The assignment-demo-critique pipelining is intense, but really amazing for changing the mind about the art of drawing. The last Musketeer strict-measure run was hard for everyone. I wasn't sure I have the mental strength to do it again. But Stan suggested choosing something that will interest us, and so I drew a friend. I stared at his face for almost 6 hours! I immediately ran into trouble trying to figure out a unit of measure that would help me with putting things in the right place. The photo probably had a flashlight go off, washing out almost all the shadows and making determining the unit of measure tremendously difficult. I actually deleted the entire lay-in 2~3 times because I couldn't find any obvious relations between shapes both vertically and horizontally. In the end, I found a somewhat radical solution: I isolated the part of the face between the brow and the chin, and between the ear and the jutting part of the cheek. This was a close enough "grid" that is both 2 units tall and across. It also handily allowed me to focus my attention on nailing down the position of the nose, as his left nostril was handily at the center of this grid. Plumb lines extend from all directions from this crucial anchor to enforce alignment, and I knew I had a foothold. After that I admit I "cheated" a little by using something Stan only passingly mentioned - rhythm. Specifically, the curved rhythms that cross-link all the shapes of the nose, mouth, eyes, and cheekbone. I lightly traced and followed all of the ones that I believe were shape-defining, the interlocking matrices of rhythm-shapes helping me check proportions with the mosaic they create. I could have learned the concept in a book called DRSB a while ago. I don't believe I have a better solution; the sparse information from the photo meant that the isolated shapes were difficult to put in relation to one another, which meant more scaffolding had to be made-up to compensate, and this is all I got. I got most of the face shapes correct and you could see that the wrongness in the forehead/hair is the result of just letting myself go. I put in all that effort cautiously measuring and I wanted to have fun doing some shading. What I really should have done is stop myself just before the fun part, and just checked all the measurements with my pencil (I used a ballpoint pen shaft because a digital stylus can be chunky) before i went wild. Interestingly, the shading itself is a 2nd try as well. Initially, I had wanted to do some 5-value shading as we had been taught, working both ways starting with a half-tone, but I don't think I had a good grasp on how to put the values into 5 "bins". This is made worse by the flood of light in the photo, as well as my amateur control of stylus pressure (I realise now I should just switch pencil brushes). The end result is a muddied mess with no clear focal point. As a result, I instead chose to go with a line-weight based approach. I wanted the minimum amount of value, while an idea popped into my head that I wanted to direct the viewer's eyes to a point of my choosing. So, I simplified 5-value shading even more, with 2 darks for the hair and 2 half-tones for the skin, leaving the rest to blank white light-value. 1. I intentionally darkened the brows and eyes and added lots of small detail to draw attention to them, knowing that the shape and value of hair will draw attention to the even darker eyes. 2. To describe the face, I lightly added small detail with lines just a bit darker than the shading behind it to assist my broad pencil-shade brush in creating sharper edges when I need them. The face area is so flooded with light that even small faint lines pop out, and so I thought very hard about what to put and keep on the nose and mouth; each line mattered! 3. I rubbed out and lightened the value of the shadows in the neck because they were drawing too much attention away from the face. Art is such magic even on small things, and I'm glad Stan, staff, and other students on Proko are my teachers because insight is shared so readily among us. 4. The hair after crude pencil-shade brush looked like an unformed mess, so I had a lot of fun designing the curved lines in the hair, trying to execute tapered, flowing lines in 1 stroke with as few digital-exclusive undo's as possible. 5. I added the Dr. Pepper can in, just to see if I can ghost in some convincing ellipses. I don't know if this is in the spirit of a measure-based drawing anymore, but it was an adventure in art that left me refreshed. I was forced to really apply what I learned in a new context, and make all the decisions. This allowed me to really integrate all the stuff we were told into an increasingly cohesive art intuition, though I guess the big thing to get used to in art is you don't know exactly how you'll manage or where you'll end up!

Practiced this again today. I was able to find a measurement that I was able to use in several places to plot out the features.

Having the ability to overlay my drawing on the reference for self critiques is invaluable. I am excited to improve at this! Criticisms are welcome.

Did one more. I'll try to make these a habit.

I've thrown in all I've learned so far in the last few projects into this Stan study (sorry stan i hope you don't mind, lmao) I don't think I can look at faces without measuring their proportions anymore after spending so much time on the last project. Nonetheless, thank you for this course, I've already improved significantly after just over two weeks of studying. I'm excited to keep going forward.

After feedback, I drew a portrait of Lindsey Vonn, an athlete from a magazine. I want to do more of these because its starting to get fun!

Did some more measuring.

tried doing it again its soo hard to know what to measure and how to get accurate

Drawing Accurate Proportions. Tried scanning instead of taking a photo. Maybe took the detail too far? Were we supposed to show our measuring lines?

Keep on keeping on; proportions and faces are good for me to do, and so I will continue to incorporate this exercise regularly.

Lately I felt like I wasn’t improving which had been frustrating me so I decided to redraw a face I drew back in like December. I feel like I have found a sense of motivation again, very proud of myself haha. (The brownish one is the old one the blue from today)

I am not big on doing potrait drawings, but they could help with proportions so gave it my best shot. He was right in the fact that it didn't take me 20 minutes lol. Here is mine, I don't have a lot of space on my laptop so I can't get photoshop as it would take up a lot of space. So instead I put the image on my computer screen then increased the brightness and put the drawing I made on the computer screen. It is WAY off, but I will come back to this and I'm proud I at least did it. :)

Practiced some more portraits. Heavily relied on eyeballing with some measurements to check. Also missed some proportions as I myself got to know when uploading these, I don't know why I wasn't able to spot it while drawing. Btw Any critiques or advice would be highly welcomed!

Slow but steady improvement

ok have been practising a few more time on this assignment, still struggle alot but think it is getting slowly better. don't have photoshop or anything like that so have to compare with printed out images, thats why my drawing get a bit crunched.

Regarding big drawing boards: Slice a section of a styrofoam "pool noodle" or water-pipe insulator lengthwise along one side and stick the edge of the drawing board into it (then it won't jab into your thighs). I also re-purposed the acrylic from a very cheap poster frame and glued it to my drawing board because it's lightweight yet provides a flawlessly smooth surface under my paper. I agree that binder-clips are the way to go, because the hinges fold flat, you can reposition the clips wherever you like, and you can clip more to the bottom sides if it's windy etc.

Third try, have definitely improved since the first. Happy with this one.

Did another practice, I needed to lower the eyes a bit but other than that I think I got it almost right...

I did another practice of measuring proportions using a reference I found. I got the angle of the face wrong, and its true what Stan said. Our brains wants to naturally straighten the face. Ugh I felt I was doing good but I was off. Good practice though.