Hi Rami! I think you have an excellent start to your piece here. You definitely have a good eye for drawing, really great job drawing the face on this! It's ultimately up to you exactly where to take this in regards to aesthetics, but i do have some suggestions that might help. I did a quick and dirty paintover that pushes some things in your painting you may want to consider. I tried to push the clarity of the value shapes a little bit, as well as the clarity between the light and the dark. I also painted my shadows with a little more color saturation, this helps skin feel like skin, and i do think your shadows are a touch de-saturated. A game-changing lesson I learned in art school was 'value bracketing' this means if you have an object, partially in light, partially in shadow, that you select a tight range of values for the lights, and a tight range of value for the darks. For example on a value scale of 1-10, you could paint the lights with values 3-4 and the darks with values between 6-7 . Try to think what is in light, what is in shadow, and really keep those shapes and values clear. To push this idea farther, I also added a shadow shape on the wall behind her to help separate her from the background. Another very simple idea but very important one to point out is that the light shapes on dark hair are never as light as you might think! Squint your eyes at your subject and you'll see that dark hair most often ends up as one dark shape with a very small value range. This are just some suggestions and tools that you could consider to push your piece, but are by no means what you have to do. My final suggestion is that you spend some serious, dedicated time looking at your favorite painters and try to observe how they use value, color, edges, etc. For example I could very easily see your piece take on an aethsetic akin to Kent Williams, whereas my paintover is drawing from value ideas more like John Sargent or Dean Cornwell, (although obviously not in the same universe of execution haha!). Hope this helps some and keep up the great work!

A few more Sergio Toppi studies from my old sketch stack!

Great piece! I love what you've done with the textures and there's a lot of nice color play going on here. I think your understanding of turning form is actually pretty good looking at your values, and the issue I'm seeing more of is not understanding the forms themselves. The way you've handled the shadow edges is quite sophisticated, but some of them aren't quite structured correctly, most notably in the more detailed areas of the features (nose/eyes/mouth). I think doing some drawing studies of the face would help a lot; focus in on simplifying that planar structure like Loomis does and deepen your understanding of the planes themselves, and that will make rendering them much easier. Also keep an eye out for the shadows going gray; sometimes it can be a dissonance between the reference photo and stylized painting choices, like if this model was outside or against a white studio background you may have captured the shadows correctly, but you've placed her in a warm "room" so there would probably be warmer tones filling the shadows. All in all really solid, lots of good things happening here! I love how you handled the hair as well, it's got great gesture. Keep it up!

I think you could still use some work on establishing the planes of the head and conveying them through your work. The nose in particular is missing some critical value changes to establish its bottom plane, and instead its shape is mostly being expressed through the positioning of the nostrils. So I'd just say go over the planes of the face a bit more and try and be a bit more confident with your shading. That said this is still a very good start overall! great work :)

You are doing great! Cara to specify what you were going for and what's the size of those studies? (Under drawing or direct paint?)

LOLOLOL :D

Hi Jon and hi everyone, totally excited about this art community thing. I really struggle with color, value and rendering to a specific level. Any advice, Tipp, Tutorial or whatever are totally welcome, please help, kiss kiss and much love!