More face practice

Good afternoon again, PiK, and welcome back to Line of Action. I'm Polyvios, and how are you?

Greater job on your control and understanding of the facial proportions and angles (relationships), spaces, edges, and forces on your expression attitudes, still. But, these drawings are far still too rigider yet. Would you like to please go ahead with 25 minutes of 5 minute faces and expressions?

The reasons why is because, one, you'll get things done with your faces more confidently, but lesser than involved with the more smaller and insignificant details. And two, to make your expressions lesser than stilted, but more than dynamic, vitaler, but fuller on the energy. For further details, kindly look into the free PDF of the Vilppu Drawing Manual on Archive.🎨🎨✍️

My hat's off to you and thank you.

I like them, and well, I have the feeling I know all the photos by now. The guy is very close, although I think the face is a bit longer and he is a bit more chubby. The lady is quite conventionalized, I don't think I would normally recognize her other than from her pose and her hairs. Her features on the OG seem to be ethnically indian or south east asian a bit.

I do disagree with the way you shaded the lady, though. You went with all the shades to the same depth, which makes it look like all her features were individually glued on a flat plane. If you want to add that much shading, you really need to look into theory a bit, terminator, core shadow, reflected light, etcetera, and basically find a way to separate the shades into different steps of darkness.

There are some mistakes, that are hard to explain, like the relationship between reflected light and midtones. If you just focus on the detail, the reflected light is usually in stark contrast with the surrounding shadow, and may appear as bright or brighter than your midtones, which contrast with lighted areas. But the shadow areas are actually still darker, even the ones with reflected light, and need to be drawn darker, or you mess up the overall shadowing of the skull, and flatten the face out.

Ironically the faces with the "extreme lighting" tag are far easier to shade. A lot of the portraits on this site otherwise are photographed with a lot of ambient light, which makes it really hard to understand and classify the shadow areas and the shadow forms properly.

And I disagree with Polyvios about quick sketching faces. Quick sketching on a predetermined time frame just doesn't work with portrays.

What does make sense is doing the underlying construction offline, "from imagination" as it is called, repeatedly for warmups, to familiarize with the construction and put your mind into the right frame. And where I do agree with Polyvios is, that you are apparently already spending a lot of time on rendering, which would be put to better use by just starting a new drawing, so you get more experience with the underlying construction. Or in easier words: your #1 way to mess up your result is to go overboard with the shading, so keep your foot on the brake peddle for now, and better draw more but simpler portraits.

If you are drawing from a template, you always have the problem, that Loomis or Reilly, they just produce idealized heads and faces, and actual people often just look different. Understanding the construction helps to know where and what to measure, but you can't really trust those idealized proportions before you checked, whether your template actually shares them.

And to check them, you need to understand exactly, what the abstraction is supposed to indicate exactly. And that isn't always clear. Like the side cutouts from Loomis. Easy enough to place when drawing from imagination, but deciding where they need to be on a specific model is frustratingly hard.