Practicing faces...

[bunn]

Last night we were finishing off our re-watch of all the Star Wars movies.  We have watched them in in-universe order, so we started with tiny awesome Anakin and finished off with absurdly emo and kind of useless Kylo Ren.  I feel I should have more to say about this, but I don't, except to comment that 'The Phantom Menace' is a really ludicrous title. 

Anyway, while we were watching Luke and Rey wander around the Island of Porgs (I did like the porgs) and I decided to do a couple of quick practice faces. I feel I've got much better at faces in ink, but I haven't really practiced painting them, since it's a bit more work to get set up to paint than to just grab a pencil and some paper and whack out some faces.  I have a theory that if you just draw *enough* things then eventually all the bad lines have been drawn and all that is left should be the good ones.

Anyway, that didn't quite work out, because the first quick draft face I did (on a spare sheet of cardboard rather than artboard because I was trying not to overwork it) came out quite well, so it ended up more of a pair of portraits.  They were quite quickly done though, specially the one on the left, which I think has come out better than the one on the right...

Cirdan and a young Gil-galad.

Comments

[alithea]

Your faces are definitely improving - those are really good!

[bunn]

YAY! It's been a long hard road, and there's still some way to go, I feel.

[independence1776]

I like them, especially Cirdan's.

[bunn]

I started painting that in Prussian Blue , titanium white and burnt sienna only, literally because I had some left over on my palette to use up. I'm amazed it came out that well!

[dhampyresa]

More acrylics?

Love the cheeks bones on the young person. Edit: love the whole thing but that bit especially

[bunn]

Yes indeed. Using them in quite an oil-painting style but I just find acrylics more user-friendly in terms of drying quickly than oils. The acrylics do have a tendency to colour change slightly as they dry, which oils don't, but I've just started switching to Windsor & Newton Professional acrylics, which are supposed to fix that problem. Haven't used them enough yet to know what I think though.

[ningloreth.livejournal.com]

I was given a porg for Christmas!

What’s nice about the face on the left is that the transitions from light to shade are more confident. In the one on the right, the contrasts are more worked, but the underlying form of the face is really convincing — if you half-close your eyes to soften it, there’s absolutely nothing out of place; it’s a real face.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

A PORG! I love their little faces.

Hmm, interesting point about the contrasts, thanks!

[ylla.livejournal.com]

Is Círdan a distant relative of Qui-gon Jinn? ;-)

Nice, though.