Marc does a great job explaining the planes of the face. I actually got a lot out of the end of the anatomy 2 class in relation to that. The shading itself is fast, its only a few extra minutes of my day. What I'm experiencing if you check those first three heads isn't that I don't understand the planes of the face, it's that I'm failing to implement the proper perspective over the entire face before rendering anything. I was actually rendering each individual element of the face and then trying to tie it all together and it looked like hot garbage. In the Fourth one I sketched out all the elements before rendering anything and it all came together much easier. Another reason I didn't use reference in the first three is that I've taught myself to copy a person's likeness using a reference without these tools and I am trying to push myself to understand the tools themselves without relying on my current skillset before blending them together. A fully rendered head like the one I shared is only taking me like 30 minutes. I've folded that into my daily practice. So I'm doing 45 min gestures, the proportions, and a fully rendered head, and then working on actual work. As far as pretty pictures go, I've actually not had the confidence to work on personal work last week as those three heads really took my confidence down and triggered some imposter syndrome Will definitely check out the videos to see if they have anything I can fold into the daily stuff though. Appreciate the time you took to share them and give feed back, Thank you!

Todays head. More positive progress.

Today's head practice. Hoping by the time I'm done with the other Term 2 classes I'll have this down. Really like this one though. Gonna shoot for a much more foreshortened one tomorrow and up the challenge rating.

@mau.wamp Thanks! I'm definitely less confident with hair but I'll try to push it farther on my next one.

Dropping one of my Photoshop 2 Graphic Design assignments. Behold! A... Beholder!

More heads. These two foreshortened ones really helped me realize a lot of the perspective issues I've had are that because We're starting with a circle when drawing the head, I've been treating the curves of the front of the face as if they are also a circle when they are more elliptical in nature. Especially in these types of poses. Not as stoked about the male, but I feel like the next attempt really shows I'm applying and fixing things based on that knowledge. I also realize that I'm needing to pay attention to the receding perspective on the mouth as well in initial construction. Tried to push the hair value farther today. The references definitely helped me make these connections as I sit and ask why and figure it out.

@mau.wamp Thank you!

Game / Portfolio Title Assignment

Just a very messy layout sketch for my 3 point Perspective assignment that I'll be cleaning up this week.

and my final assignment for Photoshop 2. Box art is by me from earlier this year.

3 point perspective wall for the Perspective 2 Class. I think its pretty much done.

Thank you @mau.wamp @LesleyCarol! I'm thinking I'll have to rotate these perspective drawings into my regular work. It was really challenging and I think I can push it even further in the future. learned so much. Excited to get this final Perspective 2 assignment handled.

Also wanting to drop my progress on the head practice I've been doing daily. They aren't all perfect but I'm super proud of a good number of these.

@nori thank you!

And that 4 point perspective illustration. Since my anatomy knowledge is lacking I really just tried to emulate what Marc shows on the video and plan on continuing to practice this daily in a much simplified line art version in place of doing the 2d perspective exercise that I have been doing every day after my gestures. Once I finish all anatomy classes I plan to revisit this project to do a portfolio piece as suggested. Using a reference and a grid you can probably really game it and make something AMAZING. Cant wait to try it out.

After staring at my 3 pt perspective assignment, I realized I made some mistakes to the left side of the piece. For some reason I was relying on the pre-created perspective lines as the be all end all guides for things I should have been designing. I decided to take another crack at 3 point perspective and use them more as suggestions while sketching and I'm so glad I did. It let me sketch out an idea for something that normally isn't in my comfort zone and I'm pretty pleased with what i got done while streaming tonight. While this isn't finished, it's really allowed me to get a better grasp of what I need to be paying attention to (i hope).

@OpaqueApple Thank you! I was eager to start something else today but I decided to polish that airship up instead!

Probably the biggest challenge yet is learning completely new software. I have no 3D digital sculpting experience going into this, but it's one of the courses I am the most excited about!

Every day I do a full render of a head after gestures as some of you know. This morning I pushed things further. Really just like how this "practice" piece came out and wanted to share it.

Watching Zmodeler Brush tutorials helped me create this almost entirely out of box sculpting. Only a little bit of hpolish and clay build up.

and I exported that into photoshop to create this:

I feel like I'm getting a bit ahead of myself with this stuff so I'll probably dial it back a bit on the extra exploration of the program, but I had a lot of fun working on this once I figured out all the fun functionality of that brush!

@jpbennett02 thank you!!

Ended up taking a few days off the class work after a stressful art show weekend. But back and working on the clothing practice from reference.

First, thank you! It felt good to make some progress on something again.

As far as resources for rendering / painting form / etc, I spent all weekend thinking about this. I've had a lot of practice. A lot. Thats probably where I picked most of it up through the years. Lots of studio art classes. Lots of sketching / drawing / etc.

As far as actionable advice, I don't know much about your process but I will try to suggest some things that I actively do.

I'm going to link you to a chalk sponge brush that I LOVE. Not great for getting sharp edges, but is very helpful for blending values. I do also use soft round and some of marc's brushes depending on what I'm doing but this is a specific tool I'm using.

Get that brush here - it's free.

Any time I'm rendering I have opacity Jitter on, but I also adjust the master opacity of my brush to get more subtle blending if I need to. I usually keep it between 60-80 when doing this, but have taken it as low as 30 if I really just want to barely adjust things.

As far as form goes, I think that really was just logging hours. Observation. I was fortunate enough to have a lot of studio art classes where we used live models. Copying photos is fine, but I made more progress when I was observing in person. Still life paintings aren't really covered in the beginning like they were for me in college, but before we painted the human figure I had a whole semester of still lifes we did that forced us to observe the relationships between objects, the light, the shadows, etc. Using a variety of textures surfaces.

I'm toying with the idea of recording myself tonight to maybe re-examine my process to see if there's anything else I'm doing that might help others. In the mean time if I find something useful I'll make sure to share it.