@um9s

Peindre

This is a very competant piece! I'm not familiar with actors and actresses so I'm not sure who it is so while I was doing my drawover i made them look completely different. Sorry in advance. I am not very good at painting myself, but I will my best to give you some tips! I think there are maybe 3 things that you should focus on in future illustrations. -First is your stroke economy! I think switching to a blockier and thicker brush when doing your paintings will help with this. I notice that you have a lot of thin brush strokes that results in something that they call banding. Challenge yourself to limit the amount of brush strokes you use to define a form. -Second is your values! Your light areas are marred with too many dark strokes and this can happen when you don't simplify your light and shadows and go straight into details. You should be thinking about the big shapes of light and dark on a figure which can be more easily done if you challenge yourself to only using 2 or 3 values. The next step would be to think about shape design when painting shadows and light but that also requires a good understanding of form and anatomy. -Third is hair! It can be easy to overthink the hair because logically we know that it is made up of thousands of strands, but that's a trap. Instead you should try simplifying it into big groups of big, medium, and small. Hinting at detail will actually look a lot better than actually painting detail. All of this sorta of ties together. I think you should focus on simplifying what you're looking at in its most basic forms and gradually add detail. This would also apply to the sketching phase! Instead of drawing in lines while constructing the face try to focus on using big shapes to indicate form. You can do 5-15 minute quick paintings, breaking down your reference into 2 to 3 values to test if you really understand value and form. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P6gaSJCgBo) This is a good video with some good exercises if you're interested.