Advice for faces (thanks!!)

I've been wanting to improve my portrait drawing from references, so an exercise I've been trying is drawing faces with a restricted time, 2 minutes. Each of these faces were done in that amount of time. I've only been doing this for a few days so I still have lots of room for improvement!

https://postimg.cc/gallery/ykzYf9V

Thank you for taking time to critique my work!

I really like how you get the expressions in the eyes, especially in the profiles! And I really like how good these look for just a few days of practice.

Something about the lower parts of the face--jaw, nose, mouth--feels like it's off consistently? It works better for me in the profile images than in the front and 3/4 views. Were I you, I might take some time looking over refs for proportions of that lower half of the jaw, then focus on that area with the next 2m practice?

Take this with every piece of salt available. This is what worked for me, and I think it is quite different from what you attempt.

#1 I don't think you should really go into features within only 2 minutes. Instead, focus solely on getting a good grid, that represents the proportions of the skull properly.

The idea isn't from me, the OG can be checked here: https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-fun-with-a-pencil/page/n35/mode/2up

Do you see those robot looking skulls in the upper left corner of the page? The trick is to practice drawing these over and over, until you know all their lines and proportions by heart. From every possible angle. You don't even really need a reference to practice them, and if you use reference, then only use it to randomize the point of view of your drawing a bit. Try to draw that robot head in the same angle as the face on the reference is, to get a bit of a challenge, and a reason for the site to record your drawing time. Likeness, expression, whatever, ... forget about it until you no longer struggle with perfectly nailing the proportions of an (idealized) head and the placement of the features every single time.

I know, that sounds horribly boring and mechanistic and like wasted time and all. Trust me, it doesn't take as long as it feels now, and once you are good at it, you will see, that suddenly a thousand taxing problems with capturing the head and face just no longer come up with your drawings.

I could type a full description of every line now, but that would be a lot of typing. You can just follow Andrew Loomis descriptions on the prior pages of that pdf, but that head abstraction is so common, and used by so many people, that there must be at least a dozen tutorials on youtube for it. Stan Prokopenski is known to be able to explain drawing practices quite well, so here is a link to follow his explanations:

So, here my explanation, why I don't think practicing to draw a head in 2 minutes or less is a good idea: Because drawing a Loomis abstraction with clean and controlled lines will in itself easily take you 5 to 10 minutes for a long time, and I think it is best practice to start every portrait drawing that way for a long long time, until your pen finds its way home to the stable without you really having to direct it.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 25, 2024 9:31pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 25, 2024 9:32pm.

Hi! Your portraits are beautiful! You have a very solid grasp on expressions and general anatomy, especially with the eyes like Jeannethornton said. I think that you could just spend a little more time analyzing the specific shapes in the faces of your references to pull it all together and fully understand how different faces break down geometrically.

I would actually reccomend using tracing as an exercise, so you can really analyze the shapes of the face. This is how I use tracing: I use my laptop w/ my ref photo underneath my paper on full brightness, so it shines through the paper, and then I spend 5 mins breaking down the shapes of the face like the eyes, mouth shapes, etc. Then, I take out my laptop from under the paper and spend 5 mins drawing the ref w/out tracing. Finally, I put the sketch I made w/out tracing overtop of the laptop w/ the ref like before to dissect the differences between the photo and what I put down on paper. I find I can see more clearly if the jaw was too big, or if the eyes were way to far apart, than if I was just looking side-by-side.

Hope this helps!

Hey Graphite,

I completely agree with Aunt. Structure is key when it comes to faces. No matter how well you can draw an eye or other details of a face, they will always look off if the base (i. e. mass of the skull) isn't done properly. Especially if your goal is drawing from imagination at some point.

Also yes, most definetly take your time at the beginning and focus on the process, not the results.

I just wanted to add one thing. The skull is already a more complex mass put together from different primitive shapes. You should be able to rotate a box on paper before moving forward to more complicated stuff. If you have problems with that, I recommend doing the 250 box challenge (on drawabox.com) if you wanna go all in. Boring as it might be at times it will positively affect everything and anything you draw, as your brain will have gotten much better at imagining and simplifying 3D space.

I ran into a similar problem just recently when studying hands. I just couldn't seem to get it right and then noticed, that my box game just wasn't up to par. Ironically enough, the shortcut here is not taking the shortcut. :D

Keep up the good work and happy drawing!

• Mahatmabolika edited this post on July 26, 2024 10:35am.
• Mahatmabolika edited this post on July 26, 2024 11:32am.