Chubbycat: thanks so much for the writeup! i spent a lot more time on the lay in and just tried to push through more and more, thinking of a watts artist i love named Matt Smith. I love his finished graphite stuff so i was trying to channel that mojo. I think it paid off, that and blocking out the main shape in advance, i still didnt quite fit it on the page but i certainly could consider it a strategic cropping.
Marco: i dont think i could get a 18X24 scanner, its all about just getting a nice photo, lighting is very important and my camera isnt the best but it gets the job done. And i am using a digital camera, its a canon 360 powershot. I actually knew a photographer one time who was very professional. He was talking to this girl about all his fancy gear and i half sarcastically said, "well i have a canon 360 powrershot." he began laughing hysterically and condescendingly, i said "well fuck you dude" but it wasnt in a fightin words kinda way. in other words, its a budget camera, but there are certainly cheaper ones, as it ran me 300$
Demon lizardman: thanks a ton my dude, as far as jobs i have no clue... I take what i can get, if someone wants me to go to a party and do marker sketches of kids for a couple bucks i do it. Not making it as an artist for so long despite my efforts has really made me appreciate every crusty one dollar bill i get; Alot of people given the effort id put in would be financially successful way sooner, i hope if anything, my sketchbook has taught you what not to do. Im getting a new computer soon, so ill learn some 3d and maybe that'll open some doors, but i dont have any specific plans, maybe try to sculpt the intimate thing i drew up there and gave up on and light it with a keyshot trial or something. or maybe some MECHS!
Did a buncha process shots for this portrait... i spent probably 8 hours on this today, like 3 hours on just the step between the first and 3rd picture. it taught me if theres a large global change you need to make, do it early on and just bite down on that struggle. At life drawing yesterday i had a nice lay in going, then i started shading and it also was looking nice. The more i worked into it however, my mark making slurred it a lot and made this awful cloudy look. Charcoal is tricky, you have to be really meticulous about the stroke direction and how the layering is working. Keeping the pencil sharp is crucial, and letting something just stay as it is when its working can really help an image.
If it works, just leave it, go somewhere else and make other things work, you dont have to go over and over a part, focus on the big values. Like shading a nose, a couple strokes will do for the brighter area's half-tone, it looks cleaner and looser that way i was hesitant earlier that the more i rendered this itd looks just more and more slurry but i was wrong. Using a napkin to smooth out the marks was a huge help. The more i did it, the more i felt my digital rendering experience was coming into use, which is really cool. i might do another long figure drawing tomorrow, and start thinking about the color palette, since i really want to paint this image. Still need a lot more preparation...
despite all this, i think the final image is more faithful to how it looks in real life; for some reason my camera washes out stuff, and makes it look worse. Its a nice portrait, maybe one day ill get a nice camera to more faithfully represent things
mkay, spent about 8 hours today on this figure drawing, 6 on paper about 2 on the computer trying to fix even more of the proportions. i know the legs arent spot on like the image and the one that is at a 90 degree angle really gave me a hard time. the forearm is still too small, and something bugs me about the torso, maybe its the width or like... something to do with the tilt of it, idunno, whole lotta pain
Also tried to take a better pic of the chloe pic, no one i know seems too excited about it so i must be doing something wrong. maybe the rendering is too cloudy, or the face is wrong in some way, so i think i'll redo it to see if i can do a better job keeping the values simple and the mark making more minimal for the sake of cleanliness. It looks fine to me, hell it looks great even, ive frame the thing, but ive said that about my own work for a while and my inbox is still tumbleweeds so, you know, cant trust that entirely
A few things about the Chloe face that hopefully can help:
- Sometimes you make her face wider than it is. The 1st image top of page (not shaded) the proportions are pretty good, but in other attempts her face is wider than what it should be. Her face is basically a (quite thin) upside down egg and her hair is quite flat and close to her skull. Pushing this elongated look of her face will help it look more like her.
