Your lines are getting pretty feverish, in your last couple studies on the previous page, you had wrangled that in quite a bit. I think these sketches are ambitious and energetic, which is good, but try to slow down and place each line with a bit more deliberate thought.
This is mostly about the areas where you start to build up the lines a ton, like in the rib cage of this last one. Erase the lines that you put down that feel wrong. It might feel frustrating at first, but when you are scribbling so much, you aren't making clear and conscious choices. Its alright to have kinda loose sketches and ink over them, but I think in your case it'd really benefit you to force yourself our of it. It's easier to ink over one wobbly line, than try to find the right stroke when 20 are already down.
Thanks for the advice Iruka! You really nailed it, I get a mixture of strong excitement and frustration when I try to draw stuff especially when it comes to creating. I will try to rein in my emotions a little and slow down for the stuff I make later. Also trying to do more anatomy, my lizard brain just refuse to retain the information for some reason
I'll make a rule-of-thirds grid when I do my thumbnails (well, if I do thumbnails, I am historically not very good at doing that even though I should) and use that to help me plan my poses or my scenery or whatever. Focus on your major points of interest. Using that giant swordo up there as an example: where will the end of the scabbard sit? The hilt? Where does it lay in relation to the person holding it? Will the sword being a straight line draw the viewers eye towards something? What will be in the background, if anything? If not how will you balance out the negative space of your canvas? Those are a lot of questions to answer but that's why you do 18,000 thumbnails. Eventually you start to get a sort of sense about things and can identify them more by feel as you go.
Once you've got your overall layout to a point your happy with THEN start working in your details. Again, you should still be in a sketch phase so avoid the temptation of rendering things out too much. One of the benefits of doing thumbnails is that you can often do them on autopilot and let your brain think about the frills and details that you want to add. So this sketch phase should go by a lot quicker and then you can jump into the real fun drawing part.
That said I think you should focus on the image of the sitting warrior. You've got a good start there and I think you could work it into a very cool piece if you give it some time and attention.
Thanks for the advice Juggernut! Man I could at least attempt to do poses but backgrounds are killer, my mind just goes blank. I know it's because of my non existant visual library which I don't really know how to build up as well as weak perspective. That said I guess I will zone in on the sitting warrior like you recommended and try to flesh out the idea more fully with less scribbles and better construction
I attempt to construct a figure in perspective and space today on my sketchbook :
Google image search and pinterest are your friends. I spend a lot of time trying to find examples of things I'm seeing in my head to make sure I'm on the right track.
Like, want to draw a gnarly stump? You can find tons of references of gnarly stumps and then more or less build one from the ground up after maybe 10 or 15 minutes of image searching.
That's not to say don't do your perspective and still life drawing but definitely make use of the tools you've got for building that visual library of yours.
Attempts at constructing the pose and thinking of the illustration
Constructed halfway before realizing that the character will probably lean forward for the pose, sorry for the messy pencilworks, too many erasures. Also I still have trouble with the shoulder and pelvis construction
While the perspective of his hammer, the stump, and the lower half of his body are all pretty consistent among each other (great job!), his upper body loses that. Its scale and perspective feels wrong to me (given the lower half). Your construction in the previous post came a little closer, with the sword between his legs, the 'resting his chin on the pommel' pose made perfect sense. With his hammer out PAST his legs, stretching out to put his chin on the handle makes way less sense. Try this: sitting where you are now, lean forward and put your chin on an imaginary surface out past your knees. Observe how low you have to lean to get out there. Try keeping the weapon between his legs for comfort purposes.
I know it can be frustrating to not be hitting that perfect mental image you have before you start drawing, but I want to stress how much you improved between this sketch and its first iteration only 10 days ago. This one feels much closer to what I'm sure you have in your head, especially with the more solid perspective on that lower half. Keep it up!
Thanks mate I will keep trying! Tried to do some figure/gesture drawing tonight, tried 3x 30 seconds using the quickposes site but they are too fast for me now, i could barely get any lines in to form anything so I have to slow it down to 45. Also did 3 sketches of unlimited time
Pfft, and earlier you were saying you felt like you were starting over from zero. These are (to my admittedly untrained eye) looking very solid! Keep up the good work, Peas.
