Critique
1yr
@stevenmc
I'm having a nightmare. Could I get some critique please. A bit of feed back on what I should be thinking about and working on.
I feel like the more I know the worse I'm getting. Or is just the start of the process? An I where I'm suppose to be at this point at the start.
I also don't wanna spam the forum with pictures so I thought it was better to put a few in one post than separately after a few days.
My critiques.
I think one major thing is I don't know how to shade, which is making me inpatient with shading making it a cycle of getting worse. Also my proportions go wrong and I don't notice until I've started shading and the eyes and nose are too big as an example.
The one of brad pitt that I done 3 times and then drew the eye, I seem to have a tendency to have the heads too short and wide. So on the bottom right I really stretched it out too my measurements, and it was much closer even then its not right.
Haha I'm sorry for the pain this might cause you experienced real Artists. Haha.
When I find something looks ‘off’ in my drawing, i hold it up to a mirror. Seeing it from a new perspective can make errors stand out. I use this as a way to check my proportions, placement, etc before i do any shading. Hope this helps!
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1yr
Hey @stevenmc!
- Fixing proportions: Having accurate proportions is a skill to develop, so don't be discouraged. You don't have to wait until shading to check, either. If you start out with the lay-in drawing, you can use a digital program like Photoshop (or its many other free alternatives like Photopea or Krita) to overlay your drawing over the original image, allowing you to instantly check the differences. Being able to check at this stage will allow you to both correct your mistakes and go through more practice drawings, which leads to developing this skill much more quickly. Here is a video that goes more in-depth both on measuring proportions and overlaying: https://www.proko.com/s/8B6Q
- Shading control: Avoid blending or smudging as a method to shade, as this gives little control and often leaves things uneven and difficult to fix. Instead, try relying on layering tone evenly with pencil and using a range of pencil gradations (HB-6B is good to have if you have access to them). Practicing value scales can be helpful too--try out both smooth gradients and steps with even distances in tone between each square. Once you're able to control this, tackling complex subjects will come much easier.
- Eye whites: Despite their literal color being so, eye whites do not often appear as pure white due to shadows from the surrounding environment. You're starting to add some shading to them, which is on the right track, but make sure to take into account how shadows from the environment will affect them. For example, in the first two images, the faces seem to be covered in shadow on the left side. This should cause the eyes on the left to also fall in shadow, making the eye whites darker than the eye whites in the area of light.
- Perspective: The Loomis model is a method of breaking down the head into simpler parts that allows you map out the position of the head as a whole and place the features together. It also helps illustrate that the features should align in perspective, so if you were to mark the direction of the eyes, nose, and mouth individually, they should all end up facing the same direction in space. Here, there's a tendency to have the features all at slightly different angles, which can break the illusion of perspective and cohesiveness. But just utilizing guidelines, like from the Loomis model, can help fix this. Here is a video that explains how to go about this: https://www.proko.com/s/1cX2
Hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you very much for your reply. A lot of information in there to help me.
I think I will go back a step and just do the proportions for 50+ heads and discipline myself enough to do it without shading and really concentrate on only proportions. That video really helped my thinking. Its one of his ones I haven't seen or haven't seen for a long while. I've got prokos portrait course but I think I was racing ahead a bit much because he does the shading in his eye tutorial. So I'll take his advice on the video you supplied and not shade for a while.
I just find the mind to hand to paper process annoying. I know what I'm trying to do, I can see it as I'm copying. I also understand it in 3d space in my mind. Then something happens from my mind to the paper that completely goes wrong. As you say it's a skill. So I need to be patient. I appreciate that thank you.
