Black and white

[Souly]

I think I went overboard with this.
I was inspired by

I think I was also subconsciously inspired by

[Souly]

No one posted, made me kinda sad. 
I don't really have much of an update, I removed the twirl under the eye and did some work to the bottom right.
I'm happy with it, not sure what else I can do with it since no one commented.
I could do probably do more with the background but not sure if I want to.

[EvilEye]

1 bit color pictures are not really my thing.

The face doesn't look right. Eyes a little misplaced / too large. Eyebrows dipping a little low. He's missing an ear... etc.

I suggest you take the face and mirror it then look at it. The flaws should become easily apparent.

I don't care much for the dithering really. Not sure what you can do with only 2 colors though.

[Souly]

I began on a female for the other side.
I plan on making the window bigger and adding another shock effect thingy.

I left the references on the image so you guys can see what I'm going off of.
I couldn't find the best image for the girl whom I have the fancies for.
And yes totally using johnnyspade's kick assery for reference.

I'm unsure what to do with the hair...

Edit:

Got into an MSN chat with some pixeler's got some input and the result.

[Corsair]

Let me start by saying that i really like where this is going. I've always had a thing for pure black/white.

I think when using black and white it's - and this might just be a matter of style on my end - better to use white to suggest shape, rather than define it. I definitely dig the deliberately dark, almost gothic thing it's got going, but i think there's too much white, and it's sort of distracting.

One thing that black will do is sort of "fill in the gaps" so that you can imply detail without directly presenting it. Of course i'm no art student, and this is just an observation, so i could be completely wrong there.

Here's something I did probably 5 or 6 months ago. I'll probably never get around to making it not look like ass, but it'll kinda give you an idea of what i'm talking about.



and while this probably kills the entire intent of the thing, i thought i'd give it a quick/dirty edit. the upper part of the guys head.
Of course now he looks more frightened than anything.

One thing i noticed while i was doing it is that the guy's chin seems kinda ...large.

[Sherman Gill]

Even if it kicks ass, it's not a good idea to use art as a reference, since you're picture will end up with all the flaws of the reference.

[Souly]

Gave them ears.

I've been more or less just editing off of actual photos now.
Trying to get both facial structures right.

[Feron]

none of the references are in the same pose as the faces you are creating.  I'd suggest taking some pictures that will help you more with this.

[AdamAtomic]

I'd add some bigger ears on there too - if you look at the ref photo for the lady especially, the top of her ear is on level with her eye, and the bottom of her ear with the corner of her mouth!

[Souly]

I've changed a bunch on the chicky, mainly her jaw and chin.

[Ian]

Eyes should be centered vertically on the face (add a little more forehead to the top of both).  Good benchmark for ear sizes (especially on a basic frontal pic like these) is from the top of the eyelid to the bottom of the nose.  So extend the ears down a little bit.  Female faces generally have less defined bone structures.  Removing that furrow line right below the ear on the cheek will likely make the face more feminine.  In general, the features of the face seem flatly placed on instead of actually being built in (especially evident in the way you treated the bar code on the man's head (it doesn't even bend to the round shape of a forehead).  Try treating the eyes as actual spheres and allow how the skin around the sockets is formed around that to come into your work.  Irises generally don't look like that with the rays coming out of the pupil.  Also highlights are rarely contained with the pupil itself but usually overlap it and are on the iris.

As a compositional sort of critique it could be neat if the two people were looking more towards the center of the piece and outward at the viewer instead of straight ahead.  All of the hairs, from eyelashes to eyebrows are pretty excellently rendered.  I also think the idea of the scene is pretty sweet.

Overall these seem like really terrible references when you could very easily find pictures of people looking straight on into a camera.  You will learn a lot about facial anatomy from this piece, but, there are a lot of basic errors that show a general lack of experience that could be remedied a lot quicker from a ton of studies with a less intensive medium such as drawing.

[Souly]

It's a little hard to shade using the shading style I've done on the guy.
I haven't done anything to the eyes yet.
As for the "rays" coming from the pupil that is supposed to be the iris it's hard to color an eye with black and white man.

