Untitled
© 2025 Paulie K923
Stray Kat
The first thing that caught my eye was the shading. I tjink you did a pretty good job on that. And you also have got most of the proportions right. The only reason this doesn't look quite accurate is only becausw of left eye. It is too close to the nose. If you draw a line from the corner of the eye to the corner of the nose you will see that the line is not parallal to the nose bridge. A good way to know if you drew eye too close to the nose is that the line connecring the corner of the eye and nose together should be in parallal with the nose bridge, when you are doing a 3/4 portrait
Mahatmabolika
Hey Paulie,
great work! You obviously put in a lot of time and effort practising and it shows in this beautiful piece.
However, you asked for critique so there are two things I would focus on improving: construction and value control.
1. Construction: while you beautifully render all the details of the eyes, lips and mouth, the overall structure is lacking a bit and is not as tight as it should and could be. I know the super sweet temptation of going straight to and getting lost in all those amazing details, but if the basis hasn't been set down properly the work can easily become some sort of labyrinth of bouncing back and forth between tiny forms and shadows while wondering why the face somehow doesn't quite look like the reference. Practice and understand the primitive shapes that make up a face and get as comfortable as possible rotating and placing them as 3D objects. Sounds boring (and it somewhat is) but will take your work to a whole other level.
2. Value control: Be more mindful of your values (blacks, greys and whites). They are the other key to achieve realism and then bend it to your style (next to construction I mentioned above). Even without seeing the reference I am pretty sure there are some deep blacks missing around the eye area. Especially in relation to the very dark hair. Be as precise as you can and compare values not only next to each other but across the whole piece.
The second issue about your values is, that they kind of work against the composition of your piece. Focal points are created through high contrast (e.g. light and dark) in some areas while not having it in others. You have this very heavy black mass of the hair with white highlights (very high contrast) while the whole face stays within a rather small range of greys. Of course focal points are highly dependent on one's style, and odd ones can be super beautiful, but I'm not sure that this is what you intended here.
Hope this helps. Keep up the good work and happy drawing!
great work! You obviously put in a lot of time and effort practising and it shows in this beautiful piece.
However, you asked for critique so there are two things I would focus on improving: construction and value control.
1. Construction: while you beautifully render all the details of the eyes, lips and mouth, the overall structure is lacking a bit and is not as tight as it should and could be. I know the super sweet temptation of going straight to and getting lost in all those amazing details, but if the basis hasn't been set down properly the work can easily become some sort of labyrinth of bouncing back and forth between tiny forms and shadows while wondering why the face somehow doesn't quite look like the reference. Practice and understand the primitive shapes that make up a face and get as comfortable as possible rotating and placing them as 3D objects. Sounds boring (and it somewhat is) but will take your work to a whole other level.
2. Value control: Be more mindful of your values (blacks, greys and whites). They are the other key to achieve realism and then bend it to your style (next to construction I mentioned above). Even without seeing the reference I am pretty sure there are some deep blacks missing around the eye area. Especially in relation to the very dark hair. Be as precise as you can and compare values not only next to each other but across the whole piece.
The second issue about your values is, that they kind of work against the composition of your piece. Focal points are created through high contrast (e.g. light and dark) in some areas while not having it in others. You have this very heavy black mass of the hair with white highlights (very high contrast) while the whole face stays within a rather small range of greys. Of course focal points are highly dependent on one's style, and odd ones can be super beautiful, but I'm not sure that this is what you intended here.
Hope this helps. Keep up the good work and happy drawing!
