Afghani Girl

[NaCl]

Hey,

This is a piece I made to practice facial anatomy, shading, and some dithering. It's the first time I've really used dithering, and am not sure if I did so correctly. I basically used dithering as an extra color between the two being dithered.



And the reference:



All crits on all aspects of this piece are welcome! Thanks

Current:


I tweaked this some more... this piece is quite fun. With Helm's edit I saw a few ways it was off.

[ptoing]

As it looks atm the most important thing you have to learn is to draw the things you see not the things you think you see.
This may sound a bit odd, but really look at the photo and compare the aspects of parts related to other parts with what you drew.

Her eyes have a very different shape in the photo and are bigger in relation to the head.
Same goes for the lips and the nose (which is too thin and long)

Also I would suggest to use higher contrast. Her hair and eyebrows as well as the outer rims on her irises are almost black, the eyes have are extremely intense in the photo, you should try to capture that.
Her skin also has a bigger range of value and is more contrasty.

Not boxing her in like you did would be geed as well, gives the picture a bit more space to breathe as well as the viewers eye something to explore.

And finally I would suggest not to dither until you got all your shapes and volumes down. Looking at the photo with squinted eyes will help you see the different fields of light and dark better. While you draw always keep checking ratios of things compared to others. How far is the tip of the nose away from the top of the lip and how does that distance relate to other places like the bottom of the chin to the bottom of the lips and such.

Keep it up, looking forward to updates

[NaCl]

Thank you ptoing for that excellent advice and critique. I tried to integrate your advice as best as I could.

I redrew the eyes to be bigger, and shaped closer to the reference photos.
Widened and shortened the nose.
Made the darker colors even darker to improve contrast.
Added a lighter shade for the tip and bridge of the nose where light is hitting it the most.
Removed the dithering on the face, until I get the facial anatomy and shading decent.

I did not expand the size of the image, but I will soonly. You are right that it would be better to have more geography for the eye to explore, I think a combination of fear and laziness prevented me from making more of the surrounding stuff.

Update:


(please look at the original post for the most current version)

[Dr D]

I've been working on an edit for a very long time, and I can keep on editing it for a lot more, but I feel I've got down some of the more major than minor points that I need to address here..

First of all, the shape of the girls head resembles more that of an aged woman than a girl. Her cheeks don't stick out as much, and the whole bottom face is much too big/wide/fat. Her face is rounder, too.

Next, the perspective. In the reference, the girls head is tilted somewhat more to the right, affecting the whole lighting of the face. You can fully see the side of her nose, rather than the top of it, for instance.

Your shading and lighting is a bit mixed up, as compared to the reference of course. You're using lighting and shading where you shouldn't, or should use the other. This can be easily seen to the left of the nose, eye, and mouth, where her features add a little bit of shading to the face, which you either forgot to do, or haven't got to yet, which is alright. I believe the mix-ups in your shading and lighting are somewhat caused by the mix-up in the perspective.

I suppose this one would fall in composition. In your latest edit, the girl's eyes look sort of asymmetrical, and slightly looking in different directions. The little bit of the white of the eye we can see under the right eye make it seem as if she's sort-of looking up. She does not look like she is looking at the camera. Also, the shape of her eyes still aren't right either, they are more pointy towards the insides and outsides of each eye. Don't forget to make both eyes look similar.

The errors in and around the eyes are the most important as they are the focal point in your piece.

And a few minor-

The lips in your piece are too round on the top, while as hers go into two, nice, pointy, points. (I can't seem to use a better word today..) And the lips curve inward as they form into those points.

Her eyebrows are thinner.. And I'd like to say they're even, but it DOES look like her right eyebrow either has less hair or is thinner than the left.

Eyelashes.. They add to the piece a lot, and she has them... And you'll notice in my edit I did something similar (And didn't add it to the other eye..  )

I know it's still a heavy WIP, so this probably doesn't apply.. But, you have some VERY similar colors, such as the two dark maroons in the bottom-right corner in her shawl.

It might just be me, but your pallete confused me as well. You might have chosen all the right colors, but used them incorrectly:



5 shades, I circled the areas that I think your shades should resemble.

Sorry, it's very messy. I used dithering in some places, instead of inserting a new color, because I was lazy. And it's my first edit, and I'm generally not a great pixeler.. So, yeah.
Again this edit is far from done or perfect, so take what you want out of it, and don't forget I am very new to art as a whole, and especially pixel art. Really, your reference is all your need to make the best you can, an edit isn't going to show how to fix anything better than the real thing.

[NaCl]

Thanks Dr D for putting so much effort into that critique! It helped me realize a few errors on the piece.

Here is what I updated:
Thinned the eyebrows a bit
Made the upper lip thinner and curve the correct direction
Angled the nose closer to the reference
Raised the sides of the nose, so it is pointier
Adjusted the colors
Redid the shading underneath both of her eyes
Tried to improve the symmetry and size of the eyes



I think it has improved a bit, and is not bad. However, it still doesn't catch that wild intensity of the reference. I believe this is because of very slight emotional cues in her facial expression, which I do not have the skills to recognize, let alone capture.

