Glad you enjoyed it, Alex.

Thanks, Leah. Honestly, the best way to improve your accuracy in proportions is to do a lot of block-ins. Practice the early stages of drawing, where you make your initial decisions about shapes and their relationship to one another. Keep these drawings simple, generalizing curves into straight lines with corners (as discussed in the course). Spend an hour or so on one, then put it aside and start another. Repeat, over and over. Then go back to your earlier drawings, look for errors you can fix and fix them. It’s the repetition that will ultimately improve your ability.

Hope that helps.

Thanks, Jacqueline!

Good to hear, Chris. I’ll try to keep this going!

Thanks, Foti!

Thank you, Leslie. Those early markings are how I attempt to landmark some of the smaller lumps and bumps on the surface. They make her look older because they’re so stark and sharp. Part of the task in the value stage is to preserve the shape and position of these structures, while also softening and integrating them into the surrounding surface. Like many things in drawing, it’s a simple idea but difficult to do – or at least I think so!

Well, that’s a big topic, Alan. I’m talking about the entire procedure of understanding what you see on the model and reconstructing it effectively on the page. Because all faces share certain characteristics in common, there are some problems to solve that are universal – each portrait presents slightly different versions of the same basic questions with respect to the shape and proportion of the head, the distribution of the features, perspective, etc.