- Your missing a lot of perspective on her glasses - they go down and taper in a lot more
- It's a lot better in your most recent attempt but she actually has a very thin top lip. It's also pretty flat in shape and doesn't have any real definition (y'know how sometimes in the bottom middle of the top lips people have a defined ball shape part, she lacks that)
I hope that helps in some way, Fed! Portraits are very difficult because even if you have proportions down pat, it's a lot of tiny nuances that make the person look like they do :) Keep on going man :)
I really like your persistance with this portrait, I think that's great! You're getting pretty close too. As chubby_cat mentioned, getting a likeness is all about the subtle relationships between facial features. You can obviously draw a head quite well already. I find that sometimes in cases like this, and for the purposes of learning, tracing the proportions can help you see where you're consistently making mistakes. I don't advise you do an entire portrait on the basis of a traced proportion but rather use it to compare against your most recent effort to see where you can improve next time.
I tried to account for the distortion in your photo a bit but it isn't perfect so maybe you can do a better job than me here but maybe this helps?
I like some of you recent charcolal drawings. I think you might need to work on clothes and folds a bit though. I recommend Burne Hogarth's book on it and some various videos online if you want to look for some tutorials. Love the way you shade though.
Lizard thanks well get to that someday once i sort the big stuff out Chubby and jondawo huge thanks yall i spent 3 hours or so on the likeness and i think its like 15% closer to the likeness. I spent about 20 mins shading it since i dont see it as useful to render it all out until i get the likeness really bangin
I cant comment on others sb for like a week since i have to type all this sjlhit on my phone
Idk i feel like im slow or like why i cant detect these small things all at once but i guess everyone deals with that. Owell ill try to get another 10% closer tomorrow and try to make the glasses fit right and get those subtle contours and shapes down
nother grueling ass day failing at this over and over. had 2 other attemps that were just as bad as the first few, but i think this one hit that 5% closer mark i had set. I think my eye has grown so far past my hand that it is crippling; Ive got that narrowness of the face i think, im still hesitant to make the jaw as full as it is and the mouth of off center, kinda sliding over; digital makes everything so easy when you can liquify and pull everything around and perfeclty line up the reference. i often wonder how long it will take me to get the likeness down but i think its just what i need is this experience
Why not just make one drawing and spend your time correcting it? If you can't see what's wrong, isn't it better to sit for a while looking at it, trying to figure it out rather than just scrapping it and starting again? That way you train your ability to see accurately so in the future it's easier to draw it more right from the start. If you just keep re-doing the whole thing, isn't that just training your process rather than your foundational visual judgement?
Hey it's Amit. Disabled my old account but signed up again briefly just to post here. I wholeheartedly endorse everything Tristan has been saying, both here and in other threads. To you and anybody else reading this, you would be a fool to not listen very carefully and take his open questions and suggestions on board very seriously and shift your gears, no matter what you say you want to be as an artist.
I won't add anything on the technical side, but just want to say you appear to still be tied to this stubborn attitude of grinding of volume over quality mentality that unfortunately is so prevalent in this forum and online in general. My suggestion would be to seriously examine this trope you have welded yourself to for so long.
Instead of doing one accurate good drawing, you devolved again immediately into grinding even more hours and repetitive volume as if it was for the alpenfelger Grinding is Gud badge of honour instead of pushing yourself in what would be a much more efficient way.
The Sevigny drawings got marginally better to a point then worse again. Listen to Tristan and really try and take on board what he is saying.
Tristan. Good on you for bothering to help mate. I hope people here appreciate what a resource and actual help you are in cutting through all the bullshit.
amit triston thx i put about 3 more hrs on the lastt one ordered a new computer today so in like a week ill have a stable way of typing other than on screen
Oh man, I've been checking your struggle recently and I relate so much, this is one of my biggest problems, in my case is due to eyeball and not measure properly (like holding the pencil and all that). Do you do such a thing? Or just try to match everything as you go?
People have been giving you so many points, I don't think there's much to add, I honestly feel that the approach I would follow would be do one, then either put the image on top or overlay and mark where you missed things, went of base, remember those mistakes and try again, thinking on them. So a mixture of quality and quantity. But I'm terrible at likeness so is not like I have any answer to give. Just keep trying, maybe slow down during the early block in? If you don't match the likeness there, don't render or add tone/volume, just try to block it again, which I guess you are also doing... oh boy!
Honestly though, without the original to compare many look quite well! So keep going strong!
