(11-04-2016, 04:50 AM)walent Wrote: Man, you're doing the same mistakes I did. You spent a huuuge amount of time on that portrait and instead of focusing on lay-in, proportions, shapes, construction, you focused on render, which is exactly zero if you miss everything else.

Yesterday I said I'm gonna sit down, take an hour or so and do a nice self portrait, have fun. So I skipped all that shape design, lay-in stuff, and quickly jumped to rendering after a very quick line sketch. From one hour I got to 3 hours, because I was constantly pushing paint around.
In the end I realized how lifeless it is, how much I had missed by not doing the simplifications, boxifying, corners, everything that helps add structure.


So if you want my advice, spend 3 hours on the lay-in, check proportions, rhythms, see how features flow one into another, find corners, even the subtle turns, and at the end, even if you have a line sketch and no paint whatsoever, you'll feel a ton more satisfied because it's an amazing, energetic line sketch.

Check out Nicolas Uribe, he's doing a lot of portrait sketches for his KS campaign and yesterday I was looking through his stuff and noticed how instead of using a straight vertical axis on a front view face, he's using an S curve, and the nose has a curve and flows into the mouth, then the chin follows the S and turns the other way. And that's super expressive, I can't believe I missed that so far, I was always focusing on doing a symmetrical face - https://www.facebook.com/nicolasuribeart/photos/?ref=page_internal

And now about the Arnold study, you're pushing too much, try to focus on either anatomy or values, because they're both very hard. And again, lay-in, man, lay-in. You've lost a lot of angles in his pose, assuming I'm looking at the correct reference.
Notice the shapes at the scapular region, how they connect and flow, then try figuring out what's up with the muscles, origins and insertions. Deltoids are all over the place because of the multi pennate fibers and that's why they're very hard to understand, so you have to simplify the shit out of them. This reference doesn't help you, so you have to use your knowledge.


Here, had some fun with this one. This is what I would love to see in a study
I would spend even more time adjusting asymmetries, proportions, curves vs straights and stuff but I really have to work on something else now. I do hope my point is clear enough.

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