Self-portrait

[waru]

Here's a self-portrait I did for my portfolio to apply to a school. What do y'all think? It was hard for me to take a proper photo of it; sorry about that.

Thanks.

[Lhune]

Hmmm it seems like you've got the shading and highlights down pretty well, but it looks really, really rough. This could be a style thing, but to me it looks rather more like unorganised almost child-like scribbling. Blend your shaded areas, make them look smooth like actual skin. Also, study your eyes and nose carefully. The underside of your nose should be more defined and the right eye (your left) needs to be darker I think.

[waru]

I don't know if you can call it style, but my realistic drawings are usually scribbly. I'll try to work on that. It's kinda hard with hard lead graphite pencils (what this was). Thanks.

[Lhune]

Well then find yourself a softer lead to work with . HB or 2B should be just fine. Don't press the pencil down too hard, start off drawing very softly then gradually press down harder to get a good feel for the pencil and what kind of lines it will produce. Fill up area's by going over them again and again, not by trying to scribble them full at once. Once you get to the final stages of the drawing you can use a far softer lead to make the darkest shades.

[Nezumi Works]

If you want some good tips on drawing faces, which you can apply to your self portrait work, try this site. I found it pretty useful when I was working on mine.

It helps a lot to really study the face and think of it in terms of shapes and planes. So you've got rounded shapes for the cheeks, a slope on the upper lip, depressions for the eye cavities, and so forth. I personally prefer to describe them with line, and vary the weight depending on shadow (usually on the bottoms of the forms, like the underside of the nose), but you can certainly develop your shading more. You've got a pretty good handle on proportion it seems, so what you should be concentrating on is describing your forms.

[waru]

OK, thanks. I'll try to work on something more smooth.

[cl0aked]

Try doing longer lines as well, I see you filling whole areas with small pencil strokes. Try using longer strokes. The eye is a little too big as well. You should study eye construction on the site Nazumi pointed out. The overall proportions seem ok, though. And that is good.

Keep on studying.

[-Vu-]

You could try using a tortillion or some other blending tool to smooth out the shading as well. The eyes seem a little too big too. But besides those things, everything seems to be good so far.

[waru]

Cool, I never knew that tool was called a tortillion.

So proportions and highlights OK, but need to work on practical technique (lines and smoothing). Got it. And the eyes are big. It's cause I like eyes I guess.

Thanks for the reference site, too.

[Janos]

I like it, its just the nose which disturbs me. Just doesn't look right. Try studying some nose images!

Cheers

[waru]

Haha. My nose is kind of crooked, but the nose was actually hard for me, too. Thanks.

[Gaspard]

For more organized pencil-work I would recommend a hatching exercise.
Basically you take a sheet of lined paper and you fill it with hatching, trying to to use the lines already on the sheet as an orient. Try pressing harder and softer to see how the material works, try achieving sharper and softer transitions. Instead of hatching with individual lines do a continuous tight zig-zag kind of thing.

Fill a couple of sheets like that and then try drawing something simple. You could even start with a matchbox - though I can see you've really got an eye for values here even without too much training under your belt (I'm still wrestling with it myself after already some time of active study !) - hatch in the direction of the shapes. You'll get a hang of it when you work on rounder objects, fruit or a ball or something.

So: anatomy, a great amount of studies (I mean actual blood-and-sweat drawing hours, not theory, which is also important but can't ever replace practice!), symmetry and form (goes hand in hand with anatomy) and transitions between values - sharp and soft edges.

Good luck !