Charcoal/Pencil Sketches (pic heavy)

falconire

The unanymous opinion of my previous artwork is that it needed at a lot of anatomy work - it did btw - so I spent the last several months drawings from life, and also photographs to get a better handle on it. I'm not 100% there yet, but I'd like to show some of my progress. I'm posting three drawings today, and I have a dozen more I'd like to put up later on.



This drawing is one of my favorites, although the eyes need work in my mind.





This one drawn from a photograph - not the best scan, but I tried to make it brighter.

Mustang

Yeah there are still a lot of problems here that need to be worked through with practice and study.

My first bit of advise is to can your shading for now and just start doing line work, your main focus right now is to learn structure and how a face fits together.

Example to prove why you need to focus on structure.


1. The round circles represent eyes. Eyes are round balls, the only reason you see them as eliptical shapes is because of the skin that envelops them. Now as you can see the two eyes are different sizes and they are sitting above the brow line. This is impossible and therefore the eyes are far too large.

2. The line drawn though represent the brow line, eye1 line and eye 2 line. With a face drawn head on all these lines should run approx. (give or take a degree) perpendicular to one another and quite clearly the right hand eye does not.

So start using construction lines
Eg


and you'll find the placement of facial features a much easier task.

Also don't just limit yourself to drawing from photographs and life and thinking that's enough. Start studying other artists work to figure out how they tackle challenging problems.

Scosglen

Football eyes football eyes football eyes

I'm assuming these are all from reference, in which case you really need to make a major effort to improve your observation skills. You will also probably find that this is a frequently recurring problem in a number of threads in this forum and if you spend a little time looking around I am positive you will find advice given to others which you can appropriate to your own work.

I think you would benefit from doing a long study grid-portrait, to force you to slow down and give you an idea of how much you should be prepared to scrutinize your reference when you're doing observational drawing.

falconire

I have an anatomy book that I'm studying - although I hadn't got far into it when I drew these - and it says the same things, so I will keep that in mind. Like I said with the first drawing, I like how it came out, with the exception of the eyes.

Thanks both the advice.

Kunkoh

There is a really good link in the Q&A thread stickied to the top with a pdf of a Loomis book. I'd recommend downloading that & printing it off. Looking at an anatomy book is great, and having one as a reference is a good thing; but looking at & reading Loomis will help you quicker as he points out a lot of key proportions/reference points to look for, things to practice, and helpful comments. Hard to beat that with a stick... unless you print it off & find a stick. But that would be rather pointless.

mudkachu

Falconire, I think the problem is even more basic. I'd think you'd have a better time eschewing the loomis and his grid and instead focus on drawing volumetric shapes in space. Despite its shading, the drawing of the girl on the very top completely lacks some sort of form and volume. It seems you were preoccupied with lines instead of shapes, and you need to work on paying attention to the latter for now until you have the sensitivity to work with the former.
Why else would the eyes be football shaped? Because you were paying attention to the outlines of the eyes rather than the underlying sphere of the eyeball--and the layered form of the eyelids above.

Everyone seems to like loomis here--and loomis is indeed good, but I think Sheldon Borenstein or Villpu (I think one of his texts is in the tutorial thread) would work more for you Falconire.

sugarm0mma

It's all the golden ratio, which is phi. If you measure the ratio of a person's facial features it's always 1.618. On every face the eyes are right in the middle from the top of the head to the chin. The mouth is the same length as the distance between a person's pupils and the widest part of the nose is the same distance between the eyes. Sadly you just can't escape math