Hey you are really coming along there, this is nice Kaly. Go darker though get into those 6,7,8 and 9B pencils press on them and bring out the richness that shadows and 3/4 tones do, you got the likeness now add the contrast, you can do it.

WOW this is Fabu-tastic! I have not seen any Rays much better than this. Great Job, and for the record I think Zombielunch is such a cool name (spookie kool)

There is this guy by the name of Richard Brown, he has been my inspiration and benchmark he and his brother, if you got a sec and you'd like to check out his art, scoot on over to www.brownblackandwhite.com this guy is awesome (in my opinion) and he has a version of Ray there similar to yours. Later

Dave, thank you very much for this explaining on colours I do mix them before, but was mixing the wrong colours I've copied you list and will use it next time, thanks again.


John, thank you, the teeth and the eyes were the most dificult for me, I also have to buy some thinner brushes, for the ones I have are to big for those details. About the shading,the nose and the jaw... I will try to better next time.
Thank you for always having time and pacience for me

Barbara, thank you.

Exactly, thank you too, I will follow your tips on my graphity portraits

PS. By the way my husband liked the portrait and didn't seem to mind those mistakes at all normaly he is my biggest critique, but this time he said it was great. I think he was beeing sweet bacause he knows I tried.

love you all and thanks again

There are lots of different colour-choices you could use - for example, you could do it in cadmiums - but the idea is that the colours are pre-mixed down to the correct chroma (colour intensity), and as strings of value. The advantage of doing it with yellow ochre, and even with venetian red as another alternative to permanent alizarin, is that you don't need the high chroma of the cadmiums (so why not use less expensive paint, too? ) as most fleshtones, even for someone heavily suntanned, or dark-skinned, are much less colour-intense than people often make them.

Thanks again Dave, I apreciate all the information I can get.

my latest 1/2 hour sketches;if you recognize them it means that i am on the right path.

Elena I hope I'm not wrong, but I think the 1st one is Salvador Dali; 2nd barmakalikhani, and 3rd. ME Lovely work!!

obrigado, Clara.Guess what, you guessed

Here I have two attempts at my portrait from photo(1988)
First was done March 15, 2008(10 days before joining drawspace)

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second attempt on August 7,2008.
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What do you think?

I think you've made progress Elena. The shapes and values are much better in the most recent drawing. The more you observe and draw, the easier it will become. In portraiture measurements are key. You need to drop imaginary lines from key features and see where they line up with other features.

For instance see where the edge of the mouth lines up with the outer iris on the viewer's left eye and how it meets the inner corner of the eye on the viewer's right.

Also look at the angle of the eyes themselves and how they differ. Use your pencil and lay it across the drawing to see how the outer angles of the eyes differ.

I made a quick sketch using your photo and dropped some lines to show you what I mean when lining up angles and intersecting points.

Finally, your drawing can only be as good as the photo you're using and this photo isn't a good one to draw from. The shadows are minimal and the image is grainy so you can't see the details that you need to create a great drawing. I know you like this photo, but it would be useful to you to use a recent, clear photo or to do a self portrait from life. Use natural light and observe shapes and angles carefully to ensure you have a likeness before you start adding shading.



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Hello,
This is my first posting and i am very excited about learning to use a site that has fine folks that are interested in portrait art as i am. If any of you will be willing to coach me on my drawing of my nephew and his new wife, i would be most grateful. This is my second portrait i have drawn. It is color pencil on vellum.

Very nice work!

Thank you, Jeanette for your time and detailed explanations. I saved the two demos in my files for further study. I actually do a very rough approximation with my eye from the features I see, nothing academic and i want to learn to be more technical. I did a life self portrait in the mirror back in March, I have to scan it some day.As you noticed I like that photo and i want to be able to work with any kind of pictures poor or good.What I am after is the likeness at this point i don't seem to achieve easily.Thanks again.

I bought a set of 12 pastels from the supermarket when I was getting my shopping and tried to draw Chris Hoy, the Scottish track cyclist who won 3 medals. For a first attempt with pastels, I was reasonably pleased with the result.

I bought a set of 12 pastels from the supermarket when I was getting my shopping and tried to draw Chris Hoy, the Scottish track cyclist who won 3 medals. For a first attempt with pastels, I was reasonably pleased with the result.

Hi everyone, man there's alot of talented people on this forum, wish i had some more talent.

I sketched a portrait of my son and its the first portrait i have ever done, i am trying real hard at hair and shading and this is where i am so far, any input would be great please.

