Any and all criticism welcome. Thanks!!

This exercise really challenged my patience. Some proportions are still a bit off, but I guess I need to move on :)

My fourth (and best) attempt at this. I still suck at drawing eyes. I feel like I cheated as I did a few shapes, then checked in-app to see how close I was and made adjustments. IDK if that's helpful for me or not. For the final one I just redrew it in ink to make it easier to see on an overlay. Going to do a lot more of these for sure! This was challenging.

Laughing is allowed here. I have such a hard time drawing eyes. He came out completely deranged the second I added his pupils. This is honestly exhausting mentally. I REALLY want to nail this so I'm spending extra time on it. I've done the same portrait every night for the last 3 nights. I think it's progressively getting better. Tonight I tried to find a mix of measuring and eyeballing. Like I would eyeball, then double check it with measurements. Rather than measuring EVERYTHING and planning every line first. That was getting exhausting. Especially when I don't have a printout to mark-up. I'm just using my computer monitor and my brain to measure. EDIT: I don't have Photoshop or procreate or anything but I just downloaded krita and made a hapdash overlay. I was WAY off. Going to take this and try again tomorrow. I REALLY want to nail this. I used Stan's approach of using the hat length as a unit of measurement, so for the overlay I just lined those things up. I don't know where I started drifting. I really want to do this without actually making any marks on a printout or using krita. I want to get good at just using my pencil and my eyes so I can apply this same methodology to real life subjects.

Forgive the picture, i had to go back and darken the lines and it still barely shows up on camera. I was so incredibly off its embarrassing to witness, often i make the eyes too big but somehow in trying to correct that i made them way too small. The shoulders and the bottom of the hat are nearly perfectly accurate but the ascots not even close....this is my first time drawing on anything bigger than 9x12, so maybe its that but. i still spent hours on this just for it to blow up in my face.

It's almost impossible to take a good image of newsprint. The resulting redlined overlay is not very good, but visible enough that I find some things very obvious: 1) I spent a lot of time getting the features on the right horizontal level as well as widths that I got lost keeping track of angles, especially the nose and forehead. As a result, the nose looks really flat (it's not protruding forward enough) and the ear is way too high as I forgot to move it down after some height adjustments of other features . 2) If I had made the beard a little bit longer the shoulders would have lined up nicely. Doing layovers is really the perfect way to self-correct. Next time, I'll do a straight vertical line in the middle and make sure to check the angles. I tend to be a bit unstructured during longer sittings and is something I need to become better at so I stop forgetting that important feature I had to move...

This project was hard. I learned a lot but one thing stands out above the rest: I need to do more of these. A lot more.

My first attempt at a portrait. This took longer than I expected but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, I had some trouble with the mouth (I just couldn’t seem to get the shape of it right). This lesson was challenging but rewarding and I'd be very appreciative for feedback on areas I could improve on in future portraits.

I tried to do it mainly by eyeballing... some proportions are a little off but Im happy with the result. Do it digitally makes it much more easy since I can undo lines that were off but I try not to clean too much of the mistakes and ugly lines.

YIKES - but I tried Definitely not happy with this, but I shall get better at measuring and proportions! Incorrectly measured the hat dimensions initially and threw everything off. Also, for the life of me, I am not yet very capable of noses. So double oof! But it was fun and I learned!

Funny that even when you take it slow and you think you properly measure you can still be so far off! It is interesting to learn about my biases and mistakes and doing more of these should definitely help with getting more realistic/accurate portraits.

Figuring out the proportions was difficult using an 8x11 printout of the image and copying it to a 12x18 paper. Drawing human faces has always been challenging. I did erase many of the original placement lines that I used because they made it look very messy.

Did another one today, I was faster than yesterday and got pretty close when it came to proportions. I have a hard time working in photoshop, but his left side is to big from what I could see. finding measurements is still hard for me, it takes a long time to find them. Planing to do many more before moving on so I will gladly take any advice. oh, and I’m drawing on a very big paper, I attached a photo from my view, is the size of the paper messing with how I see things?

First and second attempt, the second is after watching the demo for a second time, I’m still struggling a lot with proportions but I hope that soon it will come more naturally, I want to add that every practice till now has been good but I still want to come back and do more reruns of the same project.

I struggle with the shape of both eyes. Took me a while figure it out. Very funn lesson :]]

I realised as I went that I was adding in too much detail on the first lay in of the big shapes (I thought that was pretty stripped back already). Once I reviewed it in PS, I had to almost redo half the image. Once I focused on getting the bigger shapes right in my 2nd revision, it made polishing it easy for my 3rd and then in my final picture I just added in some detail on the eyes and lines. Took me about ~1 hour from start to finish. Probably around equal time for each revision inside that. Loved this one, excited to try some faster lay-ins.

WOW this assignment, I think I spent most of if not all day TRYING to get this to work, finding the best measurements to correctly get a shape is so HARD. I can feel this is going to be very important, I had a hard time getting my drawing to show clearly in photoshop.. but I hope I can get some good critique! tips on how to do this without getting a headache would be much appreciated.

