Wow I love ❤ your drawing. What pencils did you use (2B, 4B, HB, 3H)

On the last assignment or the portrait class, be mindful of his jaw structure it’s not as sharp as you sketched it. You did a fantastic job by the way

Great set of portrait sketches. It looks like these were all in a small sketchbook, so perhaps it may be easier to do such rendering when you work larger size. The strength here i perceive is rendering of hair, the old man’s beard looks awesome and his eyes as well look really good. As you mentioned, the opportunity to get better on each of drawings is accuracy of proportions, and to do that perhaps you can get a bit scientific. To improve proportions you need some method to give yourself specific feedback to practice. With digital tools drop opacity of scan of sketch and overlay it with photo reference and it will reveal proportions in drawing which diverge from photo. Or just use a ruler to check relative key point of features and skulls of drawing versus photo reference. As a challenge to really reveal proportions accuracy, take 20 plus measurements like width of eye, length of forehead, length of nose, and find your tendencies of making a feature or skull section a little too big or little too small. Last i’m not sure if you are using an underdrawing method or not, but if not perhaps consider exploring a constructive approach to building proportions of skull and locating features through Loomis or Reilly method. I hope that helps.

Hey there! If anything, it´s great practice for tonal value control. And you had fun drawing a subject you like, did you not? So take it as fun practice. If you can take a general posed Loomis head, or skull in the same position, you can use this drawing to identify what you can improve. This makes it more like deliberate practice. When you are up to it, try making the portrait again but focus on fixing the areas of improvement first, such as the general proportions, angles of alignment and so on. Great effort!!!

Hi gothamite, a very nice likeness. You might consider doing a trace-over of Riley rhythms to correct some of the misalignments? In particular, the eyes look a bit off. But all in alll, a very nice portrait :-) Cheers!

I wasn't familiar with this poster, but before I read your comment I could see that it was Ben Affleck - so the resemblance is there. The main thing I noticed is that the shadow on his nose is a lot sharper than the photo, so it makes his nose look more pinched. I feel like his right eye should be slightly larger too, but generally the proportions and placement of the rest of his features look to be pretty good to me

Well, I don't know who Mr. Reynolds is but I think you have captured a fair likeness. Nice work!

I think his forehead is taller as you said and also it looks like the cheeks are fatter so you should have more clean lines in the beard where the cheeks are, also the wrinkle on the eyebrow should be more down under the eyebrow I think (as I see it the left one) because I think it looks like he's looking more on the left that way (as I see it) and there should be more visible highlights. Mostly his face just needs to be longer honestly but overall it's pretty great good job! I'm still a beginner so I'm sorry if it's not very accurate

values are a bit skewed and measurements could be adjusted for accuracy and likeness. good job, just needs more time in the "block in" stage getting things where they need to be. squinting your eyes when rendering values can help you with representing form as well... Same tips that have helped me improve my portraits. great work keep it up

Thanks for feedback

The light areas of your darks are too light. If you added more halftones on the light side you could bring out the highlights which would make it look even better. For proportions I think that jaw angle should have been pushed further left, making that right plane of the face a little bigger, if you want to be closer to the reference (the face looks a bit "crowded"). Nice drawing, though, nothing to be ashamed of IMHO.

https://youtu.be/vj5lf43zzFc - Brian Knox is a Watts Atelir instructor and this video of him demonstrating is really helpful for constructing and mapping heads. Hope you finde it helpful as well.

Here’s what I’ve been up to. I’m really loving the charcoal brushes in Procreate.

Thank you! yes it's all procreate default brushes.

Its all digital? Flawless!

Hi @Nicole Lee, I think these are really nice! I really like the textures in the forehead on the first one and the line quality in the second one is very elegant. I'll do my best to help you further: You've have been working a lot on shading, and I can tell that you're improving. I think it's about time you take a shading course. Your drawings are very good, and you understand much about shading. However I feel like there are som holes in your foundation, that need to be filled in order to push you to the next level. The area I see need most improvement is value control. Stan talks some about values, but it wasn't thorough enough for me. Also Stan's shading is quite stylized, with a strong core shadow and strong reflected light. His main intention doesn't seem to be copying what you see exactly. For me learning to capture the value relationships I see was a great way to develop my value control. And now that I have that I can start to stylize them and do that with confidence. I think the control has to come first The course I took on shading was Dorian Iten's Shading Course https://www.theshadingcourse.com Great explanations, great assignments and affordable. I'm sure that there're plenty of good resources online about shading, but Dorian's course is the one I would recommend I hope this was helpful :) Keep up the good work!

Beautiful drawing! Just that there is too much value on the shoulder and it draws the attention away from the face and makes it look a little pale.

