hair painting experiment and a concept character attempt

I will still be doing the last 4 portraits to the challenge but I am not going to do one a day. Just when I have enough time as I would like to study other things too!

So last night I bought a concept art course ( 50 mins long for around $20 ) and it was fantastic for creating characters in a 'concept art' style, which I would love to be able to do. I gave it a go today and have a picture to post up. It is far from 'good' but for my ability I thought it turned out alright for a first attempt. It doesn't look 'finished' but I got it to the stage I was trying to get it to. So the pic is below, I also included step 1 and 2, which is basically the silhouette, you can see how basic it starts out.

It is supposed to be a barbarian / warrior type guy, just in case you can't tell :) I keep meaning to get in some hair studies too, but for today I just did something really quick and then duplicated it and played around with colour and saturation, this didn't take too long and I enjoyed this :) + I thought it looked alright! that being said it doesn't exactly look realistic, not cartoony either though. hmm oh well I will work on it..

I am also posting these on my Deviantart page, feel free to follow me :) - http://learningasidraw.deviantart.com/

Day 10

I managed to get this one out the way before lunch time ( for once ) It isn't really the best one I have done but I was trying to cut the time down a little, as spending 2 and a half/ 3 hours a day drawing the same face was really getting boring, I managed to get this one down to about an hour and a half, it's not too bad considering it's at least an hour less work. When I had finished this one I compared it with some other faces and quickly used the liquify tool just to put the jaw line and chin in a little bit, so at first the face shape wasn't great.

I should probably have spent longer at the end neatening the image up and sorting the contrast etc.. as usual I think the eyes are a bit off :/

Day 9 of the portrait challenge

Day 9..
Today's face is not too bad, or at least it looks okay to me at the moment but this is what's really weird, every time I finish a face I look at it and think 'yeah that's not bad at all, big improvement!' then the next day I look back on the picture and think ' wow, how did I not notice how freaky that looks!' So I may end up changing my mind about this one after a nights sleep.
But for now I think this is the best one so far, messed up the eyes a little, or couldn't get them exactly symmetrical  anyway, and I think I could start making the chin a little bit thinner, that being said that's not really a mistake as much as a preference or a habit. Monday is my busiest day but I managed to get it done in time luckily, so here is it.

Feeling very tired today so not going to babble on too much, the lips maybe stand out a little too much/too sharp and the eyes are very wide open, but I think this one is okay!

Day 8 of the portrait challenge

Back on the challenge today.. I started off with some construction lines as usual which took quite a while, however once I had done these I would say the rest of the face maybe did not take as long as usual, that being said over all it still probably took just short of 3 hours. I managed to get feedback on my work last night so had an awful lot of info to take on board for today's portrait. I thought I had drastically improved today's portrait but I have compared it with my last few and it is not all that different to day 6, that being said there are definite improvements but whether they are very noticeable I am not so sure. Anyway the pic is below for day 8.

I think maybe the drop shadow on the nose doesn't have a sharp enough edge and the cheek bones have been blended too much :/

1 day break from the challenge, mid point, hand study instead!

I decided to take a some time off from the portrait challenge until I managed to get some criticism.. and now I have some! the lady who does the challenge got back to me and started with my day 7 image in the live stream, unfortunately it's about 10pm now so I am not going to start the next face, but I will start it tomorrow, which means the break I had was only 1 day at least, I got plenty of notes for feedback, it's going to be challenging but hopefully it will be worth it!

On a side note before I knew I would receive feedback today I started drawing some hands, because I am awful at them... The website http://artists.pixelovely.com/ just uploaded their hand photos with timers, so basically I did x amount of hands for 60 seconds each, then I moved on and did 2 mins per hand, then I finished with two hands, 10 mins on each. The 60 second ones turned out awful for me, too fast for me at the moment but it's all good practice, I think I did just short of 50 hands by the end of it, took about an hour and a half. I need to work on hands a lot to get better at them but they are really boring!
Anyway the image is below, click it to view a larger image.

Anyway... back to the portrait challenge tomorrow!

Day 7 of the portrait challenge, putting it on hold until further feedback

Day 7..
Today's face started out looking pretty good and most of the features finished that way, I was especially happy with the lips and thought the eyelashes looked pretty cool too. However one thing that is really bothering me is the eyes, they just don't look right at all! I don't think it's the actual eye itself, but more the positioning of it, I tried to liquify it a little and move it round a bit but I just couldn't improve it. I am pretty disappointed about that because I think if it wasn't for that this would have been my best attempt so far. But every time I see this image, something really stands out that is not right about it. On a brighter note some features are an improvement at least so it's not a complete loss.

I have decided to put this challenge on hold for now ( day 7, the half way point) because you are supposed to get criticism / feedback each day on your work which I have not being able to get. So without knowing how to improve the faces I just end up drawing the same thing each time with a lot of guess work. I have contacted the lady who created the challenge so I am thinking I will wait until I hear back from her and then I can carry on with the next 7 :)
Anyway here is day 7..

