Hello,

this is my first - real - tutorial, so I hope it's alright! 

I have super much fun while drawing and you can see this in this tutorial! So, let's get the pencils on and... have fun together!

My name is Michelle and this is going to be a tutorial on how to make a pastel portrait. First of all, drawing is just like cooking. You need a recipe and ingredients!

So let's start with the recipe: Especially beginners need something to lean on while drawing. As you become more experienced, you can go more and more without it. Black and white pictures are way easier because cou can see shadows and lights better, also: choose something with STRONG contrast! 

For this tutorial I chose this picture:

Source: http://data.whicdn.com/images/13851177/black-and-white-blonde-expression-girl-hair-Favim.com-129570_large.jpg

All other images are made by me.

Alright, now the ingredients! You will need:

- two graphite pencils (hard graphite and soft graphite)

- pastellpencils/chalk (I chose a brown colour sceme)

- basic items like a rubber and something to smoothe it (like a paper towel)

- paper (this one here is 200mg paper), also scrap paper to sketch and later prevent smudges)

Now for the start. I'd like to point out that I am not a perfect artist and you don't have to be good to do this. No matter what level you are: this is fun! And that's what art is about!

To start of ths drawing, let's start with testing out the material we got! 

You can see, I tried out all of these to test how smooth they are. This is important, especially if pencils are new. 

Now, take the smooth graphite pen and sketch out (on a scrap paper) what you want to draw. Make that a very loose drawing and make sure to really point out the dark and light parts. Don't spend too much time on it. Just... go for it. That's when art get's the best!

Loose, quick and without much thought behind it! Take the piece of paper you want to draw on the portrait and sketch with the hard pen, lightly (!) the motive. No go over it with the smoother pen. 

Great! Now take a rubber and softly take off most, but not all, of the graphite. You only need the outlines anyways!

You will only need a light sketch. Now we take our Pastel Pencils! Fun time! I take a light brown to start with.

And then darker shades. You want to make dark parts of the picture REALLY dark. Contrast is important!

Go over the same parts over and over again to REALLY get the chalk in there! It kinda starts to look like Adele now, of course that was exactely what I was going for.... ehem. Shows us: Art is almost everytime an accident. This is why I love pastels so much. You can go super messie with them and have so much fun and it ALWAYS ends up great!

Adele closeup... I should probably change the name of this tutorial... :'D

NEVER forget your signature! You might get famous one day!

Your fingers should look something like this now. If that's not the case, you failed! (No you didn't but... how did you do that?)

Well that was the *amazing* tutorial! I hope you had fun trying this out! Show me your results (ohhh that would be amazing if you could add that to your comments, right?) and give me some criticism under here!

I know that this tutorial is not perfect, but I hope that I showed you (additional to: how to draw Adele per accident) that art is 100% fun and 0% skill after all. If you feel insecure about how good/bad you are at drawing (there are so many artists on here that caused depression for me because I'm like WHY ARE THEY SO GOOOOD?) than try out some pastell pencils and have some art-fun. Because that's what it's about!

Have a nice day,

Michelle :)