventually hunted down and murdered themselves.

The Art

Sad story, and it probably makes you wonder why I did the character sketch.  Alexander is a great hero in my mind, a concurring one but a hero nonetheless.  In the movie, Roxana’s character was played by Rosario Dawson.  I really enjoyed the portrayal and so used her for the character sketch. 

For the character sketch, I used a graphite pencil for everything but the hair.  I have a really hard time with black hair, always have.  I used a black colored pencil for the hair, hoping that the darkness value would be right at least.  I am not completely satisfied with how the sketch’s hair turned out.  The character has very shiny black hair and the highlights were extremely difficult for me. 

Let me know what you think of the character sketch!

This weekend was the first international Drawing Day.  Unfortunately, as I did not have internet access over the weekend, so I am posting my drawing today.

A few weeks ago I bought a book on basic shading.  The book talked about shading the basic values of a picture and then slowly forming the details. 

How the Style Differs:

This is about opposite of my normal style as I normally draw the basic outline of an image, slowly brining in the detailed shading of a face, a shirt, an arm, etc.  I start with one feature and work outward, rather than doing the basic shading of the whole image, then getting more and more detailed.

My Opinion:

The basic shading process was rather odd for me, and I think that the resulting image didn’t turn out very well.  Each of the faces of the siblings in the image is off by just enough that it does not look like the individuals that I was drawing.  Each sibling appears more cartoonish than I had intended. 

The basic shading was good, but as the details were added the overall personality of the image was lost.  I am happy with individual parts of the Sibling image, but not the whole. 

For example:

• The shading on the black shirt I feel is good
  
• The hair on each figure is good
• I even really like the basic leave structure in the background (which I chose not to bring from basic shading into higher detail).  

Overall, I think that this simple value technique may work (with more practice), but I am not convinced it is a technique for me.  I will try basic shading like this again, but probably not for a while.