Bob Marley Drawing Step by Step

Today has been a rough day. I woke up this morning with a soar throat and a running nose. I think I have fever as well because I'm constantly freezing. It's just typical that it happens right when I decided to have my 30 day challenge. Even if I've had low energy and had to blow my nose every 5 minutes I was focused on making the first of my 30 drawings. I drew most of it yesterday but finished it with some final touches today. I made a drawing of Bob Marley a few years ago but it's always fun to do it again and see if I got any better. Below I will go through the steps I made to get this drawing just as I like it.

Like I always do I start with sketching up the basic structure, getting the eyes, nose and mouth on the right place. I use a 2H graphite pen and press gently. I always erase most of my strokes because I do it by free hand so it's only a few lines that end up right. When I'm satisfied I start shading a base shadow and focus on getting the eyes and other facial features as close to the original as possible. For shading I start with a 2B graphite pen and work my way up to 7B for the really dark parts.

When the eyes, nose and mouth is good enough I start filling in the darker areas to get the drawing to seem more alive and realistic. For this I use a 4B pen but a 6B would work just as well. One key ingredient to get a realistic drawing is contrast. If you don't get the dark areas really dark it will look flat and not very realistic. I compare with my reference photo all the time. Patience is a good thing to have, the more time you spend the better the result is going to be.

When I've come this far I usually get a feeling of how the drawing is going to look like when it's finished. Usually when I start drawing a portrait I think it looks awful and sometimes I doubt if it's going to be any good. But the more I work on it, the more I like it. It always ends up with me getting surprised of how good the end result got.
I fill in more and more of the shades making them darker and darker. To make the dreads I just "shake" my hand while pressing the pen to the paper. In this way I get a certain structure on the dreads. Maybe not super realistic but good enough for me. I use some paper towels to smooth out the graphite on bigger areas and a paper stick for the small shades.

When The drawing is close to finished I start on the details. I have a sharp eraser and I always keep my pencils sharp. I have a mechanical graphite pen with a thickness of 0,3mm for the really fine stuff.
The last hing I do is to go over the darker areas one more time. If the reference photo is black in a spot it should be completely black and not dark gray. You can see on the last 2 photos that it's night and day when you add contrast. Or what do you think?