Hi Wolf,

Looking good! You've captured his likeness and you have a good eye for detail. For the next portrait -- or even for this one, if you would consider keeping on with it -- here are a few things to concentrate on:

First and foremost, you want to get rid of all the lines, replacing them with changes in tone. For example, a person's lips aren't defined by a line surrounding them (of course) -- they're defined by their color and texture. That's what you want to do here. Also, although the upper eyelid folds look like discrete lines, they're really not; they are areas of shading. Rhey are dark at the center and fade away up and down, with no discrete edges. Your drawing should do the same.

Second, hair is tricky, but in a way, you've already started down the right path by not trying to draw each little strand (a mistake some folks make.) What you want to do instead is draw each lock of hair, as its colors and highlights change along its length. The large flat areas of tone within the hair have to go!

Third, don't be shy about strong tones -- or as we like to say around here, "Don't be afraid of the dark!" Look at the inside of the mouth and the inside of the ear on our right in the photo; see how dark they are? Your drawing should be just as dark in those places.

Good luck, and keep up the good work!

thanks for the help there Ernest, i'm gonna try and add more to this sketch and see how it turns out. Its very scary to use more dark tones, i keep thinking i'll ruin what i have so far, but i guess i can try again

It's only paper, as we say. But the secret to using dark tones without ruining anything is to build them up slowly. Don't grab a big dull soft pencil in your first and stab at the paper -- build dark tones up with multiple light layers. You get much more control this way!

Hi wolf,

I endorse what Ernest is saying, you want your drawing to have depth and contrast, I couldn't add anything to what he said, in these beginning stages don't be afraid to go dark, don't even be afraid to even spoil a few to get the hang of it, it's worth it. Keep up the good work!

great contrast! I love it.

Hello there,

This my first post on the forum

Well, I started drawing long time ago, but never took any classes. I wanted to study arts but ended up studying psychology (my parents disaproved of me studying arts). When that happened I slowly left drawing behind as I felt I don't have what it takes for it.

5 years have past for me without drawing a single line. At the begining of 2008 I slowly started to draw again ... but unfortunately I do it rare, as I have a job and other responsibilities. I do want to learn though.

My friends like my drawings and can't help me with critics and advices, so I come to you for this. Here is my last portrait - it was a gift so I can't make this one better, but your recommendations will be applied at the next one.

Thanks!

(let's see how do you attach images here )

Hi Adia,

I think you did an excellent job.In fact I couldn't find anything to add. Maybe others will. But I like what you did with the strong shadows, lightening them. Your drawing gives more credit to your friend than the picture.

Keep up the good work

hello Adia

I'm with Nathalie, well done!!I also like the drawing better

hi again, i added a bit more detail or shading if you will and wanted to know if you think i should stop cause i thought to myself if i keep going i may go too far

The lips are looking great!

The eyes look a little freaky. I see in the photo that the irises do have dark rings around them, but you have to draw them more subtly. Imagine that the lighter part of the iris is a sea urchin or tribble or something furry or spiky, and it appears against a black circle behind it. Parts of the black appear between the fur or spikes or whatever. Instead a a strong even ring of black, it kinds of fades into the middle, as it is gradually covered by the light-colored fur. That's the effect you want to go for.

There's plenty more I could say, but you can only progress so far on one drawing! I think this is quite good and I think after a little work on the eyes you probably want to wrap it up. I hope we soon see your second, third, and fourth portraits!

For the next one, check out this hair tutorial, which was a huge help to me when I first found it.

ya i do see what your speaking of and i hope to get better with more practice, this was definately tricky

thanks for the constructive critism and hopefully i'll learn as i go onto the next one

Thank you Nathalie and Kaly!

I will do my best to make the next one better.

Also, thank you Ernest for the hair tutorial!

Sketch of a Luxor boy, Ziyad.

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Elena, are you interested in C&C?

of course, ernest.Thanks.

OK, Elena, this is a general comment about a number of recent portraits. It might be that I'm just pointing out a feature of a style you're developing, but it might also be something you would want to address -- I don't know, you'll have to tell me! If it's deliberate please accept my apologies, because there's nothing wrong with abstraction. Your art has definitely progressed to the point where style matters.

Anyway, it seems to me that many of your recent portraits, this one included, seem to be elongated vertically. It's even more pronounced in the Woody Allen and some of the others, but even in this one I can see the hair looks high, the nose looks long, the neck looks stretched, etc. It's very reminiscent of Modigliani, actually.

Now, I've seen this happen by accident in my own drawing on a few occasions when I've drawn on a flat, high surface -- i.e., a tall kitchen island with a chair that's not quite high enough, for example. I usually work on a board that I hold in my lap, so it's at an angle to the horizontal; the board is roughly at a right angle to my line of sight as I look down at my lap. If I draw on a high horizontal surface, I find that the drawing looks right to me as I draw it, but when I'm done and I stand back to look, I see that it's elongated. The distortion comes from the viewing angle.