Thanks Didgeridoo! I can copy relatively ok given time but creation is still way beyond my reach. It's like I can produce bits and pieces of my ideas individually but I never got to the point where I can pull off a fully realized piece. The furthest I ever got was when I went to an art school for an entire year a couple years back and somehow made a couple of "illustrations", a feat which I wasn't able to reproduce ever since. To be honest I am kinda worried and a tad desperate because I know that I probably wouldn't have as much time as I have now a couple of months later. Just hoping that I can somehow form a habit and find a good workflow for arting in the mean time.
Edit: man i am really repeating the next loop over again, i believe i said something similar last year haha
Ok I'm definitely not in a position to offer advice since I'm an ultra beginner but I'm gonna do it anyway!
I don't think you should get hung up on feeling like you have to draw completely from imagination. Drawing from reference is not cheating, and is not simply 'copying.' The concious choices about which lines to emphasize, which to leave out and how to render light and shadow ARE valuable and are transformative.
Take the knight leaning on his sword you're working on. Looking up a stump picture or a photo of someone sitting and resting forward and using that as reference for the position of your knight would not be 'copying.' Even the most fantastical things we draw will have some basis in reality, so getting a close look at reality is only sensible.
Thanks for the advice mate, you can be frank and speak your mind no matter your skill level, being kind isn't going to help me at my current age (34) lol
I don't mind using references but I also feel kinda bummed out to have such a low retention rate as well as improvement speed. I don't understand how people are nailing things like anatomy just from taking 2 weeks of courses while I still struggle getting the shape of the pelvis or even the torso correctly despite drawing them semi regularly as well as watching or re-watching excellent videos from people like Proko a dozen times over the years. And that's just anatomy, I want to learn and improve with line quality, perspective, rendering and color, characters, environments with the end game of being good enough to create a world.
I am not giving up of course but sometimes it's really hard to shake off the feeling of things not really going anywhere or even worse backwards.
I don't understand how people are nailing things like anatomy just from taking 2 weeks of courses.
Let me just stop you there, this isn't happening. If someone told you they learned anatomy in two weeks, they are flat out lying.
To put it in perspective, I've been drawing since I was a little kid. My first serious go at life drawing was probably in college. Sure, I started improving much faster once I was taking in anatomy, but that was building on 5-6 years of art summer camps, regular doodling, and general encouragement from peers. I walked into my first anatomy courses with some art stuff already figured out, but my first few years of drawing technically still produced weak results.
I'm still watching proko videos and trying to revisit my basic skills. As I get older and less impatient, the chill nature of studying just for the sake of it settles in, and I wish that I could have approached it all through college with the same sort of relaxed mindset. You will revisit material over and over, and retain something different every time. You just need to accept that it takes building up. The good news is that having an open mind to critique and being able to assess what you are putting down on the paper is half the battle, and its much harder to get teenagers to let go of the ego and see clearly.
It'll also just be slightly slower if you cant dedicate more than an hour or so every night. As a person who went to dedicated school and used to wake up every day to getting 4-8 hours of drawing and painting done, I now have a day job and get frustrated at what I can learn. I have the benefit of all those years past to hold up my drawings now, though. I want to try and learn piano, and I already know that shit is going to be a slog, because I'll be starting from scratch and dedicating a small faction of my time to it.
My advice is to pay yourself the kindness. You want to work hard, not beat yourself up if you can help it. You're clearly trying to work on your art from the foundation up, that's amazing and as you go along you will see improvement. The time is tough, and you'll be putting the hours in for a long time, so try to be nice to yourself while you work so that the little setbacks dont burn you out.
Regarding the use of references:
An over-reliance on references you find on the internet can be stifling and impact the quality of a finished product. I've seen art work floating around where I recognize and straight up have the image an artist was using saved in my reference folders, which is very funny and a little damning.
The worry that being too dependent on reference can hamper your ability to create is also a valid one.
This is my favourite example of someone who is very reference dependent:
BUT I think that the gathering and creation of references can be a fun part of the image creation process. It is a bunch of separate, but complementary skill sets.
