Just a portrait for today because I had to do raking and that shit hurts my shoulders.
However, I did take both of your advice and tried using lines and shapes to differentiate the shadows. I still went overboard in some areas, but I tried making some areas darker than others to show some contrast. The shape of the head turned out different proportionally from the reference though, so there's that I have to work on. Maybe I'll do some head studies tomorrow.
I think on day 5 or 6 I will work on inks. I'm trying to work with different mediums for this challenge.
You gonna need to hit those darker tone in the hair one day start now...don't let your hesitation slow you progress.Be bold you will learn to tone you value done just don't press to hard on the paper so you can erase you can also try to test a value by using a blank paper on the side to try to test how much pressure you should apply on your pencil to get certain tone or to try a stroke before you try putting it on your subject.But i generally say do some greyscale before you start a drawing session it quick and it help you calibrate your pressure sensitivity for the day in the begin at one moment it will be build in your muscle memeory.But it goes away gradually if you don't draw.
yes its better, you made the jaw bigger, the nose looks nicer
his eyes are narrower and sexier, his lips are less big, the indication of teeth line isnt attractive, his hair has volume and structure. the contour of his face on the side isnt as curved and whimsical. look how you indicated the cheekbone, it goes out in out again. When i see the photo, its out, then a diagonal line to the bottom of his jaw
give it antoher shot, i know its hard and frustration, but you already leveled up just doing it a second time, give it another go try to fix those little things
Maybe I'll do it again some other time, I'm going to work on some other refs I have in my folder as well as some anatomical studies. I can take what I learned from this portrait and apply it to the other ones. Don't forget, I have to do 97 more for this challenge.
whats the goal of the challenge... to improve right? its not like youre getting money for doing this or anything serious is on the line. I used to think that like oh if i draw 1000 of this i'll get better.. and well to an extent thats true. but ultimately you learn a lot about process and training your eye which is everything when it comes to realism.
When you lift weights, its that point that it hurts when you make the progress, the muscle tears. its exactly how its done at ateliers, they dont sit around and have someone draw 100 heads that arent very good. the instructor walks around and you work on making one picture look good, sometimes for 20+ hours or even 200 hours.
at the end of it, the student has a good drawing instead of 100 shitty drawings. now online its different, we cant quite look over your shoulder and help you correct this and that, so if you just continually correct something, i suggest doing it again so you practice fixing the mistakes as you lay it in, since, theres no one to tell you to erase something right away. just do it again, you get feedback, that voice in your head gets louder about mistakes and the more you correct that voice gets wiser and louder and thats what you want.
Else every effort is like "Hey i did another drawing! arent I a great artist? Im like algenpfleger i draw tons of shit. Oh someone has a critique? got it, better luck next time, i'll just do a totally different drawing." Then you never correct the mistake and go through the pain of fixing it and internalizing the accuracy. the better voice to have is "shit i fucked up that picture, im going to fix it and fix it until i get a good drawing."
thats what you want right? a good drawing? just fast forward, get it nothings stopping you
You want me to redraw the entire piece this when the only things you told me to fix could be done with a few erases and some pencil marks? Because from what you said it seems like you just want me to fix a couple minor things instead of changing the entire shape of the head.
Sorry, I'm just a bit confused if you are telling me to redraw the entire thing to to redraw the entire portrait with those corrections.
you'll probably notice some other things you did wrong through redrawing it. Theres ALOT more problems than the minor things i pointed out, im giving you something thats obvious and manageable, then i can give you a critique on what you correct, and i can help you, which im happy to do, get it to look accurate
If you want to continue the other 97 portraits to see for yourself what you'll learn, go for it; youre free to do whatever you want
I mean I think there are some issues with the eyes and the size of it compared to the reference. But I don't want to get burnt out on one piece. I'll just get back to it later after doing some other stuff. Thank you for the critique though, I do appreciate it.
I decided to give it some final touch ups in regards to some of your criticisms. I'll probably return to it in a week to give it a fresh outlook and redraw it again.
Did another portrait today and got back to doing boxes. I feel like with the boxes I need to pay attention more to wear my lines are heading and think about what the shape will look like before I even start drawing the lines. With the portrait, I think it turned out all right, some alignment issues with the lips and chin areas, practicing shading different tones. The eyes I think turned out pretty good. I think some of the shading, hatching I added was a bit unnecessary around the cheek area as it makes it look like she has a 5 o clock shadow, so I need to find a way to get around that.
As an exercise try your next one with only straight lines. That photo is poor to study from due to the blur, and caused you to invent things rather than draw them as they are. Each stroke should be in relation to the others and you ended up not spending enough time looking at the photo. I wouldn’t even worry about shading right now. The shadows you inserted aren’t doing you or the subject any favors.
You should just do whatever you want though if you’re feeling burnt out. And the advice I’m giving is probably faulty, so feel free to ignore it. But I’d at least slow down a bit if I were you.
879: Understood, for tomorrow's study I'll tone down the shadows a bit. I decided to pick a better portrait from a different resource I have been getting the portrait refs from.
So, more boxes, another portrait and some skull sketches because I haven't drawn a skull in a while and it shows. First time I've used Photoshop in a while. Might do some portraits in it sometime, haven't rendered in there for about a year. Been trying to get my construction to improve as well as my perspective.
I've always hated perspective, I have that Scott Roberts book and the difficulty curve really confuses me. So maybe I should find another book for a brainlet like me?
