JyonnyNovice - from Novice to Master!

[JyonnyNovice]

A journey through portrait

I sketched my daughter's portrait a couple of days ago, she's nearly two and doesn't stay still for long, so these were really fast, like 2 minutes to get the defining lines down - they turned out pretty rubbish! She looks like a baby from an old victorian portrait, with an adult like head on a tiny body - it was good practice though.





Based on how rubbish they were, I decided I should practice portrait drawing some more. Here's a couple of my wife:





- still rubbish, she's a very beautiful girl in real life - minor improvement over my daughter's - at least it looks like a human!

Some more practice today; I wanted to bash out as many as I could to really practice so I went for speed:



Not the best idea! I regressed - such a beautiful actress made to look like a 2 year meth addict <_>

I slowed down a bit for the next ones:



Definite improvements over Blake Lively's; I think I got the nose down at least, the first one looks more like Jay Leno than Sean Penn though XD

Slowed down a little more for the next one; tried mapping out the features of the whole head before defining any contours instead of starting from the eyes - which I did for Sean Penn.



Not sure if my Geoffrey Rush is better or worse than my Sean Penn but I was having a lot of fun by this point (it looks more like a caricature than a portrait though!)

Finally:



My best one so far, I really took my time with Scarlett, mapped out the positions of her facial features - refined it a few times before I started defining anything. I used an eraser with this, which I'm trying to avoid 'cause I'm already slow, and when a drawing takes me too long I kind of burn out a little. My wife tells me that no, it doesn't look like Scarlett Johanson but she would've thought the face looked familiar (she's pretty hard to impress).

Anyway, when I looked at my first attempts with my daughter, and my latest with Scarlett, I see such a world of improvement, and I've found I really enjoy doing these pencil portraits, they take just enough time for me to really get into but not so long that I get sick of them.



I need to practice a lot more. Does anyone have any tips for portrait drawing? As you can see My proportions and features are all over the place, despite having mapped them out - do I just need to draw more and my eye will develop on it's own? Or is there some things I can do to help? Any advice is much appreciated!






One last picture, to do justice for my beautiful daughter, so no one thinks she's a victorian baby, here's a w.i.p value painting I'm doing of her.