So, for you, is it deliberate? If so, I feel like you could push it further, and use it more intentionally to accentuate the specific features of the model.

Well, Ernest, first thanks for your time.I might have a cause in this elongation problem; I do these portraits directly from the screen on my keyboard support for my drawing pad.But Woody and Ziyad do have elongated heads. Maybe I just exaggerated them. It wasn't intentional but i noticed this fact while drawing them and after.Is it bothering?I am thinking now of El Greco and he is a fan of elongated faces.

Yes, El Greco, too. As I said, there's definitely nothing wrong with it.
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This is supposed to show two different ways of stretching out a head shape. I think Modigliani and El Greco did something like the lower center one, which is more of a shape transformation; I think this portrait is more the upper right corner one. Imitating the masters is rarely a bad idea

Ernest, I am very casual about what i do. I like the drawing, sketching,.etc. process, the relaxation that it brings me and I am not precise, accurate, obssesed with detail or patient in what I do. I like it spontaneous. I hate copying anybody. That's why i do not copy the masters ever. I find no point in doing so. So take the elongation part as my own viewing of the subject.My interest is in rendering the essence of a face.Did I manage to do this in my portrait? If the answer is yes that means that I have the eye of an artist.

here I am with another elongated portrait. I just don't know how i do it. Please critique.

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The simplest approach to avoiding elongation of faces is to make two quick measurements - height, and width, and mark these, as upper and lower limits, and left and right limits, lightly, proportionately, on the drawing as the very first thing you do. It is very quick, and easy, to do.

I assume, Elena, that you are interested in improving your accuracy - but that you don't want a drawing with a mass of construction-lines that looks like a mechanical-engineering blueprint! I can understand and sympathise with that.

However, even if you are not doing it with a ruler, calipers, or other similar mechanical aids, fundamentally, in drawing one is unavoidably measuring - each time you draw a line, and deciding how long to make it and where to put it, you are effectively doing a measuring task, because you are making a decision about the length of the line.

Now the question is, what can you do to help come to the right decision? - one approach is to:
1.start by lightly sketching in straight lines which approximate to the shapes
2. compare each line to the other lines you have already made, see how the ends of you line relate to the ends of your previous lines.

Ask yourself, with each line you draw:

Is this line too long? or too short? (in relation to other lines)
Is it at the correct angle (too steep? or too shallow?)
Are the spaces between lines correct (for example, how does the height of the upper lip, from the bottom of the nose to the lip-edge, compare with the height from the lip-edge to the chin - is the relationship in the subject matched by the relationship in the drawing).

I'm not suggesting getting out a ruler and measuring millimeters - just eyeballing it but thinking in terms of relative distances and angles.

Dave

Thank you Dave for the tips. I expected some comments on my sketch of Nancy.I plan to email her my drawing and wanted to know if it can be considered a rendering of her features.

Elena, the "tips" are ways of avoiding elongation, they are central principles of getting passably accurate placements of features, to add to and support the information that Ernest had provided above.

Nancy's head needs to be widened by about 15%, and the eyes moved apart to the same extent. The hairline needs to be moved down a bit, and the shape of the nose altered - the wings of the nostrils are higher in the subject than you have them - Animated demo:



She still looks a bit older in the drawing - gentler transitions between lights and darks on the cheeks and around the chin would help there, make the form turn in a more rounded, less angular fashion.

Your drawing of features is pretty good, its just placements/relationships that you're having a bit of trouble with - this is a common problem, and the approaches I've described above would help you improve those problems (I'm working on the same issues myself, trying to improve my own accuracy).

Dave

Thanks again. As I can see from your posts your major problem in understanding art and drawing is achieving accuracy. Mine is not. I want to be free and capture as much as i can from a glance.I am a spontaneous person in art, I do not measure as i don't want to turn my pleasure of drawing into a technical issue. That's why I would not consider working for commissions or towards copying a photo.If there are elements in my drawing, at this point after 5-6 months of everyday work, so elements that relate to the actual person means I am on the right path and in time I can render beautifully a picture. I don't erase either and like to do quick sketches. If one needs a photo looking like drawing is not me to do it. So I am letting myself manisfest freely and I am not afraid of doing elongated or short or what ever portrait comes out of my pen. This is how i understand practicing and learning by free expression.is anything wrong with that? After all I never went to an academy so i am totally independent. Will I learn this way? yes. I did several portraits at diffrent levels of skill so far and they came out improved each time. Which means that i progress in my own way and pace.Sorry don't wantt to dismiss your tips but my interest at this point is if I can identify nancy's eyes, nose, lips as particular to her.I am a beginner and this shows in every way. Any effort in accomplishing a portrait by working hard and hours is not for me; it spoils my fun.

