Advice please on drawing heads

[Turan]

With all this talk of tracing and that cool pic in the gallary of SUN FUSION. Had to try it out.

Below is a pick of my 4th and youngest child (Zara - no I did not name her after Xara!).

I'm happy with it but feel I could improve. Can you give me feedback and advice.

Thanks,

Turan

[Turan]

Thanks to all. Will download and check out you file Soquili. Thanks for spending the time.

Standay, thanks for the example.

Neil, think you could be right. I picked Zara as I thought I would stick with it and not give up. But that just makes perfection harder. Have done some characatures of people before (pen and ink days) but new to the vector bit.

Steve, I think you hit on something - as with Standay's cut-out approach I was not trying to capture everthing so hence I was going for the abstract approach. Still would like to work on the colours. Don't think my pic is up to Standay's yet. All that said, can't get over how Soquili did so well and did not go for the cut-out look.

Thanks, Turan

[Turan]

With all this talk of tracing and that cool pic in the gallary of SUN FUSION. Had to try it out.

Below is a pick of my 4th and youngest child (Zara - no I did not name her after Xara!).

I'm happy with it but feel I could improve. Can you give me feedback and advice.

Thanks,

Turan

[standay]

I'll attach one I did recently. What I do is to think of these as paper cutouts and approach it that way. This tends to help me keep things simple and not to try and over do the detail (like the hair).

Stan

[Steve Newport]

Well, as my art teacher not to long ago said, faces should be the easiest thing to recreate, we see them a thousand times a day and even stare at them sometimes. I agree that they SHOULD be easy to draw, but I'm definentally not in that category of those that can! I can do it all right with pencil/ink, but a mouse is a whole different story!

Turan, I honestly think your portraite is fine. When I first saw it I noticed nothing about color or anything else, I thought it looked good! Now maybe it's just a lack of artistic knowledge on my part, but I think the color of it was done on purpose and was there to add a kind of mood to it. It gives it a kind of, but not really an abstract look to it. Great job

Steve Newpor

[gwpriester]

About the hardest thing you can attempt to render is human flesh.

Basically your colors are too red and too saturated. When you look at the photo and compare it to the photo of your adorable daughter. Her flesh tones are almost like translucent porcelain. Of course getting the luminous quality from such an unsaturated color is very difficult.

You can cheat and use Xara's Color Picker (the eyedropper tool in the Color Editor) to sample some of the colors in the photo so you can come closer to the flesh colors.

You might try using Contours instead of blends, or blends of the same shape for a smoother transition. And the Feathering slider is great for creating soft edges.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

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Be it ever so humble...</a>

[bcdeb]

My first attempt at a portrait looked much like Xara Zara. I was really peeved. That is how I came to do the "flat" simplistic portrait I posted on the gallery of "the nude". I came to the conclusion that - apart from the painstaking style of the Russian gentleman who is Xara's featured artist - there is no way to do portraiture other than simplistically. I hope I'm wrong. But we don't have many Xara portrait artists in these forums to guide us. We might have to be the ones who discover the techniques on our own.

BTW, she's a darling [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Steve Newport]

Ok, does anyone ever experience the problem of these forums cutting off the last part of your message, Namingly your NAME!? I have the automatic signature thing so at the end of each message it puts "Steve Newport" but so many times it has left the "T" out of Newport!
It's probably just me, oh wel [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Steve Newport

[Truroneil]

Turan,
You are trying to draw or improve on perfection.- impossible. That's a beautiful daughter and a wonderful photo. You're off to a good start, and others have made practical suggestions. The skin tones are tough. I sometimes do caricatures of prominent people and friends; I'm usually disappointed when I try my own family. It's difficult. Good luck. Neil

[Clements]

Welcome Standby,

That is an interesting analogy to use. Whenever I am showing a person how to use a vector program I often use that same terminilogy along with "collage" (sp?). This helps them understand why objects can't be "woven" in and out of each other, why the order of objects which overlap each other is important, and, later on, why layers can be important.

Problem is, often I forget it my self and begin to put in unecessary complexity. Your portrait is a good example and a good reminder.