May 30 Progress: Online Art class, finishing my Webcomic, and sketching faces

I am writing this post May 31 as a way to look back and summarize what I did yesterday.

I finished up Kit and Bani comic, I rest a bit after before tuning into Istebrak’s Critique Hour (I also made some notes on it myself), a nice weekly dose of a live art lesson which I look forward to implementing into my learning schedule from now on.

In the evening I decided to sketch some faces. My favourite subjects to draw are people and landscapes/scenery. And it has been a while since I doodled something for my own enjoyment that didn’t have a “bigger end goal” in mind.

I first doodled some images from an artist I follow (love her art!), so I won’t be posting that as it would be infringing on her work. But if anyone who reads this and is interested, her name is Vicki (twitter is @vickisigh). For a taste of her lovely art, I will post one image but all credit goes to her and I’m only posting to share how lovely her art is ><. I will remove if requested.

Then I drew some faces/characters on my own to see my “style” at the time.

I think it looks rather bland, the face is too “flat”, and it looks awkward.

So I decided to draw about 1-2 hours of faces with references. I went to Pexels and searched “woman” for my images, but I will list all of the references I used (thank you amazing photographers and models!)

My goal was not realism of course, I was simply trying to capture the person’s features in a stylized manner. I will be doing realism portrait studies digitally in the coming days.

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There are more sketches but it’s quite time consuming to upload all the images and I want to spend more time actually practicing so I will omit some on the blog post.

Here is the result of my “style” after practicing with references.

I think there is some improvement in how I drew people even only after a few hours of exercise. Of course, I already had experience drawing faces before (it’s my go-to thing to draw usually!), I mainly lacked knowledge of making faces look more diverse and “realistic” in capturing unique features. The faces I drew are still very “barbie-like” and not that expressive, but I improved a bit because I can tell I am starting to draw with some “intent” behind it. Before I’d draw eyes, mouth, and a nose, and my only goal was to make it look like a face, and for it to be pretty (usually). Now I have more ideas going in before drawing, I imagine her personality and how she expresses it through her eyes and hairstyle for example. The first girl is more badass, and in my mind, she has a colour burst of her in her bangs. The other girl is pretty and sexy, and so her eyes are more hooded and her lips rounder. And having drawn with references, I can more easily vary their personalities and have the tools to express those traits. REFERENCES HELP! And practicing them is amazing! Of course, it helps me better place certain features on the face, but overall I have done a decent amount of face tutorials, so my main struggle was not proportions (not that I shouldn’t continue improving them!) but rather learning how to vary faces and give them more personality. and developing a stylized way to draw faces without making it look too bland.