You asked for critique, and so I gave you constructive critique, specifically addressing the practical problem you are having, and giving you a straightforward solution to it.

Attaining accuracy is NOT the only issue, by any means, and you are very much mistaken if you believe that it is my only interest or motivation. However, it is a simple, and common, technical problem which can be very easily improved.

Improved accuracy in your drawing would not in any way impede your creativity, but instead would allow you to express it and communicate it to others more compellingly. This widespread belief that skill and creativity are somehow mutually exclusive is a very bizarre one, really.

Elena, I'm not trying to spoil your fun, either in drawing, or in taking part in drawspace.



I'm not suggesting you do rigorous sight-size, Bargue plates, or cast drawings!

Whether you think you are measuring or not, you are measuring - its absolutely intrinsic to the process of drawing. Any time you make any sort of comparison between the shapes on your paper, that is a process of measurement



Only that I'd rather draw an elongated head because I choose to do so deliberately, not because it just turned out that way. As a matter of fact, I have drawn elongated heads as a result of misjudgement - I had an issue with assessment of height versus width when just "eyeballing", and the easy solution to this is rough-and-ready measurement - that old thing of holding up the pencil at arms length and getting the distance down the pencil between the aligned top of the pencil and the top of my thumb, and making comparisons of height and width thus.



And neither have I, nor ever taken a formal lesson from a professional artist. Anything I've learned has been by reading books, personal practice, and, in the last 5 years, from the internet.



Which surely comes back to getting their shapes and placements reasonably accurate (sorry, I wish I could think of a better synonym for "accurate" which doesn't have the mathematical implications you seem to be so put off by)



Ultimately, we all learn at our own pace, and if ideas are presented to us before we are ready for them, we tend not to be receptive. However, one of the profoundly empowering things about the internet is the fact that it does enable us all to share information. We no longer have to try to piece it all together by ourselves (which in most places really was the situation if you wanted to draw or paint at all representationally)

I think that the recent growth of online art forums is the most important positive development in art education in the last 100 years. We are all part of a huge, dramatic, and rapidly ongoing democratisation of easy access to good-quality art-education information (at last!). Not only for the self-taught, but, all too frequently, for those who've been to art-school too, even to degree level!

Dave

Hello,

Not too long ago I bought a Wacom tablet and I'm still learning how to use it. I did some other drawings, but nothing big. This is my first attempt for a real portrait - it's still in progress, but I don't really know how to continue it - meaning I don't know how to use the brushes to obtain the right gradients. I will look for some tutorials, but if any of you can help me I will be grateful.

Here is the portrait in 2 of its stages:

WOW!!!! What a fantastic drawing, I want to be you when I grow up!!!! LOL

Fawn

I can't tell you how impressed I am! You really got his likeness down well! I've tried drawing my 2 year old cousin Tichina and I wish it had come out this well! I am going to try again I would like to gift family and friends with drawings this year!!!

By the way your son is sooo cute!!

Fawn

Hi - One easy way to do things is to use a brush set to low opacity, so that one builds up lights or darks by a series of strokes.

Another way would be to create a value-strip going from white through to black, and grab the correct shade as you need, area by area.

These approaches closely parallel techniques which can be used with traditional painting media, if you would like to work with both digital and traditional media.

Dave

Thank you for your answer ... I actually am doing that, but maybe it's a matter of practice and experience. But I still have the feeling I'm doing it wrong. It does not seem like I'm doing it the way the artists who post speed painting clips on youtube.

Adia - while your subject has a terrific, characterful face, I think you are giving yourself quite a hard job with this portrait, as he's entirely in shadow, and his features are only being modelled by diffuse bounced light. This means that you have to have very tight control of the value (that is, the lightness or darkness) of different areas.

You'd be much better practicing on an image with a far wider value-range between the darker and lighter areas of the face, in the first instance.

One approach for giving insight into values is actually to sample (use an area sample, say 5x5 pixels, or slightly guassian-blur the image, so you are not just looking at pixel to pixel variation) a greyscale version of the image in different areas, see the exact brightness level out of the context of the image. (One often finds, doing that, that the results can be surprising)


Dave

Wow, thanks for taking the time to answer me.

I've noticed the value problem ... maybe that's one of the reasons I didn't know how to continue the portrait. But I wanted to do this because it's a picture (that I like very much) of my husband and I wanted to give him the portrait as a gift for his birthday next week ... My first portrait ever drawn (using graphite) was his, 6 years ago, the year we met. I'll attach it to this post.


I will take your advice and I'll show you the results ...

Thank you again,

Andreea

Dang, those are good, Sabu. I really like the mood you captured with the second one. Each portrait seems to me to have a slightly different style -- the first one slightly stylized and the second a bit more realistic. I like them all.