I know you already acknowledged that you didn't render the lights and darks further. My question is, why not? You have a fairly well-constructed Nicoli. You could easily improve your drawing orders of magnitude by simply making the darks darker. Even just making the pupils their respective deep black could add much more character. Other than that. Your eyes look like they are looking in different directions (I believe the left pupil is slightly offset to the upper left). I believe the shape/outline of your shadows could be paid more attention, especially those under the jawline and in the ear. And your shadows are nearly as light as your half-tones. Remember, the lightest darks are darker than the darkest lights. And there are many parts of your drawing that weren't shaded at all. The only parts of your drawing that should be absolute whites should be your highlights (e.g. It looks like your whole forehead is a highlight). Everything else should be even just slightly shaded so that your drawing doesn't look blown-out. I believe you have much untaped potential in this one! You should come back to it some day :)

Beautiful work! It's wonderful that you are experimenting with new mediums. Hope you had fun!

This is a lovely portrait -- very expressive. You did a wonderful job. I think what makes Stan's demo portrait successful is his use of lost edges and implied forms. Compared to his portrait, you tend to outline the features with a darker line to show the shape of the form that you have designed. I don't see that as a negative or positive thing, just an observation. Overall, you have a great value range and your drawing ability is really shining here. Great job and hope to see more :)

I think if using straights helps you in the layin stage, use 'em! I would recommend focusing on finding the right angles if you use that approach. For example, in your drawing, her face is very square and she looses the feminine taper of the jaw because the line isn't angled inward. Hope that helps!

Hi @Samuel Sanjaya, nice studies! - I've been trying to learn drawing facial expression for a long time. I too thought that learning the individual muscles of the face would help me do it better, but it didn't help that much. I've been studying the Disney animators a lot recently. There is an awarness of the muscles in their drawings, but they are focusing on the large masses and how they squash and stretch. You need very little detail! Just a few shapes can give a very clear expression. So keep it to just a few shapes, give us a feeling of solidity with a rigid cranium, then have the features squash and stretch on top of it; have all the features affect eachother. I did a paintover explaining this in more detail. It might help to do some studies of facial expressions drawn by a Disney animator. I hope this helps :) Let me know if you have any questions!

Cool! - maybe the iris and pupil are a little large compared to the eye-ball. It might help to outline the eyeball and iris in the lay-in, to check their realtionship. Cheers!

I think these are really nice. If you want something to work on, I would say to spend a little more time defining the shadow shapes--at least on the second one.

Very well done!

Very nicely done! I'll attempt this one as well pretty soon--if not today, then sometime this week.

Very nice! When you say larger format, what are you thinking?

very cool!

Looks very recognizable. Try to work on the symmetry of the lips and the eyes. Try to harmonize the shadows on the ears with the rest of the face. The iris of his right eye looks unusually bright; maybe there is a hint of a cast shadow you can add there (dont have the reference now). Well done!