Peter's Sketchbook

[Peter]

Heeey peter, finally my keyboard is here

sooo, im liking the figure lay ins as usual, im going to crit this asian man portrait alot. So first thing is you drew his feature very caucasian, and for blacks whites and asians there are different skull types so take the time to study and familiarize yourself with them as they are wildy different in subtelties

http://images.slideplayer.com/31/9632024...ide_11.jpg

Your head lay ins seem to strongly grasp perspective and neatness but you really need to dirty some stuff up and not make everything so perfect like lips for example. Lips do not look great with hard lines you need to soften the lines for the indication for men and women. The jaw line in people isnt perfectly a straight line, it sags and dips in and out of the neck especially near the ear.

For the portrait i changed many things and mine still isnt spot on, as i only spent about 15 minutes, but i didnt get the head tilt he has is still more dramatic. Id reccomend you get photoshop out and do a layer with a bright color and draw the simpliest shape to indicate the photo's nose as you can, then draw a shape to indicate the bottom of your nose as simple as you can... Are those shapes exact? no, yours is very narrow and it makes the nose look broken and kinda strange like a growth.

I did an example with the female lay in. Riley rythms are not great for beautiful women, and jeff mentions this in the workbooks. You are going in and using the abstraction to draw the face instead of drawing the face and using the abstraction as a tool to find symmetry. That is the wrong way to go about it, as the riley head on its own has no likeness and this portrait in particular is totally wrong on the chin, the cheek, the forehead, the under eye lid, the lip width. Im telling you try this and think about someone whose very critical holding a highlighter of your contours while your drawing, it happened to me over the years and drives me nuts but it really helps observational drawing!

Yo Fedodika thnaks for such a lengthy crit! :)

I wasn't aware that the skulls between different races differed to such an extent, I was aware asian skulls tend to be flatter in the cheek bones etc but that was a real eye opener so thanks for makinng me aware of it.

I was not happy at all with the last painting of mine, in the past I'd usually create a lay-in as usual on newsprint then transfer to my painting surface but ever since I took that workshop I've been trying to eliminate that step and draw with my paint brush instead which I'm finding rather difficult atm just becuase I haven't practiced it enough.

Ugh that bloody nose, fought with it from staret to finish, just couldn't get it right. I keep meaning to do draw overs at the end of every week since they help me so much but haven't had the time recently. I'm off next week so I can go thorugh the last few weeks and work on them.

Thanks for pointing out all of my errors on the female lay in. I remember Jeff talking about not using the abstraction as much for females and intead rely on negative shapes, only reason I did that to such an extent was because Erik's first class was focused on abstraction and understanding the construction (and even then I got it completely wrong.)

I still have a tough time sometimes drawing the face from the front, just shows I need to practice it more.