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

Attempt 1 - I put my measurer on the side and did some eyeballing as well. I thought it turned out pretty well.

Okay I really got to stop getting caught up with the shading but I'm really proud of the results. Still relying a lot on measuring and double-checking on PS but I can already see the improvements since the first one ! (They are in order from left to right)

This is attempt number 2. This time, instead of having the image on the screen and measuring with my arm extended, I printed the image and measured directly on it with my pencil, just like Stan did in the demonstration with the portrait of the woman. I didn’t use a ruler, but I divided my unit into quarters as needed. The portrait isn’t perfect, but it looks more like Morgan Freeman now. I think my biggest issue is measuring when the image is on a screen or whenever I have to measure with my arm extended. I struggle to keep the unit consistent and measure accurately with this measuring method.

This was a challenging one. Trying to keep all the proportions in line takes patience. At the end was just eyeballing. But great exercise. Need to do this with other portraits. request some critique please.

It was difficult to measure the correct proportions because my hand started to shake after a while and my eyes began to hurt. I think my biggest problem was keeping the unit of measurement consistent, since my hand became unsteady over time. I feel like my portrait would probably have turned out better if I had printed out the image and measured it and made relational comparisons using a colored pen and a ruler, similar to how Stan demonstrated the measuring process. However, that would somehow defeat the purpose of the exercise if I simply drew lines on the image. After all, it’s not just about drawing from pictures, but also about drawing directly from real life. I used Morgan Freeman as a reference for my portrait because the image Stan provided was too small for me to try to measure accurately

I've got him way more off that what I was thinking but I'm still a bit happy with it. I was more at ease with the pencil method, I used plumblines negative shapes and angles and it was feeling a bit more natural than before. But drawing accurate proportion is so hard ! 10th or 11th attempt of focusing onto proportions. Had a really bad start but luckily I saw my mistake before going to deep in the drawing. I did my best to put the big shape before any detail and following the KISS rule haha. Will continue this training, I really love to draw

This assignment was very difficult, but I want to attempt it again after seeing a few of my mistakes.