You have a very gradual gradient over a lot of pixels. Basically you are running out of color values to create a smooth enough transition across those pixels. Easiest solution is to either use a grainy airbrush instead of a perfectly smooth air brush, or to add noise. It will be much harder to tell where the bands are because edges will basically be blended by the variation in pixel values. My preferred solution is to hand paint the gradients with a rougher brush, so they naturally have brush strokes and noise.

Very nice study. Love the light and shadow. Maybe perspective could be improved a bit. It looks somewhat flat, which distracted me slightly, and that could be because the photo is taken from really far away with a telephoto lens. However you could cheat that a bit to angle some lines slightly toward a really far vanishing point, which would add better dimension, and make that beautiful lighting really sing without distractions.

Composition is more of a trial an error, so try some different croppings, flip some elements, and see what you like. Also helps if you have a more solid idea of the story you're trying to depict. The more elements you introduce to your story, the more things you'll have to pull from in your painting. Here is a try. I felt most the contrast in the image was on the left side, so I put our subject on the left side so our eye would be more drawn to him. Also the landscape is guiding our eye that way as well. And the sideview of the horseman wasn't really working for me, so I stole a back view from somewhere. The sky looks pretty grey, which tells me you're filming with a yellow filter. So I decided to emphasize that a bit more, shifted the red hues in the background slightly to orange, and desaturated them a bit. Since the yellow filter kills the blue, the blue pants on the rider were bothering me, so I went with grey. I went with a more intimate cropping that contained the landscape features a bit more, but depending on story, you could choose between a more open feel vs a more claustrophobic one. There is no single right answer, though there are choices that support your story, and choices that don't, so be conscious of the choices you're making and for every choice, ask yourself if it's helping or hurting the story, and you'll have to be somewhat critical and inquisitive to find the better choices. Edit: And after I posted, I realized I created a tangent with the hat and the landscape... don't do that.

2021/8/4. Hello everyone. Here's my new long drawing. Thanks for any advice or suggestion. Have a good day.

Depends on what tool you're using... If you're using graphite, newsprint doesn't work very well, you won't be able to see what you're drawing, especially if you have a light touch. If you're using charcoal or conte crayon, newsprint is great. If you're using markers, you might bleed through on newsprint or printer paper, depending on the marker/quality of paper, but if your hand moves quickly, it's less likely to happen, and not too big a deal if it does. If you like to experiment with different mediums, take that into consideration as well. So think of the combination of your tools when making the decision. Also, nothing says you can't have multiple kinds of paper for gestures... Hope this helps.

Excellent work! There are a few things you might be able to improve. Below I have a manipulated image of your reference with a filter. The white/yellow parts are the highlight, the green is the midtone, the blue is the shadow tones (which include core shadow, reflected light and cast shadow). You are missing some midtone on the bridge of the nose, yours seems to go too sharply from highlight to core shadow. This is more pronounced in the ball of the nose, where a fair amount of midtone is missing. On the nasal ala (wing of the nose) you have a highlight, that's not actually there, it's all midtone. It simply looks lighter because of all the surrounding darker areas. This is an easy and common mistake to make. When in doubt, think about the planes and the light. There are no planes on the ala that face the light directly, so there shouldn't be a highlight. And remember, midtone is part of the light family, and darkest light should be lighter than the lightest dark. And one last point I wanted to make, the contrast seems a little high, you went quite dark with the shadows. This may be intentional to create a better picture, but for Bargue studies, since part of the practice is to discipline control of the values, next time you could challenge yourself to match a more subtle overall look. This will probably take more time, as you will need to build values up slower. But it is quite rewarding. Hope this helps, really great work, keep on sketching!

I think you could put the vanishing points a little farther apart. I see the head as tilted away from us a bit, so I'd draw the horizon line at an angle accordingly. Here is what I'm seeing...

Hey Mengu! Great job on this, the drawing is definitely on it's way to being a really strong one. A couple things I might say are to define your shadow shapes more, and clean up the structure of the hands, more specifically her right wrist feels flat. Also I think if you were to make the face plate of her head wrap the forms of the head more, it would do a lot for determining the lighting. Great job though and good luck!

Interesting... To me a mixed lighting condition most of the time can be though like a diffuse light coming from approximately above or from the window, depending on which is stronger, and shadows should fade a bit quicker. On drawings maybe treat one as a major light source, and mentally tune down some of the others can be good. Nice drawing! Although the leg might be a bit too thick? or maybe the shape is like that

Nice work! My suggestions are as follows.. both the time management and not knowing what to focus on can be alleviated at least a bit by starting each piece with an intention. What is your goal? Are you practicing anything in specific? Value? Color? The effects of light? Proportion? This will help you put an emphasis on one or maybe a couple things and as far as what to focus on, is there a weakness you'd like to strengthen? Or maybe there's a certain thing about the model or scene that moved you more than anything else. Hope that helps.

