This assignment was really hard and tedious to push through, I’m not too contempt with how my drawings turned out and originally planned on doing more. I thought before I continue a better try to reflect and get some critique. My perceived biggest struggle I have currently is capturing a likeness. Based on my own observations I think I have difficulties incorporating the features ( eyes, nose, mouth etc.). Additionally id say I should probably refrain myself from using too much line weight in my drawings. In my opinion it looks like a gave Willem Dafoe botox…

The end result is actually no worse than I feared. Ended up eyeballing more than I intended, partly because I kept forgetting what my measurement markings on the paper were for. :D I also realised that getting a good measurement is one thing, transferring it to the paper is another. Maybe both come with practice.

Here is my attempt! It took me quite a long time to get everything blocked in using measurements, it was a struggle to wrap my head around

I was pleased with this pic until i layered it with the original. I seem to have gotten the eyes, mouth nose ok, related to each other. But outside of that area. things have gotten very loose. I totally fell into the trap of bad positioning. 😁

Here's my submission! I usually struggle a lot with this but I'm noticing a lot is due to laziness/sloppiness. When actually measuring things line up more accurately for me. Will continue practising

Quite happy with how it turned out, but still want to improve in seeing the big shapes instead of focussing more on the outlines.

This was more difficult than I thought. But i learned a lot. 1) I use shading to hide shotty line work. 2) I tend to want to go detail early in some random area to anchor my drawing, then all my proportions are built around that arbitrary detail. (I didn't do that here, but it was a fight) 3) many of my lines tend to be searching or lost because of lack of confidence in the shape I'm creating. 4) that tends to make me go darker than I should too early because I'll think I've found a line only to later realize it's wrong, so then I go even darker 5) shading is a bit viral... once you start in one area, you kind of have to do all areas to make it not look terrible. More notes likely in the margins as I was taking notes while I drew. Looking at some others here, I think I'll try this again trying to mimic their approach a bit. Edit: traveling, and I forgot my eraser, so that was an extra challenge

That was so hard 😖

First attempt on measuring proportions, had to scale the image by 2 because it is on an A4 paper. Overall really difficult.

This was very difficult exercise. I did it twice but I think I need to repeat it around 10 more times... all those lines look messy as well. 

Here are my 5 first attempts.

Hi Everybody, my first human drawing and attempt for this project. Mostly with eyeballing with few measures in the beginning and check during the process. So things are off ;). i first started measuring for an envelop for the face and built everything big to small. Thanks for your advices and critiques.

I was just kind a playful with the details. This assignment was hard for me for sure. I don’t normal do portraits especially realism. I didn’t wanna stay put too long since I got the basic idea of measurement. I’ve been trying to add the practice to my daily drawing and it’s been a big help. Probably not my best work but I did the lay in too many times lol. So I was like ok 👌 let’s a go!!! (I did skimp on the details of the cloth and stuff since I believe he said “complete face” so I tried to basically did that and then played here and there)

I really took my time at each stage - the measuring took approx 1hr as I tried to explore the most suitable vertical and horizontal measurements and relationships. I used a combination of measuring by units, some plumb lines, etc. Then I took photos of my sketch and compared with reference, and revisited any sizing anomalies. Then started with medium shapes and laying that in. Revisted and made some corrections (reference 1a and 1b). Then went in with detail which I took my time with. Overall I messed up my measurements as final image is too wide… so I’ll try it again shortly. I enjoyed the lesson but have A LOT of study and practice to do.... m

Despite taking copious notes on the different proportional relationships before setting out on the drawing itself, I tragically messed up along the way and smushed his face way too narrow. I put my plumb lines & reference lines in pretty light, so most of them don't show. Aside from the height-to-width ratio, and likely in large part because of it, the nose is proportionally way bigger in my drawing than in the reference. My eyes also got lopsided in my attempt to line them up as I thought they were, end his left eye drifted too far out. I'm realizing that even when I make note of relationships, I have difficulty translating that to a new image since my eye can't always accurately tell if I got things in accordance with my notes until it's too late. Definitely gonna spend some more time regularly doing more portrait sketches to practice proportions.