Hi @Jule Hollstein , great drawing! Your work has a great likeness to Nicolai and good shading that separates light from shadow areas. Below are a few suggestions of where the drawing can further be improved: - proportion: the eye on the left hand side should be smaller as it's away from us at three-quarter view. - shading: the shading transition can be softer on the eye bags, lips, and the cheek core shadows. - areas of hair in the shadow should be darker as it's in the same plane as the cheek that's in the shadow (refer to Proko's drawing) - area of the neck right below the head should be much darker as it's facing away from light and the head casts a shadow on it Hope that helps!

A wonderful piece. Well done! Keep going.

What I immediately notice from your portrait attempt is how your features do not align correctly in perspective. I would recommend you to continue drawing Loomis Heads and keep in mind the 3D forms of the face. Pay close attention to how the contours and measurements are parallel in relation to space and form. Use the 3D model as a reference. Before jumping into shading and details, the construction and foundations that make up the face are the most important to get right first. If the measurements and perspective are wrong, everything else after will also look incorrect. As for shading and getting smooth transitions in gradations I would recommend Smooth Newsprint and Charcoal, however, what matters at the end of the day is how you use the materials given to you and making the most out of what you have. Your shading is quite good! Don't give up and continue to reduce the number of mistakes you make each time. Take the time to measure everything diligently, once you think it matches, you can start to jump into finer details and shading. Good luck.

Hey, Nicole. You did a good job in most of this assignment. However, there's a few proportional mistakes: the eyes are too big, nose and ear are to small and the mouth is the wrong shape. You also drew a more idealized version of him. Notice that in the reference the bottom thirds of his face are bigger than his forehead. If you did that on purpose, that's ok, if not just be aware of it. Since we're looking at a profile, so the features gonna be smaller than in front view. Also the shape will change. Compare how much white of the eye you're seeing in the reference and how much you drew, compare how much you're seeing of the outer side of his mouth and how much you drew. There's a phenomenon that you should be aware. We have a tendency to draw everything straighter than we see. That means drawing longer axis on foreshortened limbs or force full shapes even when only see part of the feature. We do that because we're trying to match our symbolic representations of stuff. But, as we practice it's important to consciously doing an effort to draw what we really see and get away of what we think we see. The value arrangement lacks contrast. Looking at the forehead, I see that you understand the forms and you're doing a good job representing the lighter values. The problem is you're not going dark enough in the shadows, and the transition from light to dark should be softer. Practice the 2-value phase of the drawing and make sure that your ligher shadow halftone is darker than your lighter light half-tone. Finally you exaggerated the double curve on the hair in the front of the face.. It exists, but it's not that much. Try drawing the rhythm the hair makes from the top of the forehead to behind the ear. It serves as a natural cross contour. Then you design the second curve but accordingly. I would like to give you a few tips on how to study and practice when you have limited time. But problem is there's a lot different practices that may be really effective or useless to you depending on where do you want to take your art. So, Would you mind to tell me more about what do you want to achieve in art? Are you studying just portraits right now or figure drawing, anatomy...and if you're just doing one sketch for each one subject or one for all? Is there any difficulty you constantly experience while practicing? Best Regards

very nice. looks just like it. so yeah great job & love. 🤗

Hey Atharva, this is a really nice drawing. You did a really solid job on this. You definitely got a likeness, and it's reading in 3d space really well. What I would say is a bit of a nit pick. The first thing is the mouth looks like it's slightly off center from the nose, which has the effect of making it look a bit flat. The biggest thing though are the values and edges. It feels like the mid tone you've put across the right side of his face (his right) is too dark. This makes your drawing look messy, and it takes my attention away from the focal points. Some of your edges, specifically on the bottom lip and nose are a bit messy. I think if you spent some time cleaning up those shadow shapes and edges, it would do a lot to fix the drawing. I'd recommend looking at @Stephen Bauman's stuff. He does a really fantastic job organizing the shapes/ values in a drawing. To me it feels like you're at the stage where your drawings are really accurate, and have some style, but your dexterity isn't quite caught up with your hand. I think he'd be able to help a bit with that. Anyways, hope this helps. Great job, and keep up the good work.

I'm just a beginner, so you are much more advanced than me. I think this looks great. You are very good at eyes. (I also like the drawings of Morgan and Yoni that you posted.) The main criticism that jumps out at me is with the shading of the background. To me, the background is too choppy and stringy. It has too much of its own texture and is competing with the rest of the drawing. Sometimes, at a quick glance the background even looks like long stringy hair. I think it would look better if it were a smooth, blended gradient that doesn't call attention to itself.