Portrait Practice
3yr
Niko Schmidt
This is my second portrait practice drawing I did inspired by the "Basics of Russian Academic Drawing" course (since I didn't really follow the 'rules' established in the course I post it here).
I also attached my thumbnail sketch and the foundation sketch. That sketch took ~90 minutes, the details I did in the evenings over the course of a few days. Maybe all in all I invested three to for hours in the piece.
Feedback welcome :)
PS: The portrait is based on cult film director Jean Rollin (warning before you google his name, most of his films are NSFW because this was how you got money by investors in the 70s). I didn't use a single image as a source, but a collection of pics from video interviews. I attached one example.
Hey Niko,
Portraits are pretty challenging, so I would suggest you try to find better reference. Also, you have to build a good structure of the head so that all the features line up properly on the face. I did a quick sketch to show you what I mean, I hope it helps :)
Hi Steve, I practice drawing the head for a while now and with this one having not the best reference was kinda the idea, because I didn't want to use an IMDB profile picture everyone would use as a basis. Instead I looked at multiple references of the same person and tried to interpolate. But of course you are right about the structure and you can't be reminded enough about this. Thank you very much for you effort of providing a sketch, very appreciated :) I think you have to lose the structure a bit in the end to give the portrait more personality, but I wouldn't say I found the sweet spot for this.
The portrait is lovely! My eyes were just lingering on it for a minute and didn't want to leave the page :)
I think you captured his expression very well.