The portrait was done in a H pencil for the light contruction sketch, HB for the shading and harder lines and a 6B for the background(?). Anyway, I feel I should've used my 2B for the darker since HB may be too light.
Another thing I need to focus on is proportion, so I might be doing studies from Hampton and Bridgeman again for the next week or so.
The box are improving in my opinion.For perspective i recommend to continue with draw box. Scott stuff is kinda advanced it really technical stuff and if you can't nail one or two point perspective box it will feel like it out of your reach it just gonna be more confusing then anything.
Well thanks for saying my boxes are improving, I still feel kind of feel I could do better though. I will still continue with Drawbox and someone recommended me to read Perspective made easy created by Earnest R Norling. I might check that out and post some studies I do. I'm also going to do more anatomy studies, 10 studies from reference and 10 from imagination to get my juices going.
Got two portraits, one shitty, one better, more fucking boxes and some eye studies. Will be doing more of those studies soon, will probably do hands or heads next.
You did not respect the reference so for that you would not be getting a good grade.If it was to represent a believable face you would have a better grade.My biggest concern is that you somehow manage to age her more than necessary.There also those teeth you can't leave them like that it will attract attention.You gotta try to find a balance to simplify the teeth to imply there are teeth but you don't need to bring to much attention to the mouth also.
darktiste, everyone can be a critic, but not everyone can help. Sometimes, showing up and talking down to people without offering any substantial help, is kind of annoying. No need to go around giving people your own "grades".
So in regards to all your drawings here, maybe we should have a quick chat on the nature of drawing.
There's a problem with drawing in general that artists need to solve. It's basically that the world isn't made up of lines, rather it's just a bunch of color shapes hitting our retina, no real lines in existence. So are we doing something wrong by using lines? is the answer to just make everything a mass drawing rather than using lines? Well the artist and theoretician Max Meldrum thought so and was a strong advocate for excluding lines from art and only focusing on masses. That being said, there are interesting ways to solve this problem of lines not really existing.
One idea is that lines represent an end or segmentation of form. So in a sense, contour drawing. This is often a good start when thinking about drawing where you're representing the object itself rather than its visual impression, like the opposite of impressionist mass drawing. It lets you represent the form of the subject and allows you to concentrate on proportions, gesture, design, and form without having to worry about much else. This however is very difficult to represent something faithfully because it can often lack many of the visual qualities that we want a drawing to have. One of the better examples of this particular style of drawing can be this Julien drawing https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zriAVm7xjIc/S...rofile.gif
So one of the traditional ways to get more of the impression into the drawing is to take the basic line drawing and then begin to model some of the light and shade, bringing more of the impression to life. When doing this, it's important to remember how you're most likely representing softer shapes of value so your shading and half-tones need to be softer while still having some unity to the shapes. It's what is done in the Julien drawing but another traditional example is this Holbein drawing https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/...HKM9ZmiAkA
Values however aren't particularly good in drawing as a medium so you usually need to compress your value range because pencils just don't get very dark without harming the paper. So with compressing, you can think of this like how you over expose a camera, everything beyond a certain point is just pure white, regardless if there's variation in the very light parts. You can then do the same with the shadows, allowing you to work more comfortably with tones without either having to add super dark values or having to model all the half-tones making it look very low contrast. This is a good skill to learn because you will often be drawing or painting things where you just can't be as light or dark in your medium as real life, so being able to compress the values lets you paint it naturalistically without sacrificing the big impression/contrast. I made this drawing as an example of how this is done. Notice how there are half tones in the reference in the light areas that are excluded because they are too light, and the same with the dark for the things that are too dark to represent. So this preserves the big contrast and impression with a limited value range.
(this is an approach Meldrum would approve of, notice how there are no lines, only masses of tone)
There is another approach to drawing that shows up here and there historically in various forms. The idea is in a sense an impressionist approach to drawing where you no longer draw the "object" but rather it's impression, yet you do not draw in "tones", just lines. The way you do this is to re-consider what a line is, no longer representing form but rather just a change in contrast. So imagine a figure lit against a medium value background. In some parts the light will hit the form, making the contour between the light and background strong, because it's a light skin value against a medium value background, giving that contour contrast. This is also done to the shadow, so you look at its contrast against the medium value background and it's probably a dark value (the shadow) against the lighter medium value background, so you represent that area with a line too.
However at some point there will be a half-tone value where it's difficult to see the difference between it and the background, and in these places, we either draw very light lines, or no line at all. So in a simple sense, we draw a line and the value of the line corresponds with the contrast we see.
I know this is a bit abstract and weird but I did this quick sketch as an example. Notice how for example the top part of her forehead has a very low contrast against the background so it's a very light line I've drawn there. Then bellow that the front part of her forehead has a very strong contrast with the background so I drew a dark line there. This is a kind of method where you can be impressionistic and naturalistic with lines, even though they technically don't exist in reality. By just using them to show contrast, we can simulate the visual impression without having to add tone.
So with all this, this isn't to say you have to draw in one of these particular ways. It's just to outline some different points of view in drawing that are worth thinking about. Most traditional artists have a hybrid of these approaches, some more concerned with the "object" others more interested with the impression. I hope this gives you some stuff to think about, experiment with and can hopefully be helpful in your drawings.
Hot damn Tristan, that's some of the best advice I've been given in a long time. Will be sure to give that a try tomorrow. I've been having a hunch that I've been over rendering things. Unfortunately, I already did today's portrait so I might as well put that garbage here for now.
I've also been thinking of going back to doing some stuff from imagination because I haven't been doing that in a while.
