My name is Daniela Reich, I'm 35 years old and I'm doing pencil drawings for more then ten years now, most of them portraits. All my drawings are done with art pencils; I also tried charcoal pencils but they didn't work fo me. I'm using pencils in five different strengths, paper stumps, brushes and art erasers. The drawings are made on a very smooth bristol paper now, which I really love after experimenting with different papers for several month. I'm doing my drawings from printed black/white pictures. After sketching the features I'm working out the details step by step. In the end I'm doing some shading and highlighting to give the portraits the desired vividness. Each drawing takes me about six to eight hours.