Hello Joey, thank you for posting your work. I've seen some of Marco's videos, so I understand what you've done with the colour vibration and the added colour to the shadow colours. The key issue is the brushwork, both the edge design and the rough handling of detail. When painting in an element, like the light on the wooden boards or the shadow under the mask, make sure you're using the right brush size and are not leaving gaps. The focal point should be well drawn with clearly defined edges. The colour vibrations should blend in with the surrounding values. I think I've found your reference, and it's a better design than this. The straps disrupt the simple shape of the mask and give it dynamism, the blood drips into the eye hole below and the nose is softer. The scratches on the wall of the painting are scattered, careless. maybe it wasn't meant to be a typical three-stroke slash, but it crosses over the details of the wood and the 13, like a random, irrelevant detail of the wood's weathering. The lighting is boring. If it were the spotlight from a torch it would be a better design and imply a character looking for something, or if it were a soft, spread out white, it would be like overcast lighting and the hockey mask's wearer is dead and forgotten, the killer still out there. It's also too saturated and the shadows should be black at the least. All of these are minor details, the technical execution is great and it's time to enhance the design and storytelling. I've edited it in red, you can see more feedback there. I hope you can read my handwriting. Thank you.

Hey, @quizzy! I see what you’re going through, and I totally agree with @Yiming Wu - it’s a matter of shifting the mindset about how the work should be done. As Yiming says, a longer piece is almost never done in one sit, so splitting the process into several sessions can be a great idea. Start noticing how your own process works - when you notice you lose focus and the work isn’t flowing well anymore, that can be a good moment to take a break. But that doesn’t mean the work is finished, and that’s fine - after a while (minutes, hours, even days or weeks), it’s good to come back to it with fresh eyes and a rested mind to try to see more clearly what could be improved - then do another work session, then take more breaks as needed, and so on. That’s how most professionals do it. Along with that, try observing how you can break the process down into stages. For example: 1) PREPARATION - Usually, preparation work can come first: develop the idea, draw thumbnails to figure out the composition, research visual reference, maybe do some color studies or separate sketches for specific elements that will be in the piece. 2) ROUGH - Then, based on the thumbnails, doing a larger initial rough sketch might be a good following step. For me, this is usually done very intuitively and loosely, in a way that helps me materialize the idea as best as I can without having to worry too much about techniques or “correctness” just yet. 3) TIE-DOWN - After the rough sketch is done, I find it helpful to do another more careful sketch pass on top, and, this time, it’s all about making adjustments so it looks “technically right”. I give the piece a more analytical eye and try to apply all the techniques I know of to see how I can improve it. In other words, I’ll go over the whole piece again and re-draw it with the specific goal of fixing mistakes, making it better and getting the construction and composition as solid as I can.  4) FINISH - Once you’re happy with how the more careful sketch turned out, you can then start to put into practice your finishing/polishing process - and this could mean different things depending on the style and technique, but since you’re working with painting, it often means rendering. Rendering is usually the longest stage in a painting and, at least in my experience, it can take up to at least half the amount of total hours you’ll put into the piece, or sometimes even more. With some practice, these things combined might help you get to that mindset shift and even start to plan you art pieces as projects, not just sketches. Hope this helps. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, just let me know. Best of luck!

Humm I think you could just change the way you think how a piece is done. Do some more "realism" stuff (whatever that means)... Try to get a photo study to as close to the original as possible, if you are impatient after an hour, just do an hour, and get back and do another hour on top of it at the later of the day or the next day. because each time you get back to it you find mistakes and stuff, you can easily fix them. What kind of medium do yo use? If you are using watercolor then probably that's not very good for working too much. Gouache, acrylic or painting digitally could allow you to work over top of existing stuff until you get it right.

