seeing the whole.

[RLPY]

When making a self portrait i always draw every part on its own without seeing the whole picture. I'm looking for a more systematic approach,
i tried do do a sp with these lines first but i ended up doing the exact same thing as before.

[The Pariano]

Step back.

[RLPY]

I did but then i cant see myself in the mirror good enough to alter the mistakes immediately.

[George Abraham]

Start vague, siluette, big forms big tones and move in a phased approach towards more specifics.

Seeing the whole is to me a mental trick where you "grab onto" your awareness of the larger picture while you are placing smaller stuff, so those marks are somehow energetically or emotionally(feeling) connected or related to the total effect of what you want to achieve. It just works much better that way. It's one of those things you have to habituate, like myself I'm impatient.

Seeing the whole is critical in conceptualising, you have to get concept down before you start construction, starting with construction is a misconception some books might teach but it fawks it up and you have to hope for some sort of composition. Just not a good way to work. Loomis successfull drawing fixes this with the five P's and five C's.

Seeing the whole is also projection, the trick about projection is to "establish" what you project onto the paper, so that you can focus on other stuff, the stuff you put down then serves as markers and pieces of infomation in turn you can grab on once more for working on other stuff. To aid establishing projection artists would jump from the most left side to the right side or from working on the top of something to moving to the bottom.

[Hyskoa]

Squint, the more you squint the more your subject will look like dark VS light areas.
Paint those light and dark areas, use pure ivory black and pure white if necessary.
Once the outlook of what you see when you squint at both places look the same, squint a tiny bit less. See slightly more values. Add those too.
And so on, until you're not squinting.

[AndreasM]

Look at Velasquez, read about velasquez, apply.

And yea, squint alot. Get an onverview of all the value relationships you see that are going to be painted on the canvas.

Read both books by harold speed: "the practice and science of drawing" and "oil painting techniques and materials" He says everything i want to say ten times better. His texts should be mandatory reading for anoyne here loking for quick advise/solutions. Not saying that he provides them...

Unless you are painting grisaille, avoid using pure blacks or whites for the more extreme values. Usually, there is alot more color in both the high lights and the dark shadows than most beginners think they see. And getting the color of the shadow right in the first place, is cruicial, since it serves as the key for all the remaining colors.

[J Wilson]

There's no tricks (ok, squinting is kind of a trick). You just need to develope better work habits of taking a frequent step back, and evaluating your over all progress. Also, if you get into the habit of working from large and general down to smaller and more specific you'll likely make fewer errors. If each stage is pretty much right, you shouldn't have many surprises.

You have the hard part done though, which is recognizing the problem. Now you just need to train yourself to work differently to correct it.

[AChipps]

It sounds like you are concentrating on the details, and that is part of improving. If you have not started to watch each part in action to study muscle movements that would be next. What you are going through is just a stage of study, to remember each part and not the whole, because it is just a matter for breaking pose combinations down to what you can work with in detail. When you ar finished, you should be able to imagine any pose, and use the cobinations from memory to assemble the perpective pose, and draw the muscle positions, and muscle strain for each part of the body as a whole pose, but that takes time. Your mind needs more information to start. I could be the study of hands that can hold you back, or anything, before you can imagine the body as a whole.
One thing most artist forget is when you are stuck, or have an artist block, it is because your mind don't have enough information to work with, and not drawing don't help, but study and drawing will always get you through the problem. You don't get that from drawing from life because you don't use your brain, just your eyes, and hands to record what you see, growing into a mindless operation.

[dose]

Check out this thread from last Spring, which has a lot of suggestions for this:

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=127308