Self Portrait 01

[Knick Knack]

http://www.acamoth.net/art/selfportrait01.gif

First off, let me just point out that the collar there is from hunger. xD Oops.

I have blenders, but as you can see, I'm still not 100% sure how to use them yet. Also, the photo reference I used depicted my hair as much messier. x) Chalk the editing here up to slight vanity on my part.
I'm thinking my left eyebrow looks a little strange - too low. Also, I shoud have darkened the frames of the glasses so they'd stand out more, I think. Now that I think of it, one of my professors was talking about working on tinted paper; maybe I should've used the blender to make a slightly gray background.
And my neck's doing something funky; I don't know what happened there.
Well anyway, does anyone have any other weak points to point out here? I think I'm slowly getting the hang of this realism thing and I'd like to work on my weaknesses more.

[That fat kid]

Hey Knick Knack,

Step one is to either attach the image directly through this sites free image hosting, or use an external host like Photobucket to have the image appear within your post. Makes it easier to critique, and because of that, you'll get more critiques.

Anyhow, as its a contour drawing, there's a focus on the lines, as there's so few other things to look at, aside from the negative space. Make sure you're making accurate and specific marks. I can teel there's some generalization going on, especially in the eyes. It actually looks like you're using a bunch of lines and hoping one of them is right. Try to keep yourself from doing that and really focus on what's really there. When drawing eyes with only line, remember that there's a lot going on, the eyelids have thicknesses, and there's a lot of little abcesses and gullies around the interior corner of the eye, lots of little details that help to establish likeness. I kind of assume you're working from a photo, because of the angle, and the distortion of the features. next time, you'll learn a lot more and a lot quicker if you work from life.

I'd also like to steer you away from blenders for the time being....its kind of easy for newer artists to flatten things out when using them as they (the blenders) tend to make one fairly consistent grey and the darks and highlights are brought back up to describe the form.

I'd say this could use more time in general. One of the hardest things to do is to learn how to spend time on drawings to bring them up to a finished level. One of the first drawings I did, I told my teacher "i'm finished," and he said "good, now spend three more hours on it.

Anyhow, keep working!

~A

[masque]

learn to pay close attention to proportion and alignment. unfortunately, photo refs can make this difficult because they often "lie" -- the lenses of many non-pro cameras are so wide angle that they distort the true perspective of close portraits (the human face is generally better photo'd with a longer focal length lens) -- so you have to compensate some.

in your SP, the size of the eyes is too disparate, the near being much larger than the far. their alignment is a bit off also, which is amplified by the similar misalignment of the eyeglass frames. the mouth seems too small and placed a tad low, but this may simply be my looking for "classic" proportions and alignments. without seeing you or the ref it's hard to say, but i think it'd be more pleasing and perhaps more accurate if adjusted. the hair as it sweeps down across the forehead flattens the implied contour of the brow, reducing the sense of volume in the head form. the neck looks funky because it is ambiguous, hard to tell what the lines are supposed to be describing.

some of these problems may be due to trying to copy too closely a photo ref, and copying the distortions that these can have. they'd be much more visible in a drawing.

i did a bit of Photoshop adjustment with a markup to show you how things might look given the above comments.
87096

and work on rendering tones in the entire drawing, to better describe the volume of the forms and the planes of the face.

[afterthought]

think of hair in values, and don't have a line going thru ur head where the hair splits.

[JL.Alfaro]

Masque is right on. Great job masque!
Follow his advice and you will be fine.