[balls01]

i believe the eyes are under expressed. the eyes you have in the reference are large and very agressive your she seems more calm and collected, this i think is shown by shape, instead of a oval focus on the iris (circle i dont know if i got it right). the iris is round and almost completely shown ifnot is completely shown.

the palette seems fine with dithering the only thing i can say which ive been told a thousand times and still do it. dont dither because you want to, dither because it looks better. also with dithering ive noticed is that you need definate contrast or it looks bad, thats why i either dither or dont and then i get told to get rid of the dithering.

[Varish]

I made an edit to try to capture likeness more.



I made her face less long and wide and tried to get her features more like the reference.

[NaCl]

Hey balls01 and Varish, thanks for the comments and the edit.

I've tried to really look at her face and make mine closer to it, and your edit was helpful for that Varish. One big thing I found was that I needed to move her eyebrows bown close to her eyes, it makes her look more aggressive, and less calm. Also I made the bottom eyelid cover the eye a bit more.

I redid the right iris, it was too small even though I thought it looked too big. The green has been upped in saturation.

The nose is pointier yet.

The bottom lip is poutier.

Here is the update:


Thanks again to everyone who has commented here so far! I think the piece has improved a lot, and more importantly I have learned quite a bit.

[Helm]

Hello. Here's an extensive edit and critique to go with it. Grab coffee and good will.



What is a face? A face is a series of planes of varying angles. The angle of the plane relative to the direction of the lightsource is tinted more by the lightsource brightness and hue, or less. You should think of the face in geometric terms.
A face is also a series of surfaces that have other qualities than just angle, there is the issue of humidity, of texture. These things in turn refract or absorb light and make things complicated. All these qualities combined make a face difficult to reproduce (not even going into atmospheric conditions and whatnot).

Painters tend to look at a face with squinty eyes and find general bodies of the same approximate color, paint them accurately and then fix the mixes between them. Pixel artists tend to do the same. They start rough and then mix with dithering and whatnot. I think instead of doing that you should look into the physiology of the face, the angles, the volumes, the 3d aspect of it. When you learn these things then you will also be able to extrapolate how a face would look like under an imaginary light without resorting to reference, and that's a skill a lot of painters would envy dearly. Drawing pretty reproductions of photos is one thing, being able to draw pretty on your own quite another. Perhaps you'll have to go through the 'painter's way' before you go through the 'sculptor's way' so to speak, and that's fine. Just keep in mind that even when you can perfectly reproduce what a photo shows by copying planes of color and doing fine detail later, you still don't know anything about WHY the face is as it is, why there's wet highlights under the eyes where moisture and sweat accumulates, why the arch of the nose, if crooked a bit (as in this angle you cannot easily discern, but it is) will catch a highlight at the bump, why the lips, oh the lips, such a complex construction of various planes and volumes, I could draw lips for the next 10 years and still not capture the beauty of the reality of that woman in that photo.

Anyway, on the pixel front you're also using too many colors and you're worrying too much about dithering blah blah. Dithering will NOT do planar work for you. First you set the planes with solid colors, then you do your mixing with the dithering. Like an oil artist, yes?

You're getting better in this thread for real. But there's too much hand-holding on the way, you need to realize that a series of small tweaks, though will fix this image, will not help you UNDERSTAND the image. Fundamental studies, as they say, are in order. I don't mean to discourage you, I hope I haven't. I wish someone would have told me some time ago when I was just fixing n' tweaking fundamentally flawed drawings, that I need to study THE THING, not how to fix this IMAGE OF THE THING.


edit: I've been told that I should perhaps talk more about the process of editing, but I really can't because I really changed everything and too much to give you a step-by-step. However if you want a theoretical step by step of what I at least - there's people far better than me you should listen to, though - go through when making a drawing of a face, do tell me and we can take it from the top, slowly. I simply cannot help you to get from your edit to my edit without you learning a lot of backwards theory and technique, so perhaps the edit I made is a bit uncalled for. I started just by taking out all your dithering and looking HARD at the planes of the face and fixing them in your version (nearly everything is counted incorrectly) and then I started bringing more contrasts in (you need them for the deth glare) and then I fixed the parched lips and and and... the biggest problem with my overboard edit is that I couldn't stop drawing this beautiful face. It destroys all the master paintings, this photo. I'd rather look at it than look at 20 renaissance paintings.

[ndchristie]

http://javimoya.com/blog/pics/200702/Sharbat.jpg

just thought a larger clearer image might help you understand the forms.

the trouble with skin is that it's matte in many ways, translucent in others, and still in other ways glossy.  What you're dealing with then is a surface which is strongly lit from the right her left in the traditional let's draw a ball fashion, but then there are also some stronger lights on the planes that don't actually face the light source, but that reflect to it - they are actually more frontal in their articulation than the faces receiving the most light!  This is terribly confusing at a glance.  In addition, the faces that receive little light through reflection or direct exposure do have a bit of a glow, both where light cuts through them and where it reflects off the rest, giving you some luminance (let's call it saturation) in the shadows, particularly around the nose.