Hi Kuru,
I think you should be really happy. This is a great drawing. I am really an amateur however I did note that the angle of the face you have drawn is quite different from the book. This shows especially from her lips down. If you moved the lips and chin out more I think that it would appear closer to the book photo.
Hope this helps.....but I still think you have done a great job!

My 2 cents is: if you want to copy the photo, I would say your drawing is somewhat more "aged" than the photo. May be there are something to say on the details here and there. However, all the differences are coherent.
In the present state, the photo and your work do not engender the same feeling. Your drawing is very powerful and dramatic. I would suggest you keep the work as it is and do not try to do more to copy the photo. I'm afraid you would destroy the force of your creation at this time!
Just an idea. Sorry, if you don't agree!
Regards,
An

Hey,

thanks guys for your comments i appreciate it... I am happy with the drawing I guess I wasnt satisfied with it cause I was comparing it with the picture and didnt think to see the drawing by itself...also I thought I made some proportional errors with the nose it just seems wrong for some reason but I am glad you guys like it and I wont alter this one ill try to do another one just for the sake of trying to build my accuracy in drawing

kuru

So I took the antelope in the front and drew it and added my own background. I tried my best to draw by just shading just the form and no lines. I want to know if I got the lighting right I was going for the light source to be kind of top left in relation to the pic.

Hi Kuru. Wow...you sure are putting in some work here. I can see the progress, though...that's great. First off, the proportions of the Antelope look pretty darn good. One really challenging thing about your photo is that it's an overcast day, so there isn't any strong contrast between light and dark. It's more difficult to create form under these conditions. You've got all the indications of musculature in the right place, but the contrast of the indication lines is just a bit stark, especially on the front shoulder. One thing that might help you see values better is to convert your reference to B/W. Squint and see how much contrast is visible. Another thought might be to separate the antelope from the background by making the background significantly lighter or darker.

Again, great job...keep plugging away!

I agree your photo to start with is challenging ...myself I like to try things outside my normal way of drawing or my everyday portraits . You are doing some really great work here .

This is my "new" style; black and white with color only in certain key areas that may appear random. Sometimes I hate this piece because there are speckles of gesso showing threw in certain areas, and sometimes I really like it. I personally think I did a good job on the eye. I tried to achieve a sense of depth, and make it one of the focal points. The nose is not my favorite area, and I think it could have been better. I was going to for surrealistic/realistic genre, something that stems from reality yet distorts it.

Medium: Pastel, Graphite, Charcoal and some (very little) ink.
Support: 160lb Watercolor paper with Gesso and Pumice mixture.
Size: 16x20

I have been painting on and off for roughly 5 years.

Breaking The Shell
Click to view attachment

I had to search a while on the Intertubes, but I finally found this:

(which comes from http://shyninjahinata.blogspot.com/ .)

This is a classic example of what people usually mean when they talk about surrealism: a very realistic depiction of something impossible or nonexistent. This particular piece uses the same "peeling away the face to reveal what's underneath" idea as yours.

Now, the reason I posted this is to ask which is stylistically closer to the goals you had for your piece: this image, or yours? I realize that content-wise you're trying to say something different than what this artist is saying, but is the "manner of speaking" similar or different from what you're striving for?

I think you're heading in the right direction with what you are trying to achieve. You have the concept, but I don't' believe you've thought it out or researched your models enough. I see this piece as incomplete. You have a central head, floating in space, with nothing in the background to give the viewer any guidance or to ground the image. Compositionally, putting something centrally is generally a no no. It lacks interest and limits the viewer's ability to travel around the image.

I like the mottled skin effect you've done, its very well rendered but technically, to pull this off, your drawing skills need refining. Tha support and medium you're using is interesting but provides challenges for realistic rendering.

If you're aiming for realism/surrealism, accuracy plays a key role. I see the features as a little overworked and messy in places and the hard lines around the eye should be softer. In the area that is broken away, are you looking at the epidermis showing or is it something else? It seems to lack definition, if realism is what you want. I struggle to see form on this side, but perhaps there isn't any intended. The overall shape of the head especially from eyes to top of skull should be remeasured to ensure accuracy. It looks a bit long to me. As well the shape of the chin may be off also.