(11-23-2019, 09:12 PM)Rotohail Wrote: Oh man, I've been checking your struggle recently and I relate so much, this is one of my biggest problems, in my case is due to eyeball and not measure properly (like holding the pencil and all that). Do you do such a thing? Or just try to match everything as you go?
People have been giving you so many points, I don't think there's much to add, I honestly feel that the approach I would follow would be do one, then either put the image on top or overlay and mark where you missed things, went of base, remember those mistakes and try again, thinking on them. So a mixture of quality and quantity. But I'm terrible at likeness so is not like I have any answer to give. Just keep trying, maybe slow down during the early block in? If you don't match the likeness there, don't render or add tone/volume, just try to block it again, which I guess you are also doing... oh boy!
Honestly though, without the original to compare many look quite well! So keep going strong!
I would add to that an even more important part in my opinion is to correct yourself before trying the overlay method it in the correct phase .Because it train you to ask yourself question in regard to stuff like proportion,value,symmetry and perspective etc...
I also want to talk about that concept that [b]80%[/b] of your results come from [b]20%[/b] of your effort,
and how not properly preparing a drawing will result in overworking a piece.I think what most people shy away is visual measuring they prefer to eye ball but how can you eye ball something if you don't visually measure.Let say you want to create a curve that pass by 3 point A B C there an infinite combination of curve you can create but how do you make sure you are representing the curve correctly?The easiest scenario is that your using a photo and that you can compare the curve you made to the picture.An other scenario would be that your doing live study of a still model in that case you would use visual measuring technique for life drawing.
To cut to the point point is that the less guess work you do and the more you use visually measure technique the better result you get and you stop overworking your piece.One error that can also happen is not working by looking at the reference enough and falling back on your muscles memory to fill the gap instead of spending 50% the time looking at the ref and spending 50% of the time drawing.
To end the biggest trap i think among traditional artist is removing the ''messy phase'' of the drawing in favor of jump into a more clean but maybe less accurate version of the drawing.The problem with traditional medium is that you have the under drawing that you gotta clean up but in digital you can totally overlay on top of it so you save time.So when an artist work both digitally and traditional he can become lazy in the regard of making a good under drawing.
Roto; thanks my dude likeness a whole new game. I think you would be okay at it if you just gave it a shot. Don't underestimate the good skills you built in drawing. Traditional is pretty freaking tough because there's no control Z. Maybe sometime try to tough it out and do a longer effort portrait from a good reference even if its in digital
Darkiste okay that kind of work previous. I'm just going see what's like it randomly picked up on this she's not. Terrible yeah I am a contrast when it comes to life convey and move what is important in my opinion to understand how to correctly represent form with value of how not every now I'm reading off of is one of the Common Sense I like it like this kind of I guess I'll read back what the said okay that kind of work previous cloud and see what flights and randomly picked up if she's not terribly yeah I'm to life today and move what speaking in a okay so this is what I just read but it picked up what I just rant okay now I'm reading off of this one of common sense I like it this what does said okay.
I spent about five hours on this portrait today and I think the eyebrows are not bothering me anymore, I was angling the eyebrow too much when it is actually more horizontal looking. Tomorrow I will keep refining the glasses and the chin. Paper is getting scuffed from all the erasing I am doing but that is good I suppose. I wish I would have fit the whole thing on the page before I started working on this drawing; however I'm starting to see how far off it was earlier on just with traditional the medium is less forgiving
I also found text to speech so I can reply without having to use the on-screen keyboard.
Great progress so far! The face looks great, great proportion and likeness here. The values are especially well done, looks very solid and lifelike. Already looking pretty refined as well, although I'm not too sure how far you want to take it! Should be interesting to see. As far as critiques, the only thing I can think of are the eyes; she looks slightly cross eyed. That might be accurate to capture her likeness, although typically such thing should be avoided when it comes to drawing regardless if that's how it appears in real life or not. Other than that, solid work! Looking forward to seeing more progress soon!
Try to check for your negative shape.When i do an overlay comparaison you made the right leg much more apart than they are and you show more a side view of the left upper arm than on the ref.But what strike me first is the left foot it rather big.I suggest the next time you have such a uniform background to look for negative shape to help you model the outline of the figure it would play to your advantage to use them.Can you show use more of your construction phase?
