Akky - Art Journey

[akkyoy89]

Yikes, sometimes life really gets in the way eh. Tried to keep momentum going over the last couple of weeks just practicing primitive shapes and perspectives but really struggled to find time to get much else in.

Finally managed to get the dreaded Anatomy 1 video out of the way. Here's the first piece I did after watching it, sort of a mish mash of the assignment. It's early days and I'm still working out how to draw any kind of detail on noses, but I'd appreciate any feedback if there are issues with the current direction I'm going. It's quite a messy page of me just trying stuff at random unfortunately.

These were just goofy faces from imagination, from now on I think I'll stick with studying references for this topic.

[mau.wamp]

I think your doing a good job on these faces. And congrats for keeping up the practise in stressful times!
My advice would be to really study the proportions and structure of the head, because your proportions are a little off.
Just pick a reference portrait and measure them.

Maybe this video might help you

[akkyoy89]

Very useful video, thanks! Just shows that I need to spend a lot more time really focusing on learning the planes and proportions of the head before I even really think about starting to add the features.

[akkyoy89]

Back to basics today.

The hunt for good references starts tomorrow, particularly ones with the head at a tilt as I couldn't quite visualise the angle of the neck and jaw on those ones.

[akkyoy89]

Angles are really hard.

[akkyoy89]

Been restricted to pen and paper lately, just working on the basics when I've had time.

Finally got back to my tablet to have a play with a few eye references.

[akkyoy89]

I've got a lot of work to do with my blending and truly understanding the planes of the face. But in terms of pure anatomy I'm fairly happy with the feature placement on these. Need to trust myself more though as I was pretty stop and start with moving my line drawing over the reference to make check that I was getting the proportions right.

First portraits done. Back to drawing noses and ears next.

[akkyoy89]

Been doing a lot of Loomis heads lately. The more extreme and foreshortened angles are still giving me issues though I think.

Does anyone have any tips or feedback on my structure?

Going to stick with it for a few more days but I'm keen to move the bulk of my practice time onto the face features before I revisit heads as a whole and really break down the individual planes.

[mau.wamp]

What helped me, when drawing heads in more extreme angles, was to construct a box first and then construct the head within that box. That way the very basic planes are already there and I dont have to guess that much.
Apart from that, I don‘t have any tips, foreshortening is quite a difficult topic and super advanced

Hope that still helps a little!

[akkyoy89]

I'll give it a try when I come back to practicing heads again, thanks. So far I've just been following the standard style of drawing a circle and then adding the side plane and other Loomis proportion lines on.

I think getting into the habit of either drawing boxes first or just visualising everything inside a box is definitely a good one to get into. I watched an interview with the legendary Kim Jung Gi not long ago and he said the same thing, even now with all his crazy perspective drawings he imagines everything in a box beforehand.

For now I've moved onto noses just to break up my routine a bit and keep things interesting!

[LesleyCarol]

It's cool seeing all this practice!
I did a couple of draw overs to help with the structure. The main things I went over are the placement of each facial feature and the overall form of the head.

For the first head, remember there's space under the chin, so try to add this when you do extreme angles. Also, be careful when you draw the ellipses. Make sure they're smooth and the cross-hairs are perpendicular to each other. Once you get the cross-hairs right, make sure the mid-line of the face is parallel to the vertical cross-hair.

I think it would be good to use straighter lines for the jaw because they're more general and help capture the basic form of the head. The jaws here look very specific and a little distracting since the other lines and shapes are so simple.

Hope this helps!

[akkyoy89]

Very helpful, thank you!

I was using a 3D Loomis head model as a reference for those ones, that's why the jaw and cheeks are the way they are.

I seem to have a habit when only doing basic feature markings of letting the features creep up the face towards where the hairline should be. I never seem to notice that it's wrong, yet if I went fully into detail and put the nose, eyes, hair etc. in then I spot it straight away.

[akkyoy89]

Back to heads next I think, before moving onto mouths.

But for now, here's my first page of noses. I left the really rough early ones in and a bunch of workings sketches to gauge progress by the time I'd finished the page. It was a bit of a struggle just going on Marc's anatomy video so I watched a couple of extra bits from Proko and Sinix and they helped a lot.

[florian.benedikt1996]

great work Akky really like the different types of exercises, also u have a great feeling for shading i really like it!!

[ziggydas]

these look great! you have a great eye for spotting the subtle changes in value and i think there are a few places where you can really emphasize the form with more dramatic changes in value that aren't necessarily present in the photos. Another thing to consider is that if you are doing color studies, you should try to incorporate lots of different hues, especially reds since theres a lot of blood flow in the nose region. try throwing more blues in the shadows and you might see the noses really start to stand out a lot more! great work overall tho

[akkyoy89]

Thanks very much guys.

These are largely just studies for getting the structure of the nose right, I haven't really touched on any colour or light theory yet so I'm just having fun with it to keep my practice interesting. For the shading I was just trying to get something in the region of the references, though I was generally sticking with my own colour choices for them.

I did throw a couple of reds, greens and blues into the shadows but I think maybe they are too low opacity to be noticed! I'll push them a bit harder next time.

[akkyoy89]

Busy few weeks but the Loomis heads are very slowly getting better I think. Couple of miscalculations on this page but it is all starting to sink in where the mistakes are, like curving the form around the face too much on the angled ones, or placing the base of the nose too low. But slow progress is still progress.

Couple of thousand more and I might really have it down!

[mau.wamp]

You are making good progress, Akky! Well done!
Proportionwise most of your heads are unfortunately a little bit off.
I'd advise you to not focus so much on doing a 1000, instead you might benefit from doing 30-50 very clean and deliberate ones.
This video might help you understand what I mean:

Angel advises to take about 45mins to an hour for ONE head. Also the most important thing is to use reference and to measure the individuals proportions.
I can only speak for myself, but I have done this exercise over about 2 months and seen massive improvements in my head constructions. Also working from reference will make you better at constructing a head from imagination
Hope that helps you!

[akkyoy89]

Great, thanks. I'll watch through the video later. Someone linked his video on eyes elsewhere on the forum recently and I found that to be very good, so hopefully this will be too.

Just as a general point, where would you say my main weakness with the proportions is? I'm planning on going over them in a redraw just to make the corrections that I think are obvious, but I'd be interested in another pointer.

You're probably right about drawing less and taking more time per head whilst relying on references more. All of those are from imagination and I think it's apparent that I still don't have a full grasp of the construction as I keep imagining them with the same mistakes!

I was struggling to identify where the side plane initial circle exactly fell with my previous drawings from reference though so consciously moved away from it to avoid the frustration. Rookie error I think.

[akkyoy89]

Not much time today but wanted to get at least some corrections out of the way so I picked some that looked off and had another go. I feel that they are an improvement, but not quite there yet. I think I need to make the side planes larger.

I have a copy of Bridgman's Constructive Anatomy that I want to analyse the head section for next, then I'll be moving on to proper reference studies. And to go over the linked video above still of course.