Paolo Rivera has category on his blog called Wacky Reference Wednesdays where he posts his initial thumbnails, his comprehensive roughs and then the references he's compiled. He poses/lights 3D models and he photographs himself a bunch. https://paolorivera.blogspot.com/search/label/Wacky%20Reference%20Wednesdays
James Gurney has a category on his blog where he posts miniatures that he's built for his paintings. He straight up builds them out of clay, wire, wood and foam. He's also a strong advocate of going out on location, doing sketches and paintings there and then using those alongside, or instead, of your photographs. gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/search/label/Miniatures
Ron Lemen has a pretty inspiring method of using photo references for poses. His fundamentals are strong enough to take a pose from photograph and then use that information to create a new pose from a different angle. (You should check out his other posts on Muddy Colors) muddycolors.com/2016/01/one-more-take-on-inventing-a-pose/
I've also seen artists who photoshop together a bunch of references with 3D models, making weird monster people and then using that as reference for their final illustrations.
Use references in accompaniment with your fundamentals. Using references will help build your fundamentals. Tailor your references to your image, rather than the other way around. Feel free to disregard your references.
What I'm saying is, if you're having a hard time with that person on a stump, take some photos of yourself sitting down and folding your hands on a pole and a whole world of possibilities and frustrations will open to you. If you're having trouble figuring out what the environment should be, go out and sketch and photograph some things.
If you don't wanna go outside, go to Google Street View and plop yourself down in some rural, woody area and use that.
Man I am really grateful to you folks for being so patient and helpful to me throughout the years, I just wish I could somehow give back to this place by eventually becoming a competent artist
I truly appreciate all the replies and advice given to me, thank you all very much for taking the time and effort to help someone like me
Tried to sketch with photo reference after procrastinating forever, it was really scary because I don't really know how to even begin to break down the image and what lines to use for objects like trees and grass. Hopefully this will be the first of many sketches. I am still attempting my one illustration but I realize that I pretty much have no idea how to do a background properly so I want to push myself to tackle the problem.
Dude! For not feeling like you understand perspective this is pretty good! Looks like you loosely are understanding whats going on. Keep tackling that shit you dont understand and intimidates you, this is a great step.
Thanks mate! I hope I can do more later today but I managed to squeeze out an attempt at breaking down an image after watching videos online
Reference image:
Trying to find a good balance between details and time/effort spent. The previous sketch took me 4 plus hours, this took me 1. Something I noticed after posting stuff is that they always look so much sloppier compared to what I thought it looked like beforehand.
Simplifying your landscapes into big shapes, and then working in the details and texture seemed to be a great process for you! That 4 hour sketch looks great. What also might help, especially with these landscapes, is rather than outlining the big shapes, have the big shapes be a certain VALUE (i.e. darkness level). Changes in value are a great way to imply depth (darker/higher contrast stuff is closer, lower contrast, lighter stuff is farther away). I see some evidence of that thinking in the longer sketch, but I think using a BIG brush at the beginning (to define the big shapes), and then smaller and smaller brushes as you move into detail and texture could be a good approach.
Thanks for the advice mate! I will try to apply it for the next sketch.
I have to tap out of this and revisit it someday, I didn't plan properly and the leaves are too hardcore for me to handle now. The ref I used was from the previous post.
Simplifying your landscapes into big shapes, and then working in the details and texture seemed to be a great process for you! That 4 hour sketch looks great. What also might help, especially with these landscapes, is rather than outlining the big shapes, have the big shapes be a certain VALUE (i.e. darkness level). Changes in value are a great way to imply depth (darker/higher contrast stuff is closer, lower contrast, lighter stuff is farther away). I see some evidence of that thinking in the longer sketch, but I think using a BIG brush at the beginning (to define the big shapes), and then smaller and smaller brushes as you move into detail and texture could be a good approach.
Wait a minute this doesn't feels like sketching...no...not the p word......
Reference img:
I don't think I have ever actually painted a full scene from life or reference before even though I've seen tons of videos about it, gonna go out have dinner and take a walk before I go about tackling this. Should I even attempt color at this point?
No, stick with value. Pay attention to how, in addition to the normal distance effect, the fog or mist is also 'lightening' the hills behind, giving a sort of soft gradient with the highest contrast (darker) parts of the distant peaks up at the top (less air/moisture in the way). You've done a good job so far of picking out the big landmasses and assigning them value based on their distance from the viewer. Just remember, higher contrast stuff reads as 'closer' and lower contrast stuff reads as 'farther away,' so don't veer too far away from your chosen values for those distant mountains to keep them looking 'far away,' when you're adding detail -- but dont be afraid to go pretty dark and pretty light for the closest stuff -- strategic use of detail is a great way to save time while still achieving realistic-ish results.