Hello Nayan, the first thing to do is to learn how to practice. Lots of artists just dive into drawing and painting and make slow progress for months or years until they either give up, get to the level they want, or hit on better practice methods and skyrocket. If you fail to prepare you prepare to fail, so make sure you have time, at least half an hour every other day to commit to this. Please see Sycra's iterative drawing video. There are other methods but this is the one I use and whose benefits I am most familiar with. Once you have done this, you can start. Find out about the principles of structure, simplifying everything into boxes, spheres, cones, cylinders, and pair that up with perspective. Draw lots of different things, from life preferably, just understand how to show the 3D world on paper. Please work on paper, you can mess around with a pen tablet later. You absolutely must do this, it is not something you can skip out on. The better you do this, the better you draw; the better you draw, the better you paint. Most beginner tutorials teach by simplifying their subject into basic 3D shapes. Once you've done this you can try any of those you like. You want to paint - see Marco Bucci's 10 minutes to better painting and his colour theory videos, they are a popular condensing of painting's theory, though other artists teach the same in different ways. James Gurney's Colour and Light book is even better. You don't have to buy expensive supplies, with practice you can use a tube of white and black poster paint to make some amazing stuff. See Chris Fornataro's video "How you can quickly improve your portrait paintings". I would encourage beginners to look at the art community and look for what is missing, then fill it in. A lot of artists don't realise that the anatomy they are taught is European, resulting in everyone drawing Europeans. A greater number imitate trends when they are perfectly capable of making even better original art. It may be overlooked or considered the realm of snobbish banana collectors, but the best art is the one that satisfies a personal interest. Why was Leyendecker so good? Recommendations + Links: - The Draftsmen Podcast. - Bridgeman's Constructive Anatomy (advanced). - Paul Ingbretson (advanced). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ufz75UvHs Sycra | Iterative Drawing - The Fastest Way to Improve. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56XMcUQE73E Paint Coach (Chris Fornataro) | How You Can Quickly Improve Your Portrait Paintings. - Joseph Christian Leyendecker. - Aw Anqi. - The Proko Community (for feedback). - A good quality mechanical pencil.

Hey, @quizzy! These are really nice quick sketches indeed, and, to my eye, there’s nothing in them that seems to need corrections or adjustments except maybe for the perspective of the middle finger’s nail in the second one. Other than that, I think they all look pretty good! In fact, I love the linework in the first and last ones. What I honestly believe could help you hop onto a next level would be to take some time to learn the hand’s anatomy. Drawing from reference and thinking of structural planes to design your drawings of hands is always helpful, of course, but learning about the bones, tendons and muscles is what will truly give you enough confidence and understanding to figure out most problems when drawing hands whether realistically or in “realism-based” styles. Now I’ve studied from different resources before and I gotta say that Proko’s Anatomy course is certainly what I find to be the best one in terms of clear explanations, concentrated details and thoroughly varied examples. Here is the first of Stan’s videos on drawing hands straight from the Anatomy course: How to Draw Hands – Muscle Anatomy of the Hand From it, I’d suggest viewing the further lessons by following them in the course’s designed order (you can visualize a playlist menu under the video on the lesson’s page in this link) - take your time and try to be patient, it’s a lot of stuff! :) Ideally, you could consider starting the whole Anatomy course from its very beginning, since previous lessons on the arms can help with learning the hands, and earlier lessons on the torso should help understand the arms. But if you want a more specific crop on hands, following just this set of lessons should be helpful already. Hope this is useful! Keep it up and best of luck in your journey.

Hello Squizzy,these are pretty good!I'm quite fond of the hand in the midddle,I think you really nailed the anatomy and structure of it.The biggest problem I see is that while you give nice structure and design the back hand with interesting shapes,I don't think you did the same with the other two. When I draw hands,I ussually break it down into simple blocky shapes,that way I can see the light hitting on the form more clearly.Here is an overdrawing I did where I drew the planes of the hand,Please try to think of these simple form when shading the hand.(Here is also a page from the bridgman book,showing how he break down the fist if that helps) I would advise trying to get more familliar with these forms by drawing the hands in different angle and turning them into blocks.(here is an exmaple by bridgman on the top right)I would also advise watching these 3 videos for more information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBMQ-H-qUVk&t=367s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzl3eaxAJpo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXiUlO4dxZY But other than that,pretty good,please keep going.

Nice studies, @quizzy! Overall, great job, especially with the one from imagination! My least favorite of this group is the third one, and I believe it’s because the values on the face are too close to the values on the hair. Also, I feel like all the forms look a bit too flat - maybe the reference you used had a flattening, “magazine-cover-style” lighting? You asked about bounce lights - the main principle is that, in terms of value, bounce light is on the “shadow range”, so it should never compete with the main light, it should always be darker. There’s a lot more stuff going on about bounce lights if we consider color, so, rather than attempting to explain anything, I’d better suggest some of the best study resources I know on this: . Dorian Iten’s The Shading Course – Fundamentals of Realism, Light & Shadow . “Fundamentals of lighting” with Sam Nielson, on Schoolism - https://schoolism.com/courses/art/fundamentals-of-lighting-sam-nielson . CtrlPaint’s Photoshop rendering series (best if you’re interested in digital, but also contains the same principles applied to traditional media): https://ctrlpaint.myshopify.com/collections/foundation-skills Hope this helps! Keep it up!