I know it's a bit late, and you probably have figured that one out. But in case you haven't, that distance, in a better terminology, is called nasal bridge. The thickness of our nasal bridge is actually determined by the thickness of our nasal bones and a muscle called Procerus. Men usually have thicker of both, while women's are more shallow and smooth. Ethnicity also plays a huge part in this particular facial feature. Caucasian tends to be on the thicker side, while other ethnicity, like African and Asian, tend to be on the shallower side.

They're looking great. You've got the flow and the lines that look confident. I guess you're on the right track with this, Try to develop each gesture into more solid body form by implementing broad light and shadow forms, because eventually that's the goal of gesture drawing.

I think you're nearly there though. It's not wrong for heads to look roundish. But in your case, the problem is that you make the jaws much smaller and shorter than it should. You see, the difference between an adult's and a baby's head is the ratio of cranium (the roundish ball part) and the jaw (the squarish wedge-shaped part). Babies have big craniums and small jaws, while adult have still-bigger-than-babies' cranium, but their jaws have caught up the pace and grown much bigger and taller since. From your works, it seems that you make the bottom part of the jaw in line with the bottom part of the ball. It shouldn't be that way though, Jaws in adults measure almost a half of the ball in height. I have some drawings I made earlier for other users, I hope it can help you to understand this cranium-to-jaw ratio.

Hi Natali, it's great to see you're still around and keep coming back with better and better improvements, You work is great, and it's improved in many ways since the last time I gave critique in one of your uploads. The only thing I would add is the classic V shape in middle of the brows which pop because she's frowning her brows. The woman in the original picture have that annoyance kind of expression, while in your work, she looks more like she's bored. It's in the expression kind of area, which I know is not the main focus on the work, but it's still good to exercise it once in a while. The other minor thing is to add a bit of highlight on the left side of neck, so not to make the neck look flat. I've painted over your work (if that's okay) to show my points.

I will say the proportions can be better. Though, it has nothing with color, but I see that the proportion of your drawing seems a little off; like the nose seems to be a little smaller than it should be, Colored pencils are not the best of tools when it comes to learning colors. It may be convenient since they were the first coloring tools we had been introduced with when we were kids, but in the long run, they're actually hard to use. Some artists even have come to hate them, arguing that colored pencils lack almost everything an artist needs to color their drawing or painting: 1) they're hard to blend, 2) the colors are rather too bright to use by itself, and 3) the wax used to make colored pencils give the drawing that ugly sheen finish. The other problem with colored pencils is flexibility: you'd need a lot of them to cover a wide range of colors. If you'd like to learn colors, get the actual paints, like watercolor, acrylic, or even oil paints. They're much more practical and reliable. You can just buy 4 or 5 paints, and with them you can make all colors you will actually use. Colored pencils look nice since if you bought them in a set, they'd give you this rainbow-like colors. But soon you'd notice that most of them are useless, because you can't really blend them and you can't fit a bright pink or emerald green in any drawing.

They look great! The only thing I can advice you is to make sure that the lines are darker than the shading. Because as I can see from your work, the lines and the shading look the same in value. That will make some confusion. It's great to have bold shading, but make sure that the lines are even bolder.

As far as I can see, you've done a good job on landmarks. Is there any particular landmark that you have difficulty with? Broadly speaking, there's only a few landmarks on body that's worth memorizing: 1) shoulder bones, 2) knee bones (knee caps), 3) base of the back of neck (C7 vertebrae, 4) the wings of scapula, 5) clavicles, 6) ASIS and PSIS, 7) the head of femur (greater trochanter of femur, that bulging spot by the side of our hips). As for balance, there's two categories in figure poses, dynamic and static. Dynamic pose is a freeze capture of a candid movement, like a picture of someone in the middle of running. It's a bit more complicated to find the balance in these poses, because, well, there's no balance in dynamic poses: if we'd try to stop in the middle of a running stride, we'd fall. On the other hand, static poses are more predictable when it comes to finding their balance. If you try to draw a perpendicular line from the middle point of the torso to the ground, the point should never cross over the ball of the foot. A good example for this is on the first image that you attached: if you notice, in your drawing, the middle point of the torso crosses the ball of her right foot. While on the reference, it doesn't.

1. The apple doesn't create shadow of the cup next to it. The shadow is created by the cup itself. But yes, you're correct that by the rim of the bottom edge of the cup, there's an ambient occlusion (or occlusion shadow), because ambient occlusion usually occurs on the rim of things. 2. You're correct that there's two light sources in that scene: one from the front right, and the other from the right. That's why you see two sets of cast shadows. 3. You're correct that the horizon line is on the top rim of the upper cup. 4. Defining highlight on a mirror or other reflected surfaces is kind of harder than defining highlights on the actual surface, because it follows a different set of logics. It's possible to do so, but I will say to stick to the reference for this one. 5. Indeed, tha value transition happens because when things are further away from the light source, they become darker. However, it doesn't only happen to big planes though. If you put another apple on the farther side of the scene, that apple will be darker than the apple that is closer to the light source. 6. Yes, as i've said in point number 2. 7. Technically, they're great rendering. However, artistically, you can try to blur the edges of the things that is adjacent to the shadows. As of right now, it seems to me that the edge is all sharp. This overall sharpness creates more of technical feel to the drawing. By blurring some of the edges, you'll create a more of artistic drawing, because our eyes naturally perceive edges differently than that is of a camera. Our eyes blur things that are in shadows or that are not in the focus.

Printers paper is a great choice because it's mostly available in every household. But the thing about printers paper is that it's only available in one color: bright white. You see, bright white is quite hard to handle for drawing gestures because you need to use more of your pencil to achieve a noticeable shading of the halftones and the shadows. Newsprint paper is better, not just because it's cheaper, but also because they offer a natural greyish color which serves as a halftone color. So you just need a bit of shading to create the shadows, and as for highlights, you can use white colored pencils or pastels. But if you want to stick to printers paper, it's actually not that bad either.

What kind of still like are you looking for? You see, 'still life' is a very broad category, and it includes objects we can find everyday to rarest of objects.