I don't think I can continue today, spent more than 6 hours, gonna go crash for a bit lol
I will try to work on this for at least one more round, not sure how far I can actually push at my level though
The trees are killer as usual
Your solid value block-in is very good and the reference you're doing a study from is a prime candidate for clipping masks.
If you haven't used them before, clipping masks are essentially stencils you can paint and manipulate on the fly. They are very good friends.
You basically just start off with your value blocks all on separate layers
Then in Photoshop make new layer above it, hover your mouse on the line between the new layer and the value block layer, hold Alt and click. You can do this multiple times and make a big stack of layers that are all parented to the mask.
In Krita you select the value block layer and hit CTRL+G to create a clipping group.
Then you can quickly slap down textures with fancy grungy brushes and paint details onto that area without worrying about constantly having to refine the edges.
Thanks for the advice and tips again Chicoblue! I know about clipping mask but I am really bad at using all these digital tools to my advantage because I am a dummy but I will try to experiment more with them. Regarding textures I am kinda afraid of using them because I feel like I don't understand their nature and how to actually replicate them in real life. I don't know if I should treat them as forms/flats or color/value shifts or something else. I think I will try something simple with textures tonight though.
This took me forever even though it was supposed to be simpler. I think I am starting to form a process though, crude as it is now. Clip masking really does make things much less tedious. I have trouble trying to figure out and paint the values in this, especially for the bowl. Is the whole portion lit up by strong reflected or ambient light? Will be attempting textures later, ran out of time. Also i am not sure if the pics I am posting are too big, just tell me and I will resize it, thanks folks!
Yikes I guess I went overboard with the texture stuff and everything looks like a mess in the end lol. I tried out the built-in particle brush from Clip paint and hand painted the other textures. What I learnt is that I really need to find or make my custom brushes for textures or I will never be able to finish anything in the future, took me forever to do this. I don't want to have a million brushes though so I wonder if anyone in here have any tips or techniques to use the least amount of brushes to create the most amount of effects possible? Clip masking is a life saver as usual. Other than that I guess I need to somehow train to see and paint values better, still struggling to sort them out. I still have no idea what's going on down there. Water?
edit: Oh man they actually have texture brushes in Clip paint but it's under "decorations" instead, should have looked harder urgh, I downloaded a bunch of free stuff on their asset store though, I am really impressed by how much stuff they have in there
Doing the eye makes me want to try to paint a head again but dang it I have to suddenly go out for dinner and have to rush it, I will have to redo this when I come back later, the proportions are way off
I like the eye. The reflection in the eye of eyelashes which aren't there yet has a very surreal and unsettling quality to me. Matrix-like implications.
Face proportions are indeed off. Don't shy away from something like a grid if you think it'll help! Something else I find helpful is to use the ruler tool to drag a vertical line at the edges of facial features on the source ref, which will help you see the horizontal distances between them, how big they should be in relation to each other, and where they should be placed. Then you can make that same series of vertical lines to help guide placing your features.
Posts
Scope:
Fantasy
Beautiful character
Started off by attempting to do thumbnails for the night, think i gonna do more of these first
edit:
Something I gave up on during the holidays
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Thumbnails attempts with medibang on my phone
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Squeezed out 1 thumbnail today
Edit: Somehow cranked out one more for the night
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It's pretty refreshing to crank these out though, i have a lot of troubling with creative thoughts for a very long while
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Dang it!
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This is mostly about the areas where you start to build up the lines a ton, like in the rib cage of this last one. Erase the lines that you put down that feel wrong. It might feel frustrating at first, but when you are scribbling so much, you aren't making clear and conscious choices. Its alright to have kinda loose sketches and ink over them, but I think in your case it'd really benefit you to force yourself our of it. It's easier to ink over one wobbly line, than try to find the right stroke when 20 are already down.
Squeezed out 2 more for the night:
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Trying to draw on my unused sketchbook(s), just sitting in a mc donalds for 2 hours cranking whatever comes to my mind
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Once you've got your overall layout to a point your happy with THEN start working in your details. Again, you should still be in a sketch phase so avoid the temptation of rendering things out too much. One of the benefits of doing thumbnails is that you can often do them on autopilot and let your brain think about the frills and details that you want to add. So this sketch phase should go by a lot quicker and then you can jump into the real fun drawing part.
