Hey! I actually ended up attempting this myself and got carried away haha! But yeah firstly I'd say not to go to hard on yourself and ESPECIALLY don't think about your paintings or art as "bad". I think it's more helpful to create a checklist of all the things that help make a piece strong and go down said checklist for example: Proportions, value structure, form, composition, perspective etc. and then ask yourself what could be improved in each category. That way it's more objective, and you know where to go. I think your painting has a really strong sense of form/dimensionality! However, it could be stronger in terms of proportion/ likeness along with value range. In terms of being like a pro, I'm not there yet myself, but I think it's partially about being strong in all those things but also being able to add your own touch/ flare/ find ways to have fun with your art and present it in an interesting way. As you can see, from the beginning, I did my best to focus on the structure of the face and sort of divorce myself from the idea that I am drawing a "face" in a sense. I feel like the proportions could still be stronger, but I did manage to get some form of likeness. Then immediately, I went into mapping out the main values from darkest to lightest. In the beginning, probably best to stick to around 5 or less. And (this part would probably make sense to you) think about the shapes that each value takes up. After those main values, I went into the half tones, and then the details. Had a little bit of fun towards the end!

Hey Alfio, I agree with @Kristian Nee, take a deep breath, and don't be so hard on yourself! Having said that, you should feel a little frustrated because it didn't turn out the way you wanted. That is what drives us to get better! Now, the thing that I noticed right away is that you are making up forms and values that are not in the reference. We have a tendency sometimes to use too much contrast in our values. Look at the value you used to create the bag under the models eye, way too dark and contrasts too much with the light skin around it. I did a quick paint over your painting. When you compare it to your painting, notice that all I did was lower the contrast in the areas where you used value that was too dark. The only other thing I did was darken the values in the shadows. In the future, if you are not sure of a value, color pick it from the reference just to see how far off you are. Then you will start to train your eye to see things more realistically. Trust me buddy I feel your aggravation, I go through it all the time :)

Hey Alfio! The first thing I'd say is don't be so hard on yourself! This is a good painting, and it definitely is a thing to be proud of. There are some really great things going on in this The thing I'd say is to organize your values more simply. Right now your values are all over the place. The darkest parts of the face on the referencer art the eyes, eyebrows, nose, and lips. Right now the lips are the darkest part and the nose / eye lids / eye brows are all the same mid value. Something you might want to do is choose a reference with a wider value range. The one you chose is good for poppy dramatic lighting, but the dark values make some of the shapes hard to interpret. I posterized the reference in photoshop in three different stages. The 1 value, 2 value mid tones, and multiple value for different tones. As you can see, the shadow under the nose, eyes and lips are always pretty dark. I think without those dark values it's hard to make the face read.

Hey Alfio, First, I'll say this is an improvement over the last portrait you painted. The edges between your values are softer and look more natural. Now some suggestions. I noticed that your drawing is not tilted the same as your reference. Look at the angle of the eyes, that always helps you to see what the tilt of the head is. It also looks like you are not evaluating the light/ shadow shapes in the reference quite right. It looks like you made up the shadows from your imagination instead of the reference. For example, look at the shadow you put on the side of the nose facing us, that shadow does not exist in the reference, it's actually a light shape. I did a quick and dirty paint over to show you some of what I mean. Look at the differences between it and yours, and you should see what I mean. I hope this helps you, and again, nice improvement :)

I think these looks great, there is a lot of fluidity in the poses and I like how the clothes are being draw along the gesture. The only thing I would critique is to pay more to attention to the the feet, most of the drawings you nailed it. But the in the second drawing from the first image and mainly the last two from the third images. They look a bit off to me, or you exaggerated to much on the pose. But overall, great job!

I can't. hahaha. I'm just here to admire your good work. Hope you don't mind. When it comes to improving my guesture drawing. THIS is what I want to see in my own work.

Hey Alfio, You have set your standards very high, those guys are really good. One of the things you will notice about their work is that it is very well drawn. This is the key to good realist painting- painting is drawing. Make sure your drawing is spot on before you start to paint. The other thing you need to do is make sure your edges are correct. There should be a combination of hard, soft and lost edges. Pay attention to where the highlights are and how bright they should or shouldn't be. I did a sketch and paint over to show you what I mean, I hope it helps :)

Hi @Alfio Parisi, I think it's a great question! I'm no digital painting expert, but I've done some digital painting sketches where I tried to shade. I think that process can be one way to shade. Sometimes I'll pick a light color and a shadow color and then blend between them. Like for painting an orange, I might pick a bright yellowy-orange for the part in light and a sienna color for the part in shadow. Then I'd paint the shadow part as a separate solid shape on the orange, and use the color picker to blend between them, like I learned in this ctrl+paint tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwoZoUj9kuE Plus if you pick a separate shadow color, I don't think you'll even need to set the top layer to multiply, though that is one way to do it. You can just ease the darker shadow color into the lighter areas with the pressure sensitivity brush. I hope this can help!