I am not gonna lie though, after about 3 hours each day of drawing the same face I am pretty bored of drawing them in this style, looking forward to being able to draw something else for a little bit now. We will see what I come up with for tomorrow :)

Day 6 of the portrait challenge

Day 6..
Very busy day today so I have barely had any time again, luckily I have managed to get it done by 11:10 pm. I was determined to get it finished and uploaded before midnight. Mission accomplished :)
Notes on this one.. took me around 3 hours which is a little disappointing, was hoping to get a little faster at the portraits by now, however I am still struggling with bits so I have to take my time to make it look half decent. I have noticed, comparing this portrait with every other one up until now I  have been erasing too much of the lower face, trying to make the portrait look feminine but taking it too far and completely erasing the jaw line. I have tried to change this a little bit today, I have also managed to get things a little brighter. One thing I did get wrong though.. the eyes are a tiny bit far apart. I am also considering squashing the head a little more so it is not as wide, not too sure about that one though! Anyway the pic is below..

Still having trouble with the eyes, however the eyebrows are a little better this time.

Day 5 of the portrait challenge

Day 5.. Today's portrait took about 2 and a half hours, I worked pretty hard on this and it started looking looking promising quite early on, however as things went on it didn't really improve all that much and ended up looking pretty damn similar to yesterdays, I did manage to get a little bit of feed back on yesterdays, things such as using more of the brighter tones, I kept note of this throughout however, when you compare it to yesterdays it looks pretty similar, although it turned out 'okay' I am a little disappointed for how hard I worked on it. Also it ended up looking very circular and wide with a thin nose so I had to liquify a few bits and drag/squash the head to make it thinner. The more editing I have to do like this at the end the more disappointed I am as it means I had it pretty wrong in the first place :(. Could really do with getting the lady who does the challenge to give me some feedback but unfortunately have not heard back from her yet, fingers crossed soon though. My portraits look like they could be improved a lot, but I am just not sure what the next step is to achieve this, this is why getting feedback could be very beneficial, see the image below.

I think I have done the chin too big again too :/

Day 4 of the portrait challenge

Day 4 of the portrait challenge and today was a stressful one! I had already been working on uni work all day, getting very frustrated so when it came to drawing the portrait I did not have much patience at first and was very close to giving up a lot towards the beginning! Still really struggling with the structure especially the eyes, just cannot get them right in terms of positioning and size. They are not too bad in this picture but I had to use the filter>liquify option a lot to get them right. That being said as frustrating as this one was I think it was a slight improvement on day 3, so it's a good job I didn't give up ( and trust me I really was close! )
It took me around 2 hours today I think.

I am thinking I did the nose a little too wide and possibly the eyes too wide open too. Definitely a slight improvement on the bottom lip if nothing else, I also get her a pointier chin, maybe too long still though?
I am hoping for some criticism back from the lady who set this challenge, no word yet though.

Day 3 of the 14 day portrait challenge

I have barely had any time today to get this done due to being in uni all day and having plenty of work to do. However I managed to spare some time for day 3 ( wouldn't miss it! ) I spent a little longer then usual on this one, probably over 2 hours, maybe 2 and a half. This was because I spent more time structuring the features. If you saw my day 1 and 2 portraits you will know my faces looked more like aliens with pretty huge eyes. I decided to look at some proportions of heads online, they are a little different to the ones in the video tutorials I have been following for the challenge, so I am pretty confused now and unsure which are the 'correct' measurements. I think the tutorials for the challenge have the eyes a lot higher up then this one I found, but I gave it a go, I am sure it's not perfect still but hopefully there's some progress of some sort in there.

Looking at this picture side by side with day 1 and 2 I can honestly say there is a big improvement. Although the chin is slightly too big here and could do with being thinner for a more feminine look. I am not sure if the shape of the head is off? Again not too sure though. Lips and eye brows could do with some extra work.
Day 3.. DONE :) 

Day 2 of the portrait challenge

Sunday afternoon and I have the day 2 picture out of the way. I tried to concentrate on making the eyes a little smaller today, again it looks more like an alien then a human but hey there's still 12 days left to improve :P I hope this is a little bit of an improvement on yesterdays, although again something still looks very off and the eyes might even still be too big, not too sure. If nothing else though I managed this one in about 1 hour 25 mins, slight improvement on time, by about 20 mins, see image below.

I am thinking the eyes are possibly a little high up on the head? damn those eyes..
Or possibly the head is too stretched / elongated ?

My first post and the start of the 14 day portrait challenge

Hello everyone! welcome to my first post :)

I am digital artist, although still very new and learning the basic, I decided to start up a blog which if nothing else will be a good way for me to track my progress and keep me on target. If I post something I set as a goal for a week later, having it written on a blog post, and even having people following my blog, will help make sure I stick to it and don't start slacking. Or at least that's the plan ;)

So yeah, Hopefully this is the start of something good! I have been working on digital art for a few months now and am using a Wacom cintiq13hd. You will see me posting links to my deviant art and my Youtube channel throughout the blog, so please help me out by subscribing :) links are below.

Deviant art 
Youtube


Enough with the boring intro.. This first post is the first day of me starting the '14 day portrait challenge' (you can see the link for this below) the idea is that by day 14 your portrait skills should have increased a lot.
http://istebrak.deviantart.com/art/The-14-Day-Challenge-Guide-Lines-433450654

So here is my portrait drawing for today, I can see some HUGE mistakes already, especially seen as the eyes are wayyy too big for the head, however even though it looks a little silly I am posting it up anyway, gives me more of a reason to improve if I post it! I am not too sure what to do with ears at this point so they are very rough and the lips are not perfect either, The head may be a little too long as well, not entirely sure.

This took me around 1 hour and 45 min. Considering I am usually very very slow with my art work I am actually pretty happy with this for a day 1 attempt.