Hi, that’s a pretty good attempt. I knew straight away who it was so good job there. To avoid smudging your page just take a scrap piece of paper and use that to rest your hand on. As for how to approach a portrait like this the first thing I would suggest (if you haven’t already done so) is to convert your reference to black and white. This will make it easier to see the values. Your drawing does look a little amateurish and the reason is because you’ve outlined all of the details. The nose, the eyes, the mouth etc, all have quite a dark outline to them. If you want to draw in a semi-realistic way, you need to change how you think about the subject. Try to approach it more as a painter. To start, scrunch your eyes when looking at the reference. This blurs the image and stops you from focusing too much on details. Your reference should appear as large blocks of value and that’s where you want to start. It’s okay to go in first with linework to lock in the proportions and the shapes of the features, but then you want to use something like a kneaded eraser to remove those hard lines. Then it’s a process of building up the portrait in layers, focusing not on detail but on values. Starting with the largest blocks of shadows and then slowly refining the shapes and values. Details come at the end. What I’ve drawn as an example is very rough. I did it very quickly and traced a lot of it because I just wanted to illustrate the broad concept. Hope that helps. | Artwod Feedback