So, I have developed some very intimate feelings towards my Pentel GFKP ink brush, and I want to be able to do EVERYTHING with it. I can do a lot of things to my satisfaction, like simple portrait sketches. But, if I want to go into a detailed final rendering with 5 distinct levels of darkness for distinguishing pitch black, dark shadows, halftones, light shadows and highlights, I run into problems. Namely, my poor old GFKP can by its very nature only draw pitch black shapes. Off course, there are famously techniques like hatching and crosshatching known to humankind, but even drawing extremely fine lines etremely controlled is a bit of a challenge. So, I need to use a lot of lines for the finish, but if the viewer is supposed to immediately grasp the vision, instead of being confused by figuring out, what all those lines are supposed to mean, these lines have to form a very obvious and consistent pattern, so they visually just blend into one shape, What I done so far: Step 1, I decided to upgrade from my usual Loomis construction to the Reilly abstraction of the head, and did about 50 repetitions of just the Reilly abstraction from the front, without any references. https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9062 Step 2, I did a dryrun of just drawing a bunch of "circles" over various basic Reilly abstractions, to get a feeling of how that would work. I was kinda OK with the result, it did look defintely like human heads, and even somewhat spacious, even without shadows. https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9045 Step 3, As my experience with Loomis taught me, doing a head abstraction "from imagination" as it is called, so just being OK with the result looking somewhat like a human head, is all fine and dandy. My hairs only start to become grey and fall out, once applying the abstraction to a specific reference, and discovering a) that actual human people don't have idealized heads and faces, and b) if I want to focus on a likeness to the reference, I definitely have to emphasize those deviations. So, I went to the line-of-action.com/learn-to-draw website and picked an image of an upstanding young gentlemen from their catalogue, mainly because he looks really straight in the camera, and I don't have to mess with the abstraction from the front to accout for deviating behaviour like moving the neck or opening the jaw. https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9063 4) I then tried to mutate Reilly's pattern to fit to the young gentlemen's actual face. I scanned the graphite construction I came up with to attach it underneath, so people with more experience with Reilly can explain to me, whether this is even supposed to work that way, or pointing out better or easier solutions for modifying Reilly's basic pattern. https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9064 5) I decided to start with pitch black shades first. They are themselves flat shapes, (being just pitch black without internal pattern) and they give some decent orientation marks. https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9065 6) I dastardly cheated on my beloved ink brush to use an ordinary fine liner for the next step, so I wouldn't have to dabble with line weight. The goal was to draw an even mesh over the whole figure, that covered everything but the highlights. https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9066 7) With pitch black and highlights defined, I used my inkbrush to follow along the mesh and indicate the differences between dark shadow, halftones, and regular lights by varying line weight. image attached, also the final result for today.https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9067 My own critique on my result: The left cheek and the nose irritate me quite a lot. The mesh on the cheek is doing its own thing and expresses something, that I am not interested in expressing. Can probably be solved, if I stick to orienting the mesh to the skull more, and don't try to follow up more detailed curvatures on the face. For the nose, I have to come up with a better idea to preserve the interesting shadow shapes on the reference. But if I put a handkerchief over the nose/cheek area and look at the rest of the face, I feel somewhat satisfied with the result. Line quality is ****, but hey, I was focusing on a thousand other problems. But the mesh seems to work as a whole. I think the first impression to a viewer will be: "Hey, that portrait looks really plastic", not "Hey, those are a lot of lines". Sooooo, so far from me. I am looking forward to be told about everything that I could have done different or easier, or that I have missed so far, but should definitely improve upon to achieve a more polished, high end rendering. Also, my knowledge about Reilly pretty much comes exclusively from this site: https://finearttutorials.com/guide/the-reilly-abstraction/ so it is well within the realm of possibility, that I misunderstood something about the way his abstraction is supposed to be applied to drawing from reference. Please inform me, if that is the case.