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You’ll learn the most important foundational concepts for drawing anything and soon you’ll be drawing pictures out of your imagination or from reference.
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Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
LESSON NOTES
In this project, we will practice measuring with a portrait drawing. Accurate proportions are essential for capturing a likeness. We'll break the process down into steps, starting with the biggest shapes and working our way down to the small details. I’ll also show you the various measurements and strategies I use when going through this process.
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![@ljgrimm]()
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![Rain Kipper]()
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![Umbre on]()
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![Gabriel]()
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![Gabriel]()
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![@jjpowell92]()
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![Turbo Fish]()
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![@coldemptyvoid]()
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![Melanie Scearce]()
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![@irenemarceline]()
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![Samuel Gariépy]()
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![Chuck Ludwig Reina]()
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![@wonkbunny]()
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![Tim Norris]()
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![Tim Norris]()
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![Dana Cross-Payne]()
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![@na_talie]()
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![@sketchenstein]()
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![Kim Solon]()
Deadline: Submit your assignment by 07/25/2023 for a chance to be featured in the next critique video!
Use the reference photo and all the measuring methods you learned in the previous lesson to practice drawing a portrait with accurate proportion.
Keep in mind that your layin will get harder as you move from big shapes to smaller details. Don't draw too small, otherwise the shapes of the features will be too small and harder to draw accurate. Keep the photo next to or in front of your paper to avoid distortion.
Expect a careful layin to take about an hour. Don't rush. Worry about accuracy, not time.
Remember - big to small, use straight lines, measure units, double check, find plumb lines, judge angles. Try to have fun!
Level 2, you're doing the same thing for this one. This exercise doesn't change no matter what your experience level is.
The Musketeer photo reference is from the Musketeer Model Pack by Grafit Studio
Take one and take two. I was super stressed about this exercise but actually felt pretty good about it in the end. The mouth is still too high, but the eyes, hate, ears, chin, and coat are good when I overlay them in photoshop.
Tracing the chin location was a bit too difficult, so i tried to trace the beard and took it as a base shape. The feedback method helped a lot!
I was happy with the big shapes, until I had to do smaller shapes. It's frustrating I will start again from 0 tomorrow and try to do better!
Here's mine. Spent about 1h-1h20min measuring and marking down mesuraments and still think the face turned out too thin and tall compared to the reference... Also I think I forgot the subtle tilt the features have... I do think I learned a lot tho, looking at where things are compared to each other to get the proportions right feels really good when you notice a big one. But definetly need to practice a lot more
I also unfortunetly did not have bigger paper like it was reccomended and could not find them for an affordable price in my area :(
I stumbled through this so badly, and I kinda gave up when I got to the smaller details, but I am SO pleased at how this turned out. Every time I draw a face, it just ends up looking so goofy, and this is the first time I've been able to look at the drawing and the reference and feel pretty good about it. I think I've learned that proportions are my biggest weakness right now, and I'm REALLY bad at eyeballing it, so I think I'm going to need to spend a lot of time doing this over the next few months so that I can really start training my eyes. It sounds like a ton of work, but I think it'll be worth it.
Level 1 took me 1 hour, and level 2 and 3 took me another hour. Found it considerably harder to be consistent at level 3 because it seems that when you are working on small scales, small mistakes compound to big issues
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10d
Nice work! Just a few tweaks with the facial features- eyes, nose, mouth, forehead and you’ll be pretty nearly perfect with your measurements.
This could have gone a lot worse! Never could have reached this result without following Stan’s instructions letter by letter. I was very intimidated by this project but it was mostly in my mind! Can’t wait to improve so I can make portraits for people :) the largest paper i had was this very grainy one which, after getting used to the smooth sketchbook, was a bit hard to control 😅
I made two attempts at the exercise.
The first one I did with the reference on my ipad and took the measurements only with my pencil and my arm extended, closing one eye. I find it very difficult to take measurements this way, my closed eye keeps twitching. Among many mistakes, the most obvious one is that I made the width of it's head too narrow.
For the second one, I took comparative measurements and traced plumb lines over the picture in photoshop. It resulted in a better drawing, but there's still many mistakes, like the ear being too big.
I decided to move onto the next topic and project, but I see how doing this exercise a bunch of time with a bunch of references could be very useful to learn how to draw photorealistic portraits.
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12d
Nice work. And you are right. Learning to measure is a really useful skill, even if it is one you don't use all the time. As I drew more and more, I found myself measuring less, as I started to trust my eye, but it is still a tool I use on occasion. It's good to continue to develop the skill, even for sketches you are doing for fun. Again, good job on these. They look good.
Was frustrated the first time because his head was so thin on my first attempt. Completely skipped it and moved on. Circled back around and here's a better attempt. Eyes are too small I think... What do you think? How else can I improve? Thank you all!
So here’s my work. I can see where I am off. So what do I do with that? Just feels like a win still. Not sure how to translate that info to accelerate progress.
I got incredibly frustrated with this assignment and eventually had to step away and eventually decided to stop at this point in order to get feedback rather than continuing to spin my wheels.
the blocking out approach did improve my ability to align features and is a marked improvement to my other attempts. However, I struggled with this perspective and the eyes. I like the left eye closer to the edge of his face but the right eye seems the wrong size.
I’ve submitted assignments in this courses previous projects and have yet to receive feedback, so if someone could please respond to this, I really need constructive feedback on this to help identify where I need to improve. Thanks
Hi, I don't have the exact reference in mind, but I recognized him. So, good job 😉 To get fast and exact feedback, it really helps to do an overlay of your drawing over the reference. I found that a bit tedious, but it helped a lot
Another try at measuring - Cate Blanchett. Drawing looks younger than photo, and despite the layover showing a pretty good match, the drawing doesn't have the spark of character as the photo. At a loss what is needed. Thx for any constructive criticism.
This is so hard, I feel like using grid lines is much more easier, but this is much more connected to the previous exercises. Hopefully I will master this someday.