I would suggest that you revisit the concept you have in mind and research it before putting pencil to paper. Decide on a composition, background, do some thumbnail sketches to work out light sources and values, test colours and mediums. Use real life to put reality into your drawings, then morph them into whatever you want. If drawn from imagination, it rarely works in the genre you're after. You need a subject to know exactly what is represented, not memory.

I know this seems harsh, but working hard on the technical side of drawing pays off in spades for the future. We all want to get to the 'goody' part and often fail to work through the stage where we feel a piece is finished but to a fresh eye, its only partially done.

I'd like to see you restart this piece, based on solid research and a strong idea of what you want to convey visually. I think you could really make an impact with it.

It's hard to say, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your question. I was striving for an idea based in reality. In a manner or speaking I would say that what I was striving for is different. Perhaps then Surreal is not quite genre that fits. It's more a representation of reality that is more of a spiritual view of what is happening. Sort of like looking in on your own life from the outside. I think I need to deepen my study of art genre's before trying to classify things in the future.

--

IslanderNL,

Quite enlightening. Your quite right about allot of things, and have brought me back to face the issues that I have to deal with. My skills sort of came out of nowhere about 5 years ago, and I skipped around inside the basics for quite sometime before just deciding that I no longer needed to study them; yet I always end up going back to look over them to pick up on what I missed.

The head itself was intended to be hollow inside. The idea being that once the shell is broken away it reveals that there are no limits, and my fears have all along been non-existent. I had a really hard time (as your can see) trying to make it clear that one is looking at the other side of the skull through the missing pieces.

I will definitely take your advice and rethink the whole thing, and give it another go. It just seems that things work out best when I have no plan, no clue as to where I will end up, or so I thought it worked out best. Seems that the advice I often give about having a good foundation to build upon is something I need to rediscover for myself.

I must admit, in the short time that I been using these forums, I have gained an enormous wealth of information. There are truly some great people here.

It is good to skip around and play with mediums and support so you eventually find your niche. That's how we learn. And there must be learning in there, not just skipping around. My personal training let me explore different mediums but made sure that I knew the technical side of how to apply that particular medium to a support, often a painful lesson.

I was once told to never explain a painting to a viewer. They should put their own interpretation on it without any clues from the artist. A hollow head could work well, but get hold of a skull and see how the shadowing would work for this to make it have some real impact. Putting a concept onto paper is never easy, especially when it is an emotionally driven concept. That is where reality will work for you - basing your drawing on real subject matter then twisting it. Several years ago I did a class with Armin Mersmann on symbolic self portraiture and that whole area may be one you'd like to explore. You choose items that represent you, not a traditional face. The process makes you think hard, do your homework and pulls your creativity out, but makes you work in realism. I'm still working on that drawing!

Letting pieces evolve can create interesting results, but it can leave you hanging too or wishing you'd planned ahead if you reach a dead end. Loose paintings I can let evolve, but even then I have the germ of an idea in the back of my head and the trails of line on the paper before I start.

I think that's because there's no consistent lighting on the figure, and I think that's because it's entirely imagination based. Part of what Islander is getting at with the "morphing reality" approach is that you can use models to help you see what your imaginary scene would look like if it were made real. For example, a hollow thin-walled sphere with a smallish hole in the front, lit from the side, would be quite dark at the back, and there would be a specific pattern of light and dark that would help the viewer recognize the exposed broken edge at the right side. For example, you might look at photos of broken eggs:


I see a dark inside, and bright edges; and I see how the broken-ness changed the silhouette. Also note how the side lighting explains the spherical shape of the egg itself.

That egg really makes a huge difference thank you. Going to have to take advantage of this.

I've been a bit quiet lately. I've begun to restudy the basics, and try to cover all that I've missed. Kind of boring... But will be worth it!

Kuru... I agree the drawing is solid and you should be proud.

Though in response to what you are asking...

"also I thought I made some proportional errors with the nose it just seems wrong for some reason but I am glad you guys like it and I wont alter this one ill try to do another one just for the sake of trying to build my accuracy in drawing"

..... you are seeing a combined effect of small things that is causing your feelings. Portraiture requires great accuracy to every small detail, and angle. Little things being a little off each on their own pulls "likeness" further and further away. I see... yes the nose angle is not smooth enough... the face in the ref is very diagonal, almost from corner to corner, this follows through even into the chin (though not as much), you do not have the main angle on, and it varies further from correct at the chin.... the lips are too large, and look a bit more masculine (mainly becase of size) in the drawing than the ref. Though all small issues they add to pull the likeness away. Not that that is bad thing by itself, but you seemed to be curious as to the why.

