Practice drawing a head and face from a profile view

This is the note for my practice to an illustration by a beginner.

Today's illustration

The above illustration is the one before I practiced and below one is after I practiced. I haven't finished coloring most of shades and shadows because I would update the original illustration after this practice.

Before Before

After After

In this time, I changed face and head to make them look a character more female, because originally it doesn't look. These are summaries for my learnings:

  1. In many articles or many people said, womens should be drawn more rounded and not sharp or square shapes.
  2. Consider affected areas while drawing lines especially it's not from front view. In this case, I should have cared how the cheek and jaw look when I drew a mouth and eyes
  3. Eyes are not wide enough to touch with a side hair from a profile view. I should have drawn smaller.

Here is the links to today's illustration on my SNS accounts.

I tried these steps to improve this original illustration:

  1. Self review my illustration
  2. Pick up a few things for improvements
  3. Practice and figure out a few things I can improve
  4. Redraw my illustration and check what was improved

Review my illustration

What can be better

  1. The head or face can be softer and look her more like a woman
  2. Breast can look more 3D and also can recognize its shape
  3. Skirt should be affected by gravity, so should belt chains
  4. Directions of hands or nails can be more natural towards the far side
  5. Hairs can have more details
  6. Hair pin can look more natural from this angle
  7. It's obvious that boots are duplicated, so make them less obvious

What was drawn well

  1. The pleat on the skirt looks good, and also its wrinkle does, too
  2. One of boots is drawn well
  3. Shape of legs is not so weird

What I practiced

On this time, I chose to practice improving the head and face of the illustration. From this head, I felt a creepy impression from this illustration, especially because she is not a female. At first, I need to figure out why it does.

I just hide color layers and frame line layer, but it didn't change the impression so much, so it turned out it's from line layers.

So, I copied original illustration and changed a little bit on each head or body part, and see how's gonna be changed. Following illustrations are things I changed and saw how it changes.

Practice 1 Practice 1

Practice 2 Practice 2

Practice 3 (Improve an original illustration one by one) Practice 3

What I found

I still feels it's not completely natural for a woman's character, but it's hard for me to figure out why it isn't. I need to have an ability to recognize what gives how I feel, but things I found this time are:

  1. In many articles or many people said, womens should be drawn more rounded and not sharp or square shapes.
  2. Consider affected areas while drawing lines especially it's not from front view. In this case, I should have cared how the cheek and jaw look when I drew a mouth and eyes
  3. Eyes are not wide enough to touch with a side hair from a profile view. I should have drawn smaller.

What I redrew and what was improved

So, I redrew the illustration with these changes. And this is the one I redrew after the practice.

After

And I completely remove the line of the side of the jaw and instead color the shade of the neck, because the line still gave me an impression as a male character. Instead of showing the line, I change the layer of it to the draft layer, so that it won't show up after I export it to an image, if I'm not mistaken. But this change may not be necessary, because when you can see anime, the line for a jaw is clearly drawn for a profile.