Critique my drawing skills, Southperry

You might need a real picture in form of photo or you can print the picture for your own reference. My lecturer said, if you want to do figure drawing, you need physical reference or physical real photo pictures.

I agree with raizoo though. Structure is important when it comes to figure art. You need to make sure the important distinctive parts like eyes, nose, mouth, chin, cheeks with maintained proportions, based to your references. If I were you, I would do reverse technique drawing, charcoal on boxboard or plywood as for media. Reverse technique is good and easy for figure drawing, as long as you can control proportion, lighting and your strokes.

I got a trick for you. Try print the reference picture in black and white form. Then you can study more on the lighting and shading, since you made the work in black and white.

What exactly is reverse technique? And wow. Thank. You. I don't know why I didn't think of using a black and white picture!

If you're asking about saving the current work, there's quite a bit to "fix" if you're going for a photo-realistic portrait. That being said, it's already pretty good since I can see the resemblance already. Sorry if I come across as overly critical; I'm just trying to be as honest as possible.

For future improvement though, here's some comments:

Print out your reference and draw a grid of 1" squares on it with pencil. Do the same (very lightly) on your drawing paper; use the squares as references for shapes so that you can get the shapes accurately. If you're struggling to get the shapes right with 1" squares, or if your reference photo is small, then reduce the size. If you also struggle with that, then just trace out basic forms directly from the reference. Prevent yourself from consciously/sub-consciously thinking "oh this is the ____ so it should look like ___ " and drawing like that. For example, most people, when starting out with portraits, see an eye and first draw an oval with pointed ends. That's completely wrong.

The only times you should draw actual -lines- with your pencil/charcoal is when you're either doing fine details, e.g. hair, or when you're lightly tracing out blocks of shadows/forms, e.g. think of making shapes for paint-by-number. Hard lines don't exist in reality. Work on your shading/drawing technique (I can't tell which it is just from your drawings), which looks very "sketchy". It gives the feeling of "I'm not really sure what to do here, so I'll draw several lines here and hope that the composite is somewhere near where it should be." For some shading drills, try making smooth gradients and shading spheres. In addition to tortillons, you can use tissue paper(but no cream obviously) or even toilet paper to smooth out large areas of your drawing, such as cheeks. Fingers work quite well too, but they leave oils on the paper and it's really easy to accidentally transfer graphite to other papers of the paper.

Use a wider range of tones, i.e. make your blacks darker and make your highlights whiter. Do this by making several passes at shading rather than pressing harder; it's tedious but is worth it in the end. Giving your drawing more contrast makes it more vibrant and lifelike.

Specific parts:

Hair: Here's an example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLN8hX2D87I
The video skips a huge part of the long process, but here's the gist of it:
1. Lay down tones first. Use the direction of the hair as strokes, but don't make your lines very defined or hard.
2. Smooth out the shading with a tortillon. Repeat step 1 as needed to build up dark areas.
3. Using a finer tip pencil, work in the details. Don't press down hard with the pencil unless it's a very distinct hair that sticks out; just lightly draw in the direction of the hair, using an eraser to remove highlights and/or errors.
4. Repeat step 3 a gazillion times.

Eyebrows: Use the same process as hair. Block out the general shape of the whole eyebrow first, then tone, then put in details. If you compare with the reference, I think it's pretty obvious that you oversimplified the eyebrows into thin black lines.

Eyes: Some of this has to do with the poor resolution of your reference photo, but the eyes are not pitch black. Even in your reference you can see some subtle shades and several points of light reflecting off. The eyes look outlined. I'm not sure if this is because you outlined it in the first place or because of the eyelashes. If it's the first case, then get rid of that habit. If it's the second, use the method similar to hair and just bite the bullet and draw every single hair as you see it instead of just putting it all around the eye because you "know it's there".

Nose: The shape is too thin and boxy. Also, there's not enough shading to give it the feeling of roundness. I have a really good drawing reference book which shows that the nose can be simplified into three spheres, but unfortunately I can't get a scan of it right now. Sphere shading exercises will come in handy for this part.

Mouth: Again, don't outline. Define shapes more clearly (teeth look particularly "sketchy").

Everything below the chin: oversimplified. Then again, I get the feeling you were just aiming for the head (important) so I can understand why.

No, I do appreciate all criticism because I know it'll just make me better if I use what more experienced people have told me. Do know this is my first srs bsns drawing, so I can't be expected to be anywhere close to perfect haha.
I did exactly what you laid out for hair. I am in the process of using the same steps to change the eyebrows. I do not know what you mean by 'don't outline the eyes.' I trace the forms of images and then go over them with increasingly confident lines. Is that what you mean/how should I change that habit? I haven't drawn eyelashes at all. Teacher said to save them for last.
I don't know what you mean by outlined mouth/sketchy teeth, but today I tried to make the mouth more defined and the teeth separations lighter.
Under the chin is under simplified, but that's also because I don't know how to draw that well/completely anyways

The most important thing with art is to keep trying!Try not to think of things as "separate". It's hard for me to explain when we're just looking at a face, but that rule of thirds is just to help you see the different ratios of a face. Trying looking at other people's faces as well, like Jay Leno. It's also a tool used to when you're trying to caricature someone!

It's important to look at the image as a whole and then break it down because everything is related to each other. If you ever do life drawing, knowing landmarks will help understand how things relate to each other better.

If you do an image piece by piece, say, you spend an hour doing the eye and that's all you have done, your other areas will suffer. Instead, as others have mentioned, lightly go over where you want things to be placed and keep adjusting in this stage. That's not to say you can't adjust things later on, but it's important you create a good base to work on. Try to work on the entire image at once. That sounds daunting, but it just means don't focus on one key part at a time or your proportions will look completely off.Yeah, I think her forehead is a little over 1/3 of her face, her brow to bottom of nose is about 1/3, and her bottom of nose to chin is a little under 1/3.

Yeah, I've started to sit down in a different room/outside every day and sketch what I see for a good 20 minutes. I'll start looking up correct ways to shape/begin things so that I can build off of that instead of learning to do something the wrong way and screwing myself over.

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I worked on the drawing during class today:

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• Darkened mouth
  
• Sharpened chin
  
• Lightened lines seperating teeth
  
• Tried to straighten and even out mouth/nose so that the face is more balanced. I'll keep working on this.
  
• Tried to fix the shading on the nose. I don't know how much it helped.
  
• Erased eyebrows and tried to redo them as suggested. They didn't turn out how I wanted them too, so I will try again tomorrow.