[Axl]

I did this quickly last night (about 35 mins) just for some practice and to make sure I can still draw real people.
C&C welcomed.
Thanks.





[ May 15, 2002: Message edited by: Axl ]

[bearsclover]

Well...no...it does not look like her yet. I find that it is often difficult to get a likeness right off. Sometimes, I have to "sleep on it" before I can objectively see whether I have captured a likeness...or not. Since you took only half an hour on this (quite impressive) my guess is that you need to sleep on it! I think that you have an excellent rendering style, a real confidence in your technique, and a wonderful indication of lights and darks. Very nice.

The first thing I notice is that the forehead is too short. The features are too big for the face (except for the nose, which is too small. The nostrils are too narrow). Also, there is no indication of the thickness of the lower eyelid. If you want to exclude this in your own stylized artwork, it probably looks fine, but for a "real person", it needs to be there. It MUST be there! Here - I am so anal about the eyelid thickness, I have a little picture on my site, illustrating what I mean!

[Axl]

Thanks for your kind words and comments,
I can see what you mean about sleeping on it. Looking at it now I can see that the face is a little too wide and the eyes need to be worked on. I'll use the excuse that I did this at 1'am, bleary eyes don't help.
Thanks again.

[micke]

Hi Axl! This one has a lot of potential
Technically i think it's fine and proportions looks good.

I have a couple of thoughts here. Hope you don't mind

Try to draw more exactly what you see.
I see that you improvised on her lips and eyes and that's fine in some cases, but in this case i think that her likeness suffers a bit because of that. Proportions are fine, but it's not Gillian's.

-The lips looks too sharp and edgy. You might wanna soften them a bit. The values should also be a little darker. The colour of her lips in the referance are very strong and intense, try to bring that into your drawing.

-The picture looks over-exposed and is very bright. If you take your referance picture desaturate it and compare it to your drawing you'll see that the values should be alot more darker and that there are very few white areas.

-Think of the hair as a whole and not as thousands of straw of hair. Drawing every hair can make it appear flat.

Just some thoughts..I'm a little jumpy
after all the overpaint and critic discussions here lately..Don't wanna step on anyones toes

Good luck!

-Mikael

[Axl]

Thanks for your comments micke, don't worry I won't take genuine c&c as insults.
As to the lips it was something that I hadn't noticed, the fact that I've (unintentionally) drawn her lips as how I see them and not how they really are does take away from the finished piece and does make her look like a facsimilie rather than Gillian Anderson.
I agree with what you said about the hair. Looking at the reference the highlights are more a block of colour rather than each individual strand being highlighted.
I'm still learning new things even though I've been drawing since I could pick up a pencil and it's definately encouraging and educational receiving comments no matter how big or small, they all help.
Thanks.