We’ve got some fan art today of Pirates of the Carribean's irreverent Jack Sparrow from our Toronto-based Background Artist, Justin Mark!

Justin: I've been a fan of the character since the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. Wildlife Art is my personal preference when it comes to my own work, however, I occasionally like to change things up and try a human portrait or two.

The process for this was straightforward really. I had a reference image on my phone and eyeballed it with a pencil to paper and tried getting it as accurate as I could by freehand drawing.

Getting down the line work accurately is the toughest part of any piece. Having said that, after the pencil work is down and I'm satisfied with the accuracy of the angles and spacing etc, I then take a kneaded eraser and lightly dab the page to remove any excess lead to clean the paper for the coloured pencil to be applied over top.

I use a mix of colours to get the right tones in the form of tight crosshatching. It builds up as you apply more detail and the image then starts to take form. The drawing dimensions are roughly 9 x 11 inches (more or less standard sketchbook paper). This particular drawing was done in Laurentian standard coloured pencil.