I think this is definitely quite a painstaking task to do accurate drawing measurements, but I do believe I understand the assignment so I wasn't pulling too many punches when it comes to using the reference. I put the reference and the canvas on different monitors and have them at different sizes, then slowly measured out and adjusted a 2 x 5 grid using the same hat face Stan used as a unit of measurement. I'm not plotting and noting down all the lines and alignments, because I know it is tempting to grid the reference up and just draw what I see. The entire point of this assignment is suffering through this repeated shape relationship processing, or at least I don't want to measure beyond what I immediately need nor mark the reference up. I agree with Stan about only using the pen/pencil as a measure tool, not only because I can't be bothered to lug around tools, but because I always thought it was a romantic notion to have paper and pencil and nothing more. That's how I doodled throughout my young years and I loathed erasing lines unless I absolutely had to, even when I usually put too much pressure on pencils and dug into sketch paper. Some decisions I made when drawing: - I determined that the left eye is on the centre line and 1.5 units from the top, put down a line for the chin from the centre line to the bottom of the chin 3 units from the top with an angle estimate, then chiselled in the external shapes. - The hat itself is a trap, I can't find reliable rhythms or angles to help me for the inner edges and I wasted a lot of time trying to get the angles right, so I moved down to play with the beard, which turned out to be a good decision. It had some good rounded shapes to block in, and extended shortly into the nostrils. - I had trouble with the left nostril until I estimated the angle from the left eye to the nasal wing, and drew a line down from the centered left eye to where I think the nasal wing should end. - The inner corner of the right eye was also handily aligning with the deep corner of the mouth. - Stan already gave a big hint on the angling of the eyes, nose and mouth, so I shamelessly used that fact to align the nose tip, the eyes and the base of the nose. - Drawing through the rhythm of the right side of the nose bridge to the side crease helped me align the far nostril. - The eyes were surprisingly hard because you really had to stare to see the light eyebrow hairs and small bumps due to muscle under the face. - The rest are just small touch-ups, I didn't bother to enforce a lot of line control. I think I should have simplified the shapes more, but focusing on measuring correctly can really put you in the mood to want to go into the details. I also like loose curvy lines from the wrist by default, so getting my arm to listen is hard; far too many undo's and erases for my liking! I'll have to figure out the self-checking later, I don't know my way around Krita yet. The other drawing is one I did for a friend, and I did it before this lesson/assignment. I made use of "artistic license" since what I know are very limited (you can see the basic ~5 values used, line weight etc.), and you can see how some of the proportions aren't exactly correct, because I just pulled lines and blocked in shapes freely using loose sketching, and made up shadows by squinting really hard. My friend liked the portrait, and isn't that the delight we want to give? I think my drawing has improved (see the work from the first assignments), not so much muscle memory in such a short period, but mindset. I still have some habits from before and some eccentricities from drawing alone and unguided most of my life, but I think with Stan's lessons and the guidance from kind staff and eager students, I can iron those out into something good.

Feel free to critique, I will not get mad I promise. Also one biggest thing for me was measuring, I never been good at this, I always eyeballed everything, this really helping slow me down. My other minor problem what keeping my finger on pencil where I measured and how to put that on paper, I used another pencil to mark it with a dots. Still gotta long way, probably gonna be months before I feel comfortable with this.

I might have messed up a little bit and I actually completely forgot to save reference pictures on my phone (whoops) but I did those three in a span of four days, the lady looking right was my last one and I am happy with her especially considering I have never really drew human faces before. Accuracy checked, was absolutely horrid with the first two but the last one worked out pretty well.

My first go at measuring proportions . I think proportion wise it turned out ok just some messy lines. What advise?

I wanted to add detail but I had to restrain myself and keep it simple