This is a portrait I did recently of Emmy Rossum. It wasn't "for fun", but it took me a short time to complete it. Before anyone says anything, let me point out that I know I should have gone darker. I want feedback regarding the hair and the face. Also, can anybody give tips on shading? Mine always looks "smudgy". Be brutal in your critiques. I want to learn!

Hi,

I see a lot of things I really like here! The mouth and nose are really very good, and the irises are illuminated beautifully. I like the cast shadows from the nose and lips. Good observation and good execution.

The area where I'd like to see the most improvement is the hair. In the photo she has beautiful shiny hair with lots of dark areas and brilliant highlights, but in the drawing, all I see are a lot of hairs. You should worry far more about the areas of light and dark, and far less about the individual hairs. You'll never draw every hair on a person's head, so you shouldn't try! Instead concentrate on the masses of hair and the large light and dark shapes.

As for shading: if you use smudging (i.e., tortillons, tissue) to move graphite around, then it looks smudgy, and there's nothing you can do about that. That's a style of drawing in graphite that some people like and some don't. Lee Hammond obviously makes a fine living drawing that way.

But there are alternatives: Brenda Hoddinott (the owner of Drawspace) mostly uses cross-hatched lines, which gives a bold, graphic look which I really like. Check out the lessons on Drawspace and you'll find several explaining how to do it. Another approach is called circulism, which is basically a fancy name for shading by drawing tiny, overlapping circles, building up layers using light strokes. Quite a few people here use that technique (I'm one of them.) Either crosshatching or circulism give a much crisper look than smudging.

And one last word: I can't overemphasize the importance of using a sharp pencil when sharp lines are needed. Dull pencils draw fat, diffuse lines, and they're incapable of filling the "tooth" of your paper so they leave fuzzy white bits. If you'd like a sharper, more focused look, then keep your pencils sharp!

You have an overall likeness here, but it needs some tweaking to get to the high level of accuracy that you seem to be aiming for. Observation is something that is learned and comes with practice. Seeing and translating that through the brain's labels into what is actually there can be challenging. In portraiture, measuring and proportion are key elements in getting accurate likeness.

Have a look at the eyes. The viewer's right lower eye lid should come up a bit. See on the reference that it overlaps the lower part of the iris slightly whereas in your drawing there is a gap. The left eye needs adjusting as it arches up too high and should be longer, being slightly covered by the hair. Increasing the shading on the internal sections of the eye will help form the curve.

The mouth looks fine, but I think you need to remeasure the length of the chin from the bottom lip to the bottom of the chin, it looks a bit short to me.

The jawline seems to go too far back before it curves upwards towards what would be the ear. This throws off the likeness also.

The hair is coming together, but you're a long way off from completing it. This and heavier shading will give the portrait more depth. Unfortunately, using fan images like this are the poorest form of references as they are over lit by flash and have little character in terms of lighting, becoming a nightmare to draw from.

Speed isn't a factor in any drawing and speed generally is why artists become frustrated and give up. Quality drawings do take time and there really aren't shortcuts. Shading is a topic in its own right and as Ernest said, there are several ways of doing so. I personally don't like blending. Its a technique that simply grinds the graphite into the paper, lessening the artist's ability to add more layers. I also see blending as a bad habit that artists can get into and not easily break. I prefer to use the pencil to create the values and see blending the graphite as a last resort or for small areas or specialized pieces.

Thanks for all of the advice! The hair was really hard to draw and i get what you're saying about drawing individual hairs. I'll have to experiment with shading... cross hatching sounds fun!

Thanks for the advice! I draw too quickly and i often give up if it doesn't "look right". I'll slow down next time. I get what your saying about cross hatching, but I don't know if I'm doing it right because when I do it, I can see each individual pencil line and their usually darker or lighter than the ones surrounding it. It doesn't look "uniform". I guess I'll have to practice!

Hi All.

I would like to ask you to send me your opinion about the drawing below "Playing the guitar".
The contrast, shadows, perspective, angles of body parts etc.

Thank you very much.

MiStr