Sorry for the bad references, I just kind of wanted the characters to look like me and the girl I fancy.
I'll look up some faces straight on so I can see what I'm doing wrong, but I'm not really going to change too much of their appearance.

I suck at drawing with a pencil, I like the feel of a mouse.
I'm also too impatient to erase things, I like undo too much.

[Helm]

That reply seems to me like 'no I won't try to make it better' 
All of the critique Ian gave you is solid. Your are putting features on a face mister-potato-head-like. Study the fundamentals and rework this from the top, use your pencil, it's your friend. Do a lot of studies. Think of features on a face as things with volume. It's the hard road to what Skurwy - sorry, mr. Spade - did to get to his Razor piece, but it's the right one. There are no shortcuts. I can give you a drawover of this if you want, but the point I want to communicate most of all is : don't fight critique, don't be impatient, don't be afraid to push yourself.

[Souly]

Sorry Helm, I don't have the skills to really show my understanding of what he wrote, in post form.
The only way I can do it is to put what he said into account.
Which I just did, the eyes are now perfectly vertically centered.
As for horizontal centering I still haven't gotten that figured out.
I'll change the ears as well.

[Ian]

As for horizontal centering I still haven't gotten that figured out.

A way to check your eye position is to get the width of the eye from the left corner to the right corner.  Then break the head into 5 horizontal segments of this length with the 2nd segment from the left the left eye, the 3rd the bridge of the nose, the 4th the right eye, and the two segments on the edges composed of just side of head space.  Right now a little more space on each side of the eyes could make it slightly more realistic.  Keep working at it.

[Souly]

I'll see what I can do about centering the eyes more horizontally correct.
I began shading the female n'stuff.

[Souly]

I think I may have figured out how to fix the hair.

[ptoing]

I really think you should take better, straight on reference pictures, as I do not think you look like this.



The wide open eyes look scary, in a relaxed position you would not see the whole iris, but the top off it would be covered by the top lid a bit.
The ears also look quite unnatural and kinda invented.

You have a good base, and the resolution is high enough to pull off nice dither styles with just 2 colours, but I think you should use reference a bit more, because the structure is clearly lacking and it seems to be mostly due to lazyness.

[Souly]

See the reason for the bad flip is partly because I drew it halfed.
I'll try working on it as a whole and then half it see if that works better.

[Helm]

hope this helps. Right now you're drawing symbols of a face, not your face.

[Souly]

Thank you for the portrait helm. 
It beats mine to shit.


I don't wanna look at this anymore.
I get what you're saying about the faces being shapes and now I look at it and just see shapes, makes me want to re-do the whole thing. 
But I don't have time, I've gotta start work on two other projects starting now so I doubt this piece will get much loving from me..

I've gotta restart on my GIANT SWORD dude, found an old successful Flash game called Shadow Strife, we're re-doing the graphics for it's engine.

It's horrible in many ways but I have to say I like looking at it more then.

[Souly]

Yeah I know I said I was done with this and all.
But I started on the mushroom cloud.
I may have gone overboard.

[TrevoriuS]

First thing in your piece that isn't drastically uniform, and contains shading with a style. Apply your methods there to the rest, make it live.

[Souly]

Big thanks to monsoon2d for the help over IM.

[EvilEye]

If that large jagged thing coming out of the side should be anywhere it should be at the top, like the glow in the picture.

[Feron]

I'm gonna be honest here, i think the whole thing would look a lot better if it was half the size.

You would be able to render the objects a bit nicer and it would take a lot less time, and will probably get completed.

[Souly]

I'd make it smaller but I've already done it this large, no turning back.

[willfaulds]

I think if I were you I'd try to ease the process by blocking in with maybe 2 or 3 shades of grey to define some volume on the faces. nice big brush...

You can either then use it as reference or work to convert it to dither patterns. It's just what I'd do to simplify the process.

Thought this might be of use (dither patterns more than anything - although you're doing grand with the cloud's shading )

[Souly]

Not much of an update...
Good news my computer crashed and had to format out of no where. Fun.

I should stop looking at porn.