More face practice
© 2023 PiK
These were 20 minute practices but I paused the clock on both because I got into it a little!
They don't look exactly like the models but for now I think I'm maybe getting things in the right place at least?
Thank you!
Aunt Herbert
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.
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.
PiK
Thank you Aunt Herbert. A lot of great information here! I particularly like your advice about moving on to a new drawing rather than getting caught up in details. I will practice doing so.
Aunt Herbert
I have to thank you. The site messages mention, that critiquing other people is a good way to improve your own practice sessions, and well... at least half of the stuff I so confidently tell you is as much a reminder to myself.
I also really want to push into that area of a really crisp and ultra-detailed rendering, and I got used to the fact, that it comes almost inevitably at the cost of at some stage butchering a decent base construction. I also delusionally insist on not only doing it with ink, but with an ink brush, which is probably three or four stages of madness more than my actual skills at the moment can handle.
There is one more tip, which I am a bit hesitant to share, as I feel it undermines the value of the Learn How to Draw site a bit: I feel like a very good source for portraits are youtubers or youtube news sites. After I have been immersing myself into head construction and shadow shapes and such, when I sit on youtube and just watch regular talking heads doing their thing, after a while my visual cortex starts to kick in, and I get distracted from the topic they are talking about, because I discover some really distinctive features of their face. And I swear, when I then stop the video and draw those heads, the process is 10 times easier than starting from a still photo, and the results look leagues better.
I think the amount of complex ambient lighting on a lot of portraits on this site has to do with it, but also watching a face move for a while just gives a more vivid impression of how the muscles and bumps produce shadows on this specific person's face. For me doing portrays here often feels like dungeon end boss stuff, that really tests my skills, unless I expressly filter for only the extreme lighting pics.
And some of the best portrays I done so far are from action series with a bit of "noir" flavor. The light designers for those movies are often schooled in old expressionist german moviecraft, and sometimes make a real game out of lighting their actors in unusual and bizarre ways, that almost break the face into abstract geometric pattern for you, which are unbelievably simple to catch with a pen if you just stop the movie at the right moment, and the results make you look as if you were twice the artist, that you really are.
From memory, there is a German series called 4Blocks about criminals in Berlin, which delivered some ace material for me. Scratching my head about some other series with great lighting, and I remember my drawings, but not the name of the series atm.... So far I posted here only stuff that I drew from templates from this site. Maybe I should do some housekeeping and put up a folder on my ArtStation site, where I get some of my lucky strikes from drawing from netflix collected.
I also really want to push into that area of a really crisp and ultra-detailed rendering, and I got used to the fact, that it comes almost inevitably at the cost of at some stage butchering a decent base construction. I also delusionally insist on not only doing it with ink, but with an ink brush, which is probably three or four stages of madness more than my actual skills at the moment can handle.
There is one more tip, which I am a bit hesitant to share, as I feel it undermines the value of the Learn How to Draw site a bit: I feel like a very good source for portraits are youtubers or youtube news sites. After I have been immersing myself into head construction and shadow shapes and such, when I sit on youtube and just watch regular talking heads doing their thing, after a while my visual cortex starts to kick in, and I get distracted from the topic they are talking about, because I discover some really distinctive features of their face. And I swear, when I then stop the video and draw those heads, the process is 10 times easier than starting from a still photo, and the results look leagues better.
I think the amount of complex ambient lighting on a lot of portraits on this site has to do with it, but also watching a face move for a while just gives a more vivid impression of how the muscles and bumps produce shadows on this specific person's face. For me doing portrays here often feels like dungeon end boss stuff, that really tests my skills, unless I expressly filter for only the extreme lighting pics.
And some of the best portrays I done so far are from action series with a bit of "noir" flavor. The light designers for those movies are often schooled in old expressionist german moviecraft, and sometimes make a real game out of lighting their actors in unusual and bizarre ways, that almost break the face into abstract geometric pattern for you, which are unbelievably simple to catch with a pen if you just stop the movie at the right moment, and the results make you look as if you were twice the artist, that you really are.
From memory, there is a German series called 4Blocks about criminals in Berlin, which delivered some ace material for me. Scratching my head about some other series with great lighting, and I remember my drawings, but not the name of the series atm.... So far I posted here only stuff that I drew from templates from this site. Maybe I should do some housekeeping and put up a folder on my ArtStation site, where I get some of my lucky strikes from drawing from netflix collected.
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.