That said I think you should focus on the image of the sitting warrior. You've got a good start there and I think you could work it into a very cool piece if you give it some time and attention.
I attempt to construct a figure in perspective and space today on my sketchbook :
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Like, want to draw a gnarly stump? You can find tons of references of gnarly stumps and then more or less build one from the ground up after maybe 10 or 15 minutes of image searching.
That's not to say don't do your perspective and still life drawing but definitely make use of the tools you've got for building that visual library of yours.
Attempts at constructing the pose and thinking of the illustration
Constructed halfway before realizing that the character will probably lean forward for the pose, sorry for the messy pencilworks, too many erasures. Also I still have trouble with the shoulder and pelvis construction
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Trying to think of the background, used my phone and medibang for this. Googled for things to put inside.
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I know it can be frustrating to not be hitting that perfect mental image you have before you start drawing, but I want to stress how much you improved between this sketch and its first iteration only 10 days ago. This one feels much closer to what I'm sure you have in your head, especially with the more solid perspective on that lower half. Keep it up!
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Edit: man i am really repeating the next loop over again, i believe i said something similar last year haha
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
I don't think you should get hung up on feeling like you have to draw completely from imagination. Drawing from reference is not cheating, and is not simply 'copying.' The concious choices about which lines to emphasize, which to leave out and how to render light and shadow ARE valuable and are transformative.
Take the knight leaning on his sword you're working on. Looking up a stump picture or a photo of someone sitting and resting forward and using that as reference for the position of your knight would not be 'copying.' Even the most fantastical things we draw will have some basis in reality, so getting a close look at reality is only sensible.
I don't mind using references but I also feel kinda bummed out to have such a low retention rate as well as improvement speed. I don't understand how people are nailing things like anatomy just from taking 2 weeks of courses while I still struggle getting the shape of the pelvis or even the torso correctly despite drawing them semi regularly as well as watching or re-watching excellent videos from people like Proko a dozen times over the years. And that's just anatomy, I want to learn and improve with line quality, perspective, rendering and color, characters, environments with the end game of being good enough to create a world.
I am not giving up of course but sometimes it's really hard to shake off the feeling of things not really going anywhere or even worse backwards.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Let me just stop you there, this isn't happening. If someone told you they learned anatomy in two weeks, they are flat out lying.
To put it in perspective, I've been drawing since I was a little kid. My first serious go at life drawing was probably in college. Sure, I started improving much faster once I was taking in anatomy, but that was building on 5-6 years of art summer camps, regular doodling, and general encouragement from peers. I walked into my first anatomy courses with some art stuff already figured out, but my first few years of drawing technically still produced weak results.
I'm still watching proko videos and trying to revisit my basic skills. As I get older and less impatient, the chill nature of studying just for the sake of it settles in, and I wish that I could have approached it all through college with the same sort of relaxed mindset. You will revisit material over and over, and retain something different every time. You just need to accept that it takes building up. The good news is that having an open mind to critique and being able to assess what you are putting down on the paper is half the battle, and its much harder to get teenagers to let go of the ego and see clearly.
It'll also just be slightly slower if you cant dedicate more than an hour or so every night. As a person who went to dedicated school and used to wake up every day to getting 4-8 hours of drawing and painting done, I now have a day job and get frustrated at what I can learn. I have the benefit of all those years past to hold up my drawings now, though. I want to try and learn piano, and I already know that shit is going to be a slog, because I'll be starting from scratch and dedicating a small faction of my time to it.
My advice is to pay yourself the kindness. You want to work hard, not beat yourself up if you can help it. You're clearly trying to work on your art from the foundation up, that's amazing and as you go along you will see improvement. The time is tough, and you'll be putting the hours in for a long time, so try to be nice to yourself while you work so that the little setbacks dont burn you out.
An over-reliance on references you find on the internet can be stifling and impact the quality of a finished product. I've seen art work floating around where I recognize and straight up have the image an artist was using saved in my reference folders, which is very funny and a little damning.
The worry that being too dependent on reference can hamper your ability to create is also a valid one.
This is my favourite example of someone who is very reference dependent:
BUT I think that the gathering and creation of references can be a fun part of the image creation process. It is a bunch of separate, but complementary skill sets.
