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Maybe trying to mentally separate the construction of the face from the shading process will help. "Cartoons" usually try to capture an object with few and clear lines, and sacrifice subtle midtones to achieve this, to the extreme of accepting a very flat 2-D impression like in a typical child cartoon, while shading to achieve depths aims to capture exactly these midtones.
You work almost exclusively with lines, so your technique for depicting midtones has to be hatching or cross-hatching. The challenge is to make a visible distinction between hatching lines, that mark the tone of an area, and contour lines, that mark the outline of a shape. Your lines seem to oscillate a bit between these two functions, which reduces the clarity of expression. Is that part of the face in shadow, or do these lines represent wrinkles?
Warm-ups that concentrate purely on practicing a more regular hatching pattern might be a good idea, as will rendering geometric shapes like spheres under simple lighting conditions, so your hatching patterns don't inadvertently become more expressive than you want them to be.
On the other hand you could try to focus on drawing from extremely dramatically lit images, with high contrast and few midtones, so you get used to capturing the shapes of a face with clear stylized lines, replacing all hatching with flat dark planes contrasting with flat white planes at first, as lights and shadows, without using any midtones at all. Then only start to separate midtones once you are comfortable to draw without them.
I find that movies or series often use that kind of expressive lighting, hitting the pause button often produces great motives.
And last but not least, be aware that "cartoonish" i.e. stylized drawing, and realistically rendering voluminous depth via shading, are somewhat separate goals. You will likely end up finding your own compromise somewhere between, but if you try to excel in both of these polar opposites at once you WILL accumulate quite a bit of frustration. There are few artists, who excel in both at once, and the result of a heavily stylized motive with 100% natural rendering will produce a distinct "canny valley" effect. Only artist that comes to mind for me is Gottfried Helmwein in some of his political caricatures.
P.S: You are asking specifically for the placement of features. Normally I would point to the Loomis method to help with that, but from your results you don't seem to lack theoretical foundation for that task. I would guess, that at the point you are at, it's just a question of more practice, although revisiting more basic lessons again is never a bad idea. If you figured all that out purely on a trial and error basis and don't know Mr. Loomis, you might want to search his introductory works and try them out, but I got the feeling you are really beyond that by now. Refreshment is always good, but don't expect completely new insights.
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Aunt Herbert
edited this post on May 14, 2021 12:20pm.
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Aunt Herbert
edited this post on May 14, 2021 12:33pm.
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