Skull / Portrait Studies! (Patreon)

Hey Everyone! I hope your week has been off to a great start so far. 

I wanted to share what I have been doing lately to prepare for a huge upcoming challenge...still a secret for now. I have been following along to the skull portion of the course ' Med's Map' from Ahmed Aldoori. (this exercise is not part of the course, its just what I wanted to do instead of the assigned homework lol)  It has been amazingly helpful to realize how easy it is to construct stylized faces after drawing the skull. And yes you heard me correctly, I drew this skull first, THEN drew the face over it. I believe this is because the skull determines so much more of the facial features than anything else, so when you skip the muscles and fat and go straight to the features, you simply get a decent stylized face! (in this case Raya from Raya and the Last Dragon)

I have done many of these that I will share later with the full sketch rewards and have seen massive improvements. My current concerns are that Its still difficult to draw them without doing the skull first. I tend to skew the head to the right whenever i draw, along with not keeping the facial features aligned in the same direction. My third weakness is drawing the head in one angle, then the rest of the features in another angle. So when I draw the skull first, I usually end up with a decant face because It forces me to keep everything straight. Going right into the organic features is confusing to me so I think I have quite a bit of relearning to do to draw things lined up, in proper perspective the FIRST time around. However, If I have to draw a skull every time in order to get a good face - I'll accept that. At least I'll be badass at drawing skulls.