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thehonedstiletto

PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 7:26 pm


Not exactly sure if non-members can create threads such as these. Anyways, this upcoming bit is not an excuse, My art teacher for portfolio work said that we shoudl do a self-porttrait wihtout using the picture and only staring at it, memorizing the features for a good five minutes or so. Sadly the picture was on my computer at school and I printed off a copy of it to wrok from. I odid the exercise and my god the image is s**t but, I would liek soem critique on it as I am trying to get into art college so it is much appreciated.

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P.S. sorry for the size of the damn thing.
PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 7:41 pm


I don't know what your face looks like so to avoid the risk of insulting you by pointing out anything anatomical, you should probably give a picture
Otherwise I think it is extremely rough lacks contrast; I can barely tell where you did some shading and I think you need to make it more noticeable since values on your face aren't going to just be that subtle

otimohoT


thehonedstiletto

PostPosted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 2:22 pm


Tohomito
I don't know what your face looks like so to avoid the risk of insulting you by pointing out anything anatomical, you should probably give a picture
Otherwise I think it is extremely rough lacks contrast; I can barely tell where you did some shading and I think you need to make it more noticeable since values on your face aren't going to just be that subtle
okay, I'll draw another one then use my cameraphone (sadly only working camera that doesn't require exorbanant amoutn of work to use in the house) later this evening. cOnsidering the differing time zones due to states being 5 to 7 hours behind europe. Will post it in here when I'm done with it.

Edit: Ok hands are getting tired and as per usual I'm probably making loads of errors already so I've decided to leave the rest of it to morning. I have the two stages (blocking, blending start) below. They are 1024x768 size and contain the image of me to the right where as the self portrait is to the left. The picture is, sadly a bit odd not sure what made phoshop do that change to it when I screenshotted the images.
[uploading to imageshack as well atm for the thumbnail since these files can be obnoxious in size.]

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And the camera picture by itself, note that it's low quality (my cameraphone is incredibly crap when it comes to resolution):
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 21, 2008 4:54 pm


Alright,...You're running into a common problem of drawing what you think you see, not what you're actually seeing; since you're working from a photo it should be easier to spot differences between your drawing and your source material. What's happening is your left brain is using symbols it can quantify in place of accurate representations.
You're going to want to focus on rendering shapes and the shapes or spaces between them. Since you're working from a photo, it should be much easier to mentally break up the image and duplicate it. So instead of drawing what you know to be an eye, you're going to be drawing a collection of shapes as described by your source photo to build a representation of your source photo...that just happens to look like an eye.
(Am I making any sense there?)

Right now, you have a problem with shrinking the facial features to fit in a much smaller space than where they would normally lie. The second drawing you posted shows that it may not be your shrinking the features, so much as overestimating the space of the jaw and cranium around them. With the side-by-side comparison in the second, you can see that the space between the eye and the side of the cranium is vastly larger than on your source photo.
You might be starting to focus on details to quickly, as well. Your goal right now should be layout/structure; once you get the proportioning right, you can start adding in subtle values, anatomical details, etc. Start with blocking in sections with shapes. Try viewing planes and shadows as flat shapes to be rendered later, it'll help you place things more accurately.
Start simple and progress only when the simple blocking is looking accurate.

If your art teacher doesn't take offense, I'd also recommend working in black and white. Removing color from the drawing will help you learn and focus on the representation and help you pin down value changes. And since you're drawing digitally, you can come back at a later stage and paint over it in color on a separate layer.

But I'm not a guild member either, so I take what I say with a grain of salt whee

mr_smite


thehonedstiletto

PostPosted: Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:05 am


I very much appreciate the critique mr_smite, I'll take that into account hadn't noticed most of that until it was pointed out to me. I'll work on the shapes and the size of the cranium and jaw then on a new piece and post it up here when I think I have the proportions layed out properly. Considering I did a head anatomy study a while back, it might help. smile
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