Longhaul portrait -10 min in

Greatest! Greatest! Greatest work on your 10 minute outline construction, AuntHerbert! That's the greatest job you did and you have done on gesturing the facial and expression construction in 10 minutes.

So, if I could suggest you a completely and totally honest criticism, it could be that your head construction, is, though it's actually, mostly and consistently the greatest in terms of the realistic anatomy, but I'm not getting just about enough of the flowing caricature and organic drawing and forms of this face. Would you please just be able to do 3 hours (10,800 seconds) of 7 second warm up sketches of facial features and expressions and faces? (10,800/7/10, 1,543/10=154 warm-ups a day) (all flipped vertically) This latter part is to help you quick sketch the faces and noodles with the right side of your brain.

The reason why you could and should do this trickiest but useful exercise is because of two different things: 1) To help you percieve the edges into your gesture sketches of your heads and expressions. 2) To help make your head and face constructions and relationships the least stiffest, and the most dynamic, energetic, fluid, alive, spontaneous and liveliest.

And, if you wanna see more info and details, be sure to look up these two books for you: Drawing the Head in Light and Shade, by Edward R. and The 4th Definitive Edition of Betty Edwards.

Good luck, cheers, my hat's off to you, and I hope you'll find these definitely, totally and abolutely helpful.

Thanks for your praise Polyvios. It is really encouraging, and I wouldn't want to miss it.

I do slightly disagree with your idea, that more and more repetition in ever less time would really help me where I want to go at the moment, though. Most reactions I get praise my boldness, and mention they like the roughness and grittyness of my style. Which is nice to hear, but I don't want to be stuck with it forever. I also want to be able to do that really slow, boring, highend perfectionist finished style, and I am looking more for photorealistic than caricature in my forms.

See, if you want to become a complete martial artist, you should do those fast repeating boxing sack patterns, but you should also train the slow perfectionist tai chi movements in the park. I feel like I am in Lotus stance and try to move in slomo, aiming to almost get to a standstill to finally form a perfect slow circle with my hands, while you shout "great, but do it faster, faster, faster!". It is a strange disconnect.

Your proportions look good to me. There are some strong lines. I don't see any contrast for shading and light.