Alexander Study

[Devlyn]

I've spent about 20 hours or so on this, I can easily spend another 20-50. There are a bunch of issues and I've tried to fix them, but every time I look I find a bunch more. When do you move on? I think maybe my base drawing may not have been sufficiently secured or my painting skills aren't quite up to fixing the errors.

I've tried to move into attempting to find the basic shapes (little cylinders for the hair, spheres for the eyes, the wedge of the nose, etc) and make rendering decisions based on that and I think I'm improving in that area.

Crits definitely welcome.

[Mute]

Hey man, nice study.

Good values and a pretty decent likeness. So, a few inaccuracies aside, I'd say this study was pretty successful.
Now, like you said you could spent another 20-50 hours fixing all the things wrong with this, but that would be like trying to repair the foundation while the building is standing on it. Very difficult, but if you'd learn enough to make it worth your time then by all means do it.

If I were you I'd start a new study from scratch. I'll bet doing this study the second time around will take half as long and look twice as good. You'll get a chance to practice your process as well. Just be sure to pay attention and fix the mistakes you made doing this one.

Maybe do some studies of the eye and the brow and how they relate to each other. It looks like that is where you had the most trouble.

Good stuff, Rock on!

[MM Howard]

Compared to the reference, the chin is also a tiny bit too squared. You might want to round it a bit. The highlights on the sculpted hair also need to brightened a bit. But like Mute said, there are just small mistakes here and there. Other than that, I think its successful render.

I don't know if your planning on doing this or not, but I'd like to see some texture when you have it exactly as you want it. Looking forward to the final result.

[Devlyn]

Thanks for the comments guys.

The brow and the chin did give me challenges, particularly the eye fat of his left eye - I kept flopping between either it was the shape or the value. It seemed like when I had the shape correct, the value was off, then when the value seemed correct, the shape became off - then my eyes started to blur and I did my best to split the difference. That was the point I determined I didn't quite have the drawing as correct as it needed to be.

I also found myself having difficulty in creating the smooth transition of value between the light and darks of the rounded forms, like the chin. I did do this in PS and felt sometimes I just couldn't control the media.

I'm planning on getting an easel and gouache to try this in a traditional manner - maybe that experience will help?

Thanks again - I will probably mess with it a little more, but I think I'd like to do another one, perhaps more of a 3/4 view of some busts I found on Artrenewal.org.

[eulalia]

honestly i think your right on it but the texture of the sculpture is throwing you off

i can see how you can spend another 20 hours on this probably just on texture alone

its up to you how far you want to go

if you zoomed in and added texture, it would make this drawing go to the next level

it would just be very very time consuming, and thats where you decide.

honestly what MUTE said is really good advice, or try another sculpture try looking for a lot smoother one if possible so the texture doesnt throw you off

good luck keep up the good work