Kangaroo Drawing

Kanga is a realistic kangaroo drawing I am very proud of.

This portrait of a kangaroo was created using graphite pencils on acid-free archival paper with fixative coatings to prevent smudging. We (family and friends) have been going to Pebbly Beach on the NSW coast for 40 years and it is my favourite spot in the world. I took some photos of a kangaroo that came to our campsite for breakfast one morning and I found this particular pose adorable so I had to draw it.
Our archival-quality Pet Portraits are beautifully hand-drawn reproductions of your beloved pets. Working from high-resolution photos, we strive to tease out the true character of pets for you to treasure forever!
All Pet Portraits are drawn on 200gram acid free, non-yellowing artist paper, then sealed with fixative. The protective layers of fixative render all drawings smudge-free.
Usually, I start my drafting lines with a 2B pencil and get some shadow areas in before going to deeper tones. My deepest tones using graphite pencil are rendered in 6B with mechanical pencils but with standard pencils I can go up to 8B. Part of the process when rendering in the realistic genre is to use paper stumps for blending or smudging. Other tools are erasers and pencil filings collected from sharpeners. Erasers come in soft or hard plus mechanical.
I prefer to work with mechanical pencils and erasers purely because they are convenient, less messy, and no sharpening required.
Realism as a genre is defined by being a realistic or accurate representation of the visual world around us.
Realism can refer to artworks in the genres of landscape | portraiture | still life | figurative | architectural.
When working within realism, I enjoy creating landscapes with oil paint, whereas my portrait works are usually completed with graphite pencils. It takes years of dedication and observation to become highly skilled in this genre. You must learn all the fundamentals regarding colour theory, perspective, structure, and composition. If you are weak in any of these fields then your artworks will lack conviction, they will not appear to look right.
When I am working on a portrait or a figurative piece, I think about the composition first, then work out the scale, followed by the structure. Once I am happy with all that, it is time to work out the form, then finally the details including tone and shading.