Here is my charcoal drawing of Jerry Orbach. Charcoal is one of my favorite mediums to use when creating my artwork. I haven’t drawn a celebrity portrait in a while so I thought it was time! I loved Jerry Orbach…was a big fan of Law and Order. He was on that show for twelve years!! But I think that my favorite of his roles was the voice of Lumière from Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”…be…our…guest…. ♥
My Process
Whenever I decide to draw a portrait, I always use a reference photo that I can find online. And from that photo, I create my stencil as shown in the photo on the left. If the reference photo is in color, I edit it to black and white – that way I can see the value changes and I focus on shapes and values when creating the stencil. The photo on the right shows me adding light values, white charcoal. Additionally, I mix white charcoal and HB charcoal to create a light gray value.
The next step is to add the dark values, black and dark gray. I used my 6B charcoal pencil for the black, and my 2B charcoal pencil for the dark gray value. For this drawing, I decided on 4 values only. I used blending stumps, tortillons, cotton swabs and a flat paintbrush to do the blending. However, you could probably get away with a blending stump only; but I like the tortillon blenders because they have smaller tips for detailed blending, for example, around the eyes.
Real-Time Art Lesson and Supply List
If you’d like to try drawing Jerry Orbach, I have the real-time art lesson on my YouTube channel Rain Frances Art. The video is about an hour and fifteen minutes. There is a link to the stencil that I made in the description of the video as well. You can download it for free and print it out. Here are the supplies you’ll need:
- Black art paper, I use Arteza black art paper, 90lb, 9” x 12”
- Black and white charcoal pencils, I use Generals Charcoal Pencils: White, HB, 2B, 6B
- Blending Tools: Blending Stumps, cotton swabs, tortillon blenders, flat paintbrush – as mentioned above, if you only have a blending stump that will be fine
- I always have some wax paper handy to keep my hand from smudging the medium
- Jerry Orbach stencil
- White Graphite Transfer Paper – BUT…if you don’t have any, I can show you How To Transfer Your Stencil To Your Canvas using charcoal pencils, graphite pencils or even pastel pencils.
Let me know in the comments if you tried my Jerry Orbach charcoal drawing tutorial!
