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.