Help critique my self portrait

The-V

Long time lurker here, I used to draw a lot when I was younger, but got into graphic design, and haven't worked in traditional mediums for seven years.
I am trying to start drawing again, and thought I'd start with a classic observational self-portrait, but it needs help! I wasn't happy with the result so I went over it with some markers, which didn't really help any.

Please send me some critique, break it down as much as you want, I have many years experience listening to incredibly harsh critique.

Lyrical

Well it should be said that despite the literal inaccuracies, you've made this into a pretty visually appealing image--your design experience definitely shows through it.

The main wonk I'm noticing is the placement of features. It seems like each piece has been given a lot of attention and is for the most part believably rendered, but the overall facial structure seems...absent.

The more time you can spend laying out the whole composition and understanding the relationships of the shapes and planes, the easier it will be to believably render something complex like a face. Getting an accurate lay in is even more crucial if you're drawing from life, cause stuff moves.

Overall, you've done a good job of paying attention to volumes, and not getting caught up with lines or surface textures (the hair is really nicely rendered) but you seem to have forgotten this with the facial hair--getting hung up on a lot of small lines rather than rendering the volumes, and it really flattens out that whole area.

I actually really dig wonk like this in drawings, but if you're trying for a more accurate rendering, that's about all I can say.

Nappuccino

The left side of the image (his right) like it was extended in a way you didn't intend. I would tighten that bit of his cheek up and it would look loads better imo.

acadia

Is there a reference photo or something that we can compare it against? Otherwise it's entirely possible we're just critiquing how weird you actually look, haha.

The-V

I think Lyrical nailed it, I didn't spend enough time correctly mapping my features. I have an incredibly hard time doing that when doing observational drawings because it's always a different pose when I look back up at the mirror, so I focus on one feature at a time... How do you get all the features to be oriented correctly when you are working from the mirror?

tynic

Do your layout as quickly as possible. You only really need a few strokes to mark the centre of the face, the eye widths, the nose positions. Once you've got the guidelines down, then you can gradually fill in the details as you go.

Also if you're drawing with the mirror then you should go to some effort to try and maintain the pose as you glance at yourself. This is probably easiest if you set up so that you don't have to move very much to look between the drawing and the mirror, so put up an easel or desk basically facing the mirror.