Hey Mengu, These are nice paintings, plein air is pretty hard. I made a few notes that I hope will help. Keep up the good work :)

I think this is lovely. I agree with the other commenters, we want a bit more attention to the main subjects. I (perhaps a bit crudely) darkened the surrounding, and brightened the focus area. You probably don't have to go as far, but you can merge some of the shapes into the background, like that black train in front was drawing a lot of attention. Also your reflected lights are perhaps a bit too strong, they don't have to be that strong to still read well and define your forms, so I toned them down a bit. And I sharpened some edges in the areas we want the viewer to look at. You can definitely spend more time to do it all better. I absolutely love the story telling you have here.

Looks pretty good. I have some nitpicky things on the last image if you'd like to improve on them. The short lines like the ones indicating the depth of the windows and short side of the awning should follow the perspective lines. The dormer windows seem to be leaning forward a bit and the junction of the roof top is a bit confusing since it doesn't agree with the slope the dormer windows suggest. You may have to figure out where you want that roof corner to be, going up from the plane of the second floor ceiling. Also the perspective lines should go exactly to the vanishing point, not in its general vicinity when studying perspective. And one last thing, you may already be doing this, I just don't see any guidelines for it, be sure to find your midpoints geometrically for centering things, like the center muntin of the window pane. In case you don't know how to do this, you can simply draw a corner to corner cross on the window, and where they intersect is your midpoint. Be sure to do this on the full pane (not just the visible portion of the pane). Hope all these words make sense, if not, let me know, I'd be happy to explain with a diagram.

You captured that old school feeling, I like it! His weight is centered a little too far behind his feet, so he doesn't quite look balanced. And I'm not sure how he's wearing those bracelets, looks like they might fall off, if he lowered his arm down, and his helmet may be cutting into his ears. If these are intentional, it's fine but otherwise, it's a good idea to think about function when sketching. Also the shield could use a bit of thickness, it looks paper thin. Values look maybe a little low contrast, but I think that adds to the old school look. Otherwise, the style looks consistent. If you wanted to make shadows darker, lights lighter, you could certainly do that. Depends on what sort of feel you want. You can always try on a new layer and see how you like it, or just try it on your next piece. Keep on sketching!

There is a lot of good advice here, but I just wanted to say, where you're at is a perfectly normal place to be. So don't worry about committing crimes against art... And don't feel like you have to "nail" a course before moving on. Do the exercises, spend some time to absorb the information, and move on. Keep in mind, you don't have all the information yet to create beautiful drawings. Once you've gone through everything, you'll want to circle back, and do it all over again. It gets progressively better. Keep practicing!

You can use smoother paper like bristol or hot press watercolor paper, you need a very sharp pencil, you need to go lightly, slowly, and patiently, and let the graphite fill out the texture. If you use a blending stump you still want to be very gentle with it, and not smash the paper texture. You can watch Stephen Bauman talk about and demonstrate this process in many of his videos. Also with a brush you can get some fairly light tones, and can control the value pretty well in that lighter range. You can also use graphite powder, if you need a large area of tone. You can use chamois cloth. You can use a cotton swab. You can use crumpled paper. You can experiment!

Have you tried using SketchClub on the iPad? It's a sketching app, it has a vector tool (which should be called enclosure tool), that might fit quite well into your workflow of working from silhouette with lasso tool. I can see you are super used to photoshop lasso/fill/erase routine and are super fast with it, but it might feel more natural to have the tool fill as you make the enclosure. Anyway, I haven't used it in a while (here is a really old sketch to show you how it sort of feels: https://app.sketchclub.com/sketch/4998401559887872). If you have tried it I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Looks good conceptually. The outfit tells us a good bit about the character, so I like that. There are some symmetry issues, like his left hand holding the cup is larger than his right. Probably both hands need to be adjusted to be somewhere between the two, but stylistically you could err on the side of the larger hand if you want. His right arm looks a little awkwardly pronated. His left hand holding the cup doesn't seem like it's holding a round object, and the thumb is not really doing its job for how one would hold a cup. One stray finger is okay when holding an object that size, but I'd make it either the index finger or pinky that's stray. With his body type, I would tie that sweater around his waist line, a little higher than where it's at, so it doesn't keep slipping down. My recommendation would be to think about function, and use reference. For instance hold a cup like you want your character to hold a cup, and study what your fingers are doing. Keep it up!