Ironing out bad habits, Naruto Portrait

[JamesMabe]

Howdy,

I recently received a critique on this work as below

"There are some anatomical issues with the subject, the eyes especially.
Texture inconsistency issues, some texture well done while others flat and muddy."

Not sure on the anatomy issues, I enlarge the eyes a little on purpose trying to bring him a little closer to his anime form but still don't think I pushed them too large. Main one grabbing my attention is the texture inconsistency, I have had another image get a critique very similar to this so there is something I am doing that is drawing this conclusion and I want to drop the habit. So I'd like a little better description on where this is going wrong and what I need to do to not only fix it but avoid it in the future. Also I had a lot of difficult with the hair on this, I wanted to style his hair like the anime version but make it real, a tall task on itself but it should be doable, I don't think what I have is terrible but of everything that is the part that bothers me the most.

[Newcalibre]

Hey mate,

There are a couple problems I can spot at a glance.

The features of the face are painted as if viewed from front on, but his head indicates a slight angle; a bit shallower than 3 quarter.

The eyes aren't looking at the viewer. In future when you're painting eyes, keep them blank, paint in two dots for pupils and align them till they're focussing on you (or whatever they're looking at) then build the iris around them.

Here's a quick paint over, there are still a few things that aren't quite right but it'll give you a better idea of what I think should be corrected




As for the textures, its your choice how much you want to render, but sometimes less is more. There are a couple things that bug me:

• the eyes are a little too porous.
• I reduced the texture of the headband towards the lighter areas. Textures are most visible in the halftones; anything more and it starts to look too artificial.
• The hair's too groomed, the texture too evenly applied and it's lacking volume. A couple images of blonde spiky hairstyles to give you an idea of how to simplify texture and tousle it a bit more:








If you're looking to break bad habits, it's not enough just to correct this painting.

Your ability to render and polish is good, but you're using this to hide your flaws. You're also painting too much of what you think you see, instead of what you should be seeing. No amount of polish and finish can make your portraits look realistic if they're fundamentally flawed.

The best way to grow out of this habit is to do more studies of heads from all angles.

I highly recommend reading 'Drawing the Head and Hands' and 'Fun With a Pencil' by Andrew Loomis. These will help you construct the head from imagination. But it's not enough to just do loose line drawings.

You should do some basic value studies using 4 or so values. Find a reference image (of a real head, not of an artwork) and try and reproduce it using these 4 values. Keep the brush at 100% opacity & flow, turn off transfer, and map out the light and dark values as if it's a cell shaded comic.

This method allows you to learn without getting distracted by halftones, polish and rendering. It'll teach you to simplify your paintings to important forms, so you can make proper, efficient use of your value range. If you feel you don't have enough values to describe the details you want, it's either because they're not important or because something else needs to be simplified for these details to read clearly.

Spend 10 minutes on it. Find another head, do it again. Repeat as much as you can, observe how the features change in different angles and stop painting when you've stopped learning.

When you're done, chuck them in a folder and keep them for yourself to look back on in future. Don't post them online or you'll get too caught up with posturing instead of learning.

Hopefully this helps.

-NC

[JamesMabe]

Howdy,

Back with an update, after seeing your paint over and what you described the issues started standing out to me. Other than the hair it mostly looks like a series of small errors that have led to an larger problem and I know I am prone to small errors. First when you said the angle of the head was off from the face it kind of caught me when you said it looked like a little less than 3/4 when what I was going for was more like just a little turn from from center. I believe the nose, the shape of the right side of his head and his left eye to be big causes of this. Also I undone the left over anime style to his eyes, over sizing them apparently just doesn't work, holding to style may have worked with Bowser since he is a monster anyway but Naruto being human it just stood out too much as an oddity. Hair, once again I was sticking too closely to the anime drawings of him and not taking enough liberties to make it real, hopefully it is working a lot better now. Still need to work on the muddy textures and the head band is still a bit warped from adjusting it but hopefully this is much more on the right track physically.

[califfguzman]

wow much better. Skin on the face is amazing. Texture on the lips is a little bubbly