unfinished jerry garcia sketch..

s,not bad, some of the features are a little warped it seems though

 

if you say you dont draw much you do well for just starting.

i can see you had trouble with proportion on the eyes:

a little trick i do is start with the eye on the left (right eye actually) if youre right handed, that way when you go to draw the eye on the other side you wont have your hand blocking the other eye while you draw.i just say this because its easier to keep them the same size if you can see the other eye while you draw the second one.

another idea ...considering the techniques you use to draw would be...

making sure that you never OUTLINE your drawings, what i mean by this for example:

say you look in the mirror at your lips, you dont see a dark outline of your lips around your mouth do you...nope...so what you wanna do is draw the flesh part of the top lip by very very lightly outlining the shape of it, then fill it in so that it is only 1 shade,

after you have that done what you want to do now is shadow the top of the lip (which is replacing outlining) without drawing on the lip itself...its simple just look at your picture..the thin shade that youre putting along the top of your lip is going to add dimension..after youve done the top lip do the bottom lip starting at the bottom of that lip.

now where your lips touch together when you close them will have to have a thin more precise shade

sometimes you only have the bottom lip showing in a drawing like yours

that long stoner info was just letting you know that outlining is almost always bad,sometimes its necessary but meh...

maybe ill make a step by step diagram thatll just share my ideas with you, they may actually help.my drawings are in pen and they are outlined only because theyre just simple outline drawings..

the best piece of advice i can give you: draw it as you see it, even if you have to draw the simplest line 200times...if you improvise and say, "eh its close enough to his nose" then you get to the mouth and say, "eh its close enough to his mouth" and so on then by the time your drawing is done it looks like someone else!!

i think i went into it too much because im ripped outa my mind!!!! but you sounded like you like to draw and you said any new ideas would be appreciated so i thought maybe id share ...

i will give you this though....i can tell who it is so thats cool,

have you ever heard of graphing a picture before you draw it by chance??? its another way of getting things exact

 

i tried to pm this but my resizing skills suck

as you can see in the clip here..on the left is your picture you want to draw and on the right is your sheet of sketch paper

graph both, the picture and the sketch paper so that the squares are identical.make sure you have the same amount of squares too!! 1 extra square ruins the picture!

even if your picture is smaller than your sketch paper ,, make sure the squares are proportioned correctly so that both look identical ...kinda like Dr. Evul and mini me..EXACT same thing only different sizes..(my squares on the example arent the same proportion...thats only because it was a quick doodle for a visual idea)

once both papers are graphed....pick a square any square!! and draw it exactly how you see it on the corresponding square of your sketch sheet..(i know the example shows otherwise but i usually start at the 4 corners and work my way in to the center)

do this and post the outcome i wanna see how good you did....if you didnt understand something i said jus let me know....sometimes im a bad explainer!!

 

yeah, if you draw each square on your paper the same as it looks on your picture...then by the time your done drawing-in every square . your drawing will look like your picture.

like look at my picture..see on the paper on the right how i drew part of the sun in that one square because thats what was in that same square on the other paper.

all you have to do is pic a square and if it has part of a tree trunk on the right, and an apple on the ground..then draw it the same on the other paper

 

nose shadows and shades are pretty tough...eyebrows can be also..

if you plan on shading the entire picture what you want to do is look at Garcia's skin in the pic youre using..go ahead and draw your outline of his head/face if you want.

what i do after this is lightly shade the entire face and as youre drawing you will notice ofcourse some places: around the nose under the eyes, etc will be darker....so around these places you will want to go ahead and shade the dark parts under the eyes or next to the nose.....now youre thinkin "ugg it looks like he has dark patches on his face now,how do i fix this?!"

as youll notice when you look at a photo you can see everbit of shade on someones face perfectly!! but somehow it seems to blend in with the brighter areas....

to do this practice using your fingers to smudge from the dark patches onto the lighter skin..youll figure out a pattern after awhile...

eyebrows are tough, you can either try to draw each individual hair....(pain in the ass).or ...you can draw the basic outline of the eye brows then shade those in all the way so that they are the darkness youre going to want...now after youve done this go in with your eraser and erase little lines so that they will look like white hairs...do that all over the eyebrow and then blend it together to give it a bushy more definitive look..


to tell you the truth its soo hard to explain this with only writing..but on the next picture i draw ill take photos and step by step how i like to do it

 

take your time..always..im in no hurry....i just have a feeling youll like what you see when youre done!!!! also ofcourse ...erase the lines after youre done with your drawing lol i kinda missed that part but im sure you probably new that already

 

Weedseed, you're a real bank of good drawing advice!

 

thanks much...i just started a Martha Stuart drawing lol...its a pic from her court hearing

 

heres my current project that im starting

good ole martha, you can see the gridding on her but not very good on my paper