Like sculptures, this classically beautiful face has all the features spelled out for drawing. Following suggestions from Daichi and tutorials I saw online, I started drawing coarse shapes very loosely (in a base layer) to help proportions. The more detailed contours are then much easier to pin down. I drew coarse shading in a third layer.
I am not sure yet how and if I should shade the face.
From the same source I experimented with artist pencils in a digital drawing to compare with graphite sticks.
Interestingly, I made similar proportional mistakes to my previous physical drawing, notably the over-long nose.
The 4+B digital pencils were too dark, so I switched to 2B which would be too light for physical pencils.
I drew this one loose and quick to feel the graphite sticks, so I did not realize the incorrect proportions until the end, such as overlong nose, shifted gaze, and over-large left ear.
I plan to experiment with digital drawing to see if it can achieve similar rough senses and effects.
Warren Buffett once said to look for three qualities for people to work with: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And without the first one, the other two will kill you.
However, history is full of people who committed grave atrocities due to lack of intelligence, even with good intention and integrity. And I have witnessed people causing less damages who are not as dangerous but still annoying.
Thus, lacking intelligence is no less dangerous than lacking integrity. Avoid such people as much as possible.
I decided it is about time to go back to the instruction book to follow planned exercises. (As a student, I seldom followed guidance before sufficient self-exploration.)
The next practice is proportioning a frontal face, so I picked a movie still of an actress whose quarter profile I had difficulty with earlier. (I will come back to that exercise later.)
I hope to capture the feeling better with subtler shading (e.g. smiling with the cheeks), but I ran out of patience and had to go out for dinner.
PS: it is better to practice portraits starting from subjects outside personal social circles.
This is a face with fascinating contrasts: light and shadow, young and mature, beauty and menace.
My original goal is to practice depicting the shadowed side with minimal amount of details.
Then, during the drawing, I encountered great difficulty capturing the unique identify of the face after 3 nights and 1 morning. It has a fascinating combination of a juvenile face laced with mature features such as plump lips, wearing a delicate and yet sorrowful, vengeful expression.
Art works, including 3D sculptures and 2D advertisements, are already abstracted and serving as excellent sources to practice drawing.
Unique faces, beautiful or ugly, are easier to draw, because they already have distinctive features. It is the mundane and ordinary that take will more efforts to read, see, extract, and depict.
I ensured correct proportion of the base layer/structure before proceeding to the details. This saved time, taking me about one hour to finish this one. Previously, I sometimes noticed mistakes on the base layer which thought I could fix or hide with upper detailed layers, but that just took me a lot of time with little benefits.
Both the face and the water surface are challenging to draw.
A core skill, in art, science, or even life, is the ability and willingness to objectively perceive subjective reality.
Notice the swap of the two adjectives. Supposedly, perception is subjective and reality is objective. However, that is a fixed given condition. Our bodies and brains act like filters, so reality is always subjective. What we can strive for is objective perception and depiction of the (given) subjective reality.
For example, in drawing, one has to perceive what is really out there, which can vary depending on the individual subjectivity, in the physical world, in the memory, or in the imagination.
In deriving a math proof or following a scientific argument, one has to rely on what is assumed to be true (axioms, theorems, conjectures) which are subjective by nature.
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