B Pencil Portraits

[Twon Smith]

I have recently gotten back into drawing with pencil after finding a figure drawing class in my home town. Here are some portrait sketches that I have worked on this past week. I hope you like them.

[Boosnap]

i like the robert deniro portrait. Your doing a great job, just work on your proportions. Your eyes are quite slanted.

[elenaM]

I like the way you sketched them.

[agentouchie]

oh man - you've got great style, you make really interesting marks and your stuff has a really neat sense of depth. i think if you focus a little more on underlying structure and proportion these can go from "that's awesome" to "damn that's really awesome!".

[Art_Addict]

The outline and outside drawing suggests a certain amount of focus and attention to the features in most of them which is not bad at all.
But you lose so much of it by quite aggressively putting down values and inside modeling which is quite a pity.

What I think would help is a clear and constructive idea of why shapes appear rounded and voluminous by the way light hits them.
Atm none of your drawings suggests the feeling of being lit. Which is why they appear flat on the page.

One of the best ways to learn those principles is by drawing from life in stead of from photographs. Preferably a single source indoor lighting situation.
There are many fine books written on the subject such as those from Ted Seth Jacobs (http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Open-Mind-Reflections-Teacher/dp/0823014657/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210970517&sr=8-1) and Tony Ryder (http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Open-Mind-Reflections-Teacher/dp/0823014657/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210970517&sr=8-1) that go into detail about those ideas and they're a bargain on amazon atm.
But I'll give you a few things you may consider in your next drawing ;
The first thing to determine is where your light is coming from. The direction being determined by its angle and its tilt. Once you established that, you are ready to think about how the form you're observing is being lit.
Every spot on your subject relates to the light source by 2 ideas, namely : Proximity and orientation. Proximity being the distance to the light source and orientation being the amount of curvature or plane change of the surface relative to the light source.
Light rays always travel in straight rays out from the source and diminish in strenght the further they travel away from it's source. So everything on your subject that is further away from the light source will therefore be darker then everything that is closer by = proximity
Secondly, every rounded surface will turn darker the more it turns away from the light source = orientation

Light and shadow : every part of your subject is either in the light or in the shadow. The area where a form turns into shadow is called the terminator or form shadow's edge. This is the area that receives the least amount of light on your subject apart from very dark accents like inside of nostrils etc..
because of reflected light usually being bounced into your shadows.

Certain areas in your setting will reflect light from the light source back into the shadow side of your subject. Reflected light behaves just as highlights by the law of incidence and reflection.

Cast shadows are shadows that are being cast on a form by another. They shape as they follow the form they're being cast upon.

Just a few ideas to get you going, hope it helps a bit..

Tom