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blockh34d [2015-03-10 18:02:30 +0000 UTC]

Hello, I received some instruction on face rendering and I thought I would pass along what I could if it helps

First off, it looks great, very nicely done.


Generally there is an order of brightness to the highlights of the face, it goes:

Brightest first:

Lit side eyebrow/eyesocket ridge (upper)
Tip of the nose
Lit side eyesocket ridge (lower) / cheek bone
Tip of chin
Lit nostril
Dim side cheek
Thin light highlight along top edge of darker upper lip
Wider, less bright highlight on lower/lit lip

(If you look at my profile pic you can see these highlights in pretty much the order I mentioned, pretty clearly, although that's completely accidental)

For this to work properly it's important to not only get the brightness of highlights right but to also cause the edges of the head to recede spatially, usually by making it darker, although I like to also make it blurrier, and a lot of times I put a slight backlight effect on it so it can mostly get darker at the edges, except the very edge which is lit, then the background can be dark as well and you still get acceptable seperation of tone.

So the head is basically a big sphere with a carefully structured progression of highlights

Two other things can cause a portrait to look flat or lack realism.  One is to pull the chin too far forward in space (it's part of the head sphere, it recedes even if we think of it as jutting forward).  I think there could be a little of this in effect with your drawing, pushing the chin back some would help the rest of the face come forward, spatially.  To balance that out you should also work at making the back top edge of his head be a little blurrier and farther away.

The other thing is not making eye sockets deep enough.  To really illustrate how deep an eye socket is, try this (I had to have this done to me I didn't think it would work).  You take a pencil and lay it across your eye socket.  Most faces, no matter how you turn the pencil, if it lays on both edges of the eye socket directly through the middle, it will not actually touch the eye.  So eye sockets are a lot deeper than I think we generally consider them to be.  It can be nice to make sure you get maximum depth around the edges of the eyes so the detail in the center can pull forward in space.

Oh and one more think, eyeballs have a dark side I think that's why the dog might look a tad more realistic, as you say.  Your brother's eyes seem to have the same tone on either side.   I've found you may need to bend the original lighting around a little to best create the illusion of depth so I encourage you to essentially stop using your photo reference after you've gotten the proportions and layout worked out, then create a lighting model in your mind and try to apply it consistently.

Again, great pic, I'm subscribing to your art and I look forward to more.

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