Honestly not bad for a first time ever. The majority of the facial features are decently in place with some scaling misses. Spent less time on the rest of it so there are more errors but overall pretty proud of this attempt.

Something I wanted to add onto Tim's post (thank you a lot by the way!) is how to clean up your sketch before comparing it with the reference photo. If you're unable to take photos in a good lighting, the sketch will look dirty and grainy, even after adjusting the contrast with the gradient map. The clean-up is just the extra process of adding a glow/lighten layer on top to blot out those grains and keep just the lines. The process is as follows (pictures included below): 1. Upload the original photo onto your program of choice, and set the layer mode to 'Multiply'. I used Clip Studio Paint, but any program with layer modes should work. 2. Create a gradient map layer above the multiply layer. 3. Adjust so that the line and the background have a somewhat clear contrast, but not so much that the lines themselves are lost. The edges of the photo are probably quite grainy and dark at this point. 4. Create a glow/lighten layer on top (in this case I used 'Add (Glow)'). Any layer that brightens the layers below it seems to work (although it'll need some testing). 5. With a large airbrush (in pure white!), gently paint over the unwanted grains on the glow/lighten layer. You can erase where the lines are afterwards, in case they become too light too. 6. If the lines are too thin or too light, you can merge all of the above layers into the original photo, duplicate it, then merge them both to get clearer lines. Repeat this process as many times as you want until the lines are clearly visible. 7. (Optional) You can add another gradient map layer on top of this layer to adjust the contrast even further, so that little spots or light construction lines are removed too. - and that's it! The comparison really shows that bad photos can be cleaned up to look presentable with just a few adjustments.

I was thinking, some people may not have an Adobe Photoshop subscription, or an iPad with Procreate so I thought I’d share a way to do the proportion measurement self-check for free (at least at the time of writing). It’s not quite as elegant as Stan’s but when I follow his Photoshop instructions in Affinity, they don't seem to work. There's probably be a simpler method in Affinity, but this is the one I've found so far that works. This process should take around 70-90 seconds once you’re familiar with the steps. First, you need to download the (currently) free Affinity software at https://www.affinity.studio/download, which is available for Windows and MacOS. Once you’ve created an account and are able to get into the software, follow these steps: 1. Drag and drop the reference image into Affinity 2. (Optional) lower the opacity of the reference image to make it easier to see your drawing lines. This can be adjusted later. Click the layer lock toggle to make sure you don’t make any accidental changes to this layer. 3. Drag and drop your drawing into Affinity – it should create a new layer above your ‘Background’ layer. 4. You can use the Move tool (Arrow icon) or press ‘V’ on your keyboard to select and then drag the circles at the corners of your drawing layer to resize it. Clicking on the middle of the layer lets you move it around. 5. Create a ‘Gradient Map’ adjustment layer by either: a. Going to the affinity menu bar at the top and selecting Pixel > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map b. Clicking the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers pallet (Circle bisected diagonally with top half black and bottom half white) and selecting Gradient Map. 6. Affinity will create a new Adjustment layer that affects both your drawing and the background image, but we only want to apply it to the drawing. Click on the ‘Gradient Map Adjustment’ layer to select it, then left-click and hold the layer while dragging it over your drawing layer. You should see the drawing layer change color to match the selected gradient map adjustment layer and a pop-up window saying “Place Inside” – then unclick and the Gradient Map Adjustment layer should appear under your drawing layer, slightly offset to the right. 7. In the Gradient Map Adjustment pop-up window, click the right-side (Blue) dot to select it. Then click on the blue color selector box below and to the left. Change the color to pure white. Click on the green dot in the center and change that to white as well. Then click and slide the center dot towards the right-side dot so the two white dots are closer together. The red lines of your pencil marks should become more easily visible. Slide to get the best fit for the photograph of your drawing. The brighter the light you took the photo to make the paper as white as possible, the cleaner results you’ll get. 8. Click back on the layer of your drawing (one above the Gradient Map Adjustment layer) and change the Blend Mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Soft Light’ in the drop-down menu. The background reference photo should now be visible and you can select the Move too (‘V’) to resize and move your drawing layer to fit over it. 9. If you’re having trouble seeing your pencil lines over the reference images you can try a couple of things. a. Click on the Gradient Map Adjustment layer icon (looks a bit like a chopped onion) and the pop-up window will reopen. You can then click on the far left (red) dot and change its color to something that pops out from the reference better. b. You can increase the contrast between dark and light areas in your drawing overlay by adding a ‘Levels’ layer, or ‘Curves’ if you’re more confident with how they work. These are adjustment layers and are added the same way as the gradient map. Make sure the adjustment layer is embedded within your drawing layer. With Layers adjustments, you can slide the ‘Black Level’ to the right to make darks more prominent. If you slide the ‘White Level’ to the left, you’ll quickly start to lose details in your pencil work though. Hope that’s useful to some of you.