Getting Started 001 Sharpening my Pencil

I love drawing but I always veered towards more cartoonic elements than realistic, trying to find my own style that I was comfortable with. Besides drawing people, my tendency when drawing was to design more rather than doing caricatures and with the start of my own podcast, I started to create designs again. As small and minute as they may be, they engaged my left creative brain and that would always intrigues me which brings me to this post. I have a friend that had her birthday just days ago and since I didn't have any gift to give to her, I suggested my portrait drawing of her and she thankfully agreed.

It's beyond me of showing off people's pictures for personal gain but this is for comparison sake between the real life counterpart and my attempt of replicating it. Bear in mind that this is my first attempt to draw a portrait of someone years after my last try ... and it's pretty decent compared to my standard. If you compared the picture on the right to the left of my drawing, the former was straight from my smartphone while the latter was off a scanner, showing my skill (or the lack thereof) of drawing without much (or any) outline and it ended crooked like that, but I like how it turned up. 

Upon her dissatisfaction on the artwork (I did tell her the picture would not be the best to base my attempt on), her constant changing of her own profile pictures presented me with more suitable candidates for portrait:  

After these three attempts, I find myself handing the folding of the cloths and her general outlines well but the distinct features of a human tricky to replicate such as the fingers and her lips were particularly hard to do. I settle on her look (on the left) after a few tries while the one on the right was quickly drawn although the proportion could have been better. 

These three artworks were only sketches and I have three approaches on how to give more color and life into them: basic black outline with ballpoint pen, outline with colored ballpoint pens and finally full colored pencils. Thank you for your time and look forward to their transformations in the future.