young boy portrait - part three.

So by now i'm almost finished with this picture and am going to start moving on to a new one very soon. Before that, though, I need to finish this portrait...

There's still a couple things that i want to finish on it. This time, i shaded some more things darker, including the eyes. I worked on the hair a bit, but that got to be really challenging because there are lights and darks, but it cannot look random... so there has to be definition, but if there is too much then it looks like straw hair. I also had to change the hair line a bit because it was going to far over the boy's forehead. Also, I think i finally got the face shape really similar to the actual picture, which I was very happy about. {That took a lot of measuring with the end of my pencil, and much erasing!}

One thing that you'll notice looking at the original is that there are some very prominent shading/shadow lines under the eyes, which I tried to work on as well. It's difficult because I didn't want it to look overly shaded and with a child's face you don't want too much shading because it makes the skin look a bit older. However, there is some obvious definition, which takes a gentle buildup of sketching.

The picture isn't the best quality, but that's because of the size of my scanner compared to the sketchpad - it lets some light in. All that being said, for a first full-page project, I think that it's looking fairly good :)

young boy portrait - part two.

So i spent a few hours one evening working on my project picture, and I'm quite happy {and surprised} to say that it's going pretty well. There are some things that I still need to work on, and the face shape still isn't quite right {very very very difficult to get that similar to the picture, especially because my image is a larger scale of it.} Here's how it looks right now, compared to the original.

As you can see, I shaded the eyes a bit more and defined more of the hair. The nose and mouth and lines are also more defined. Next time I'm going to work on the hair the most, as well as fixing up some details. I also think that the space between the nose and mouth is a little less than it should be, so I might very possibly change that next time :)
I have found that I enjoy working on this project, but once I have drawn for an hour or two, I need to stop before I make unnecessary changes and get frustrated!
Any suggestions?

young boy portrait - part one.

So I started the work on my first {official} project, and I realized that it's going to be a bit more work than I thought... I thought I might just be able to freehand the face shape and guess as to where the features and such are positioned. That didn't turn out too well for me {as you can see in image two... not really my proudest artwork I must admit!} :) The picture printed actually is about half of a page, while what I'm drawing is a full page of sketching paper, meaning that I can't just "cheat" and trace it or something like that...

Here is what I began by doing {it looked good at that point, i thought} (:

But when it came to doing the features, it didn't work so well to just try best to guess/sketch it. I ended up having to erase a lot of what I did at first because the proportions weren't exactly right... as you can see in the next picture :P

I had to use my pencil and measure the size of the distances from the mouth to cheek, nose to eyes, eyes to side of the face... etc. I also started shading too early {which is why the mouth and the eyes did not turn out very well!} I learned that it is much better to do light outlines before you start working the shading too much, otherwise you have nowhere to go when you finish, and it's better to build up your dark/medium tones as opposed to going with them right away. I made this mistake with the boy's mouth.. shading the middle but not the rest.
I worked on the picture a bit more and it did end up much better than image two {but then I got so sick of it and decided to stop at that point.} However, I forgot to take a picture but I'll include that in the next post. Maybe I'll do a quick sketch in the meantime before coming back to that picture on Monday or Tuesday :)

child faces first sketches.

These two are the ones that I started with for practicing drawing a younger face. The first one of the young girl I don`t really like as much, especially the hair and the forehead should have been a bit longer. Also, the eyes look a little too old to be a child. It could be more of a little bit older kid.

The next one of the little boy was just a quick sketch just to get more of an idea of the basic face structure. I like this one because of the simplicity, and I wanted to do one with closed eyes.

I learned that when drawing a young face, it`s important not to make too many shading lines and such, because kids have much ``softer`` skin, and less wrinkles or lines. If you shade too much, it ends up adding a few more years. Odd, but true! Also, when making the eyes, it`s important not to outline them too much...which i had trouble with in picture one.

update.

So, the last time I posted I was beginning to be not-too thrilled with this project. However, I've put a bit more time and effort in {probably something I should've done in the first place,} and it's been pretty enjoyable. And, I've surprised myself with some of the way my first sketches are turning out. Here are my two favorites so far.

The first one turned out alright, I was working with lighting from the top right. I don't quite love how the left side of the face turned out, but it's alright. I tried to do some cross-hatched shading for the shadows. The angle of the face is also about a three-quarter view, so getting the left side to look realistic was a bit challenging. The one thing that was fairly difficult about that was not making the jawline or cheekbone too sharp. Also, it's pretty hard for me to get the left eye {the one to the left on the paper!} to resemble the right one {because I usually draw the right eye first.} This time, I drew the eye on the left first and it worked a bit better!

The second one was just a quick sketch for practice. Not quite as much detailing and shadow work :) The main goal was just to get it to look like an actual human face.

Any comments or suggestions?
Let me know!

pictures...

as promised, some of my first attempts in photos :)
any suggestions? i'd love to hear them.

eyelashes...many futile attempts. 

 rough sketch of eye.

 making a grid helps, actually ;) but again, first attempt!

 textures and shading exercises, kind of fun :)