Paolo Rivera has category on his blog called Wacky Reference Wednesdays where he posts his initial thumbnails, his comprehensive roughs and then the references he's compiled. He poses/lights 3D models and he photographs himself a bunch.
https://paolorivera.blogspot.com/search/label/Wacky%20Reference%20Wednesdays
James Gurney has a category on his blog where he posts miniatures that he's built for his paintings. He straight up builds them out of clay, wire, wood and foam. He's also a strong advocate of going out on location, doing sketches and paintings there and then using those alongside, or instead, of your photographs.
gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/search/label/Miniatures
Dan Dos Santos uses photography pretty extensively in his work.
muddycolors.com/2013/11/getting-the-shot/
Ron Lemen has a pretty inspiring method of using photo references for poses. His fundamentals are strong enough to take a pose from photograph and then use that information to create a new pose from a different angle. (You should check out his other posts on Muddy Colors)
muddycolors.com/2016/01/one-more-take-on-inventing-a-pose/
I've also seen artists who photoshop together a bunch of references with 3D models, making weird monster people and then using that as reference for their final illustrations.
Use references in accompaniment with your fundamentals. Using references will help build your fundamentals. Tailor your references to your image, rather than the other way around. Feel free to disregard your references.
What I'm saying is, if you're having a hard time with that person on a stump, take some photos of yourself sitting down and folding your hands on a pole and a whole world of possibilities and frustrations will open to you. If you're having trouble figuring out what the environment should be, go out and sketch and photograph some things.
If you don't wanna go outside, go to Google Street View and plop yourself down in some rural, woody area and use that.
I truly appreciate all the replies and advice given to me, thank you all very much for taking the time and effort to help someone like me
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Reference pic:
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Reference image:
edit:
Attempts at trying to do textures
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Trying to find a good balance between details and time/effort spent. The previous sketch took me 4 plus hours, this took me 1. Something I noticed after posting stuff is that they always look so much sloppier compared to what I thought it looked like beforehand.
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I have to tap out of this and revisit it someday, I didn't plan properly and the leaves are too hardcore for me to handle now. The ref I used was from the previous post.
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Wait a minute this doesn't feels like sketching...no...not the p word......
Reference img:
I don't think I have ever actually painted a full scene from life or reference before even though I've seen tons of videos about it, gonna go out have dinner and take a walk before I go about tackling this. Should I even attempt color at this point?
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I don't think I can continue today, spent more than 6 hours, gonna go crash for a bit lol
I will try to work on this for at least one more round, not sure how far I can actually push at my level though
The trees are killer as usual
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If you haven't used them before, clipping masks are essentially stencils you can paint and manipulate on the fly. They are very good friends.
You basically just start off with your value blocks all on separate layers
Then in Photoshop make new layer above it, hover your mouse on the line between the new layer and the value block layer, hold Alt and click. You can do this multiple times and make a big stack of layers that are all parented to the mask.
In Krita you select the value block layer and hit CTRL+G to create a clipping group.
Then you can quickly slap down textures with fancy grungy brushes and paint details onto that area without worrying about constantly having to refine the edges.
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Ref pic:
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Yikes I guess I went overboard with the texture stuff and everything looks like a mess in the end lol. I tried out the built-in particle brush from Clip paint and hand painted the other textures. What I learnt is that I really need to find or make my custom brushes for textures or I will never be able to finish anything in the future, took me forever to do this. I don't want to have a million brushes though so I wonder if anyone in here have any tips or techniques to use the least amount of brushes to create the most amount of effects possible? Clip masking is a life saver as usual. Other than that I guess I need to somehow train to see and paint values better, still struggling to sort them out. I still have no idea what's going on down there. Water?
edit: Oh man they actually have texture brushes in Clip paint but it's under "decorations" instead, should have looked harder urgh, I downloaded a bunch of free stuff on their asset store though, I am really impressed by how much stuff they have in there
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Ref img:
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Doing the eye makes me want to try to paint a head again but dang it I have to suddenly go out for dinner and have to rush it, I will have to redo this when I come back later, the proportions are way off
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Face proportions are indeed off. Don't shy away from something like a grid if you think it'll help! Something else I find helpful is to use the ruler tool to drag a vertical line at the edges of facial features on the source ref, which will help you see the horizontal distances between them, how big they should be in relation to each other, and where they should be placed. Then you can make that same series of vertical lines to help guide placing your features.