Peter's Sketchbook

[Peter]

From all older imagination drawings posts you did, you tend to flatten the top of the head more than looks natural, or in other words you make the angle transition from brow to the highest point of the skull change too abruptly so it has more of a 'corner' at the forehead (you can see this even in this last image) 
You tended to make the jawbone too long as it sweeps back to the ear and often will also extend the back of the skull too far as well. The Bon iver post is an extreme example of both. But you also did this to the black guy with hat ref drawing too.

Might help to revisit how facial features are placed and aligned to the skull landmarks and do some 'gap filling' study there. Also really figure out the basics of head to figure relationships. Many of your heads all seem to start too large compared to body and end up looking strangely baby proportioned, or too small in your 'quicksketch' examples. Nail that proportion down, it's a pretty important one

wrt to your reference drawings...well just keep measuring and checking. step back from your drawings often. use photos of the drawing to help you see or take small breaks and go back to the drawing and fix everything you see that looks off.

Some of the issue that may help you think about appeal is making more conscious distinct decisions on what to make a hard edge and what to make softer, what shapes to group into a mass and what to separate. This applies to choices in value grouping as well that will create the large rhythmic patterns and feelings in the overall composition. There is no single formula but you can easily observe how others handle this in their work and emulate/learn from them directly as well as experimenting with different approaches yourself.  

One choice you made in the last drawing was to render out all the hair and draw almost every. lock with hard edges. Hair especially is such a great contender for mass grouping of larger volumes and working with softer edges. might have been a very 'appealing' place to use contrast against the harder edges in the face and cape. Try it next time maybe?
Also look at the highlights on the hair. Look at all the tiny shapes that define the border of highlight to the dark. If you squint and look do you think all those little shape changes contribute to the overall? In my view you got so bogged down in rendering the detail you skipped the step of being able to look at the whole and ask yourself, 'what can i leave out or simplify or exaggerate from features of the highlight shape for best effect?'

Over-emphasising hard edges or straights all the time and always rendering everything out especially when going for something more naturalistic may lead to problems. Look for curves as well (Huston talks of S and C curves for example). Notice how in your drawing even most of the curves are drawn with straights. Great for measuring in a lay in perhaps but then not modified. Look for larger linked rhythms that may work through a figure pose for example. These help to unify your expression before you get stuck into more accurate shape placements. Not saying straight lines are bad..they can be very effective especially in stylisation but become more aware of the different effects these choices have. analyse your own work and ask if these specific choices worked or not?
It is hard to observe very hard edges anywhere using our eyes but in photos they are everywhere. Usually when working from photoref I find it's more about how one reduces edge and shape information and making clear key and value grouping choices beforehand that makes it more likely to be successful or not as a piece of artwork.

Thanks for such an in-depth critique Who. Going back to skull studies was on my very long to-do list and as you said fill in some of the knowledge gaps which I've definitely felt when working from life.

As you said I believe my main problem is getting caught up in the details and thinking that I need to emulate everything that I see in front of me to create a good likeness aswell as a nice drawing which I know isn't the case, I think it's just the lack of knowing what and how to simplify all the information in front of me.

I feel like all the errors you pointed out to me can mostly be solved by doing master studies which was my next plan of action once this illustration was finished. Already got a list of artists sorted so I'm going to spend some time compiling a bunch of images to work from and pretty much spend the next month tackling that.