Portrait Drawing Fundamentals

Also challenge of this was my reference was a photo taken of a photo posted on Facebook. So the quality was bad. Had to invent a lot of flesh tones and put in some anatomy that I knew was there but not able to see in the photo. Couldn’t have done it without this course. 👍🏼

Hi Matthew! Nice drawing so far and already looking like her a bit and the head tilt looks great. I think the main things are the thirds of the face measurements and the nose out of alignment with centerline of the head. Those two issues are throwing off the likeness. You did capture a good amount of likeness already from drawing the overall shape of her head well but the middle third of the face is changing her look. In the image I attached you can see this V like red shape from her middle upper lip running through the edge of each nostril. This cupid's angle is a quick way to check for issues in the portrait drawing. You can see that the left side of the cupid's angle is much farther from the eye than the other side is to its eye. So just need to double check the measurements of the thirds of the face and make the nose inline with the rest of the head. I think with those changes it will look like her much more.

Hi Matthew! Beautiful reference shot. Good work so far and I know a couple of things you could do to bring back her femininity. You pretty much nailed her Gonial Angle of the jaw. Nicely done. Her ear is too small though. One thing to help see the proportions of the ear and other features is to think of the head being inside a box and check the vertical and horizontal alignment of the features. See images attached here. Place all features on a similar tilt. A way to increase feminine characteristics is to look for the Ogee Curve and show it as is or even push it a bit more. Check the angle from tip of nose to mid-line of chin. Correcting that will help the most I think. Many times when we lose the feminine look to our portrait its related to drawing the Gonial Angle wrong and making it more masculine. In this case you got it perfect. Hope that helps. Good work. I look forward to seeing more of your portraits!

Oh! I also watched Steve Huston's course on how to draw the face and enjoyed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T7cDY7YDsg

Can we see the reference?

Thanks. Tht all make sense. I appreciate the feedback. In my mind I know all these things but when someone points them out is when I realy realize my problems

Don't worry about style at this stage. Look at the tilt of her head, in your drawing her head sits straight down on her neck while in the reference you can see the head tilting to the side, countering the neck's twist. More importantly, there is a pretty big proportional issue with her jaw too, on your drawing it looks too deep and angular making her more masculine than she really is. The vertical placement of the features is mostly correct, but the forehead is too flat making it almost impossible for you to carve a depression for the eyes to sit in. Overall you did a pretty good job, try drawing some skulls from different angles to improve your head construction, the moment you begin thinking in planes your work will look much better

The nasal bone should project off the plane of the glabella, your maxilla and jaw are pretty flat too, try using ellipses as guidelines to feel their turn in space. Still, your did a pretty good jaw at carving out the side plane of the skull and jaw from the front!