BlueBear's Sketchbook

[Patrick Gaumond]

Don't worry about likeness too soon. Unless you're planning on becoming a portrait artist by trade, there's no practical benefit to learning that. But even then, focus on the structure of the head and getting the proportions right and that will be enough. I used to do portraits of famous/recognizable people too, but then i realized I was focusing too much on getting the likeness while missing sight of the importance of the structure, which ultimately hampered the development of my imaginative work. And really the accuracy of the likeness depends almost entirely on the accuracy of the structure, so much that a few millimeters will throw it off.

As for colours and values, I would recommend some gnomon DVDs

Colour:
1. Colour Theory: The mechanics of colour by Richard Keyes (as title suggests it covers colour theory in depth)
2. Practical Light and Colour by Jeremy Vickery (Covers application of colour theory and how to think about saturation and hue shifting etc)

Value:
Matte surface shading by scott robertson (Discusses rules to use values from imagination and how to render geo forms accurately)
OR
How to Render by scott robertson (book with lots of info on rendering and values, similar to matte surface shading dvd)


But none of that matters if you don't apply the info yourself. Study life and photographs armed with the knowledge from the theory videos, and try to avoid photography that's heavily manipulated or even films, since they change the colours a lot in those as well, if you want to understand natural lighting better. Once you have a good basis in reality, then its ok to use film photos as colour studies to expand your colour palette knowledge