Did all these today...

This is an exercise I took on to help develop my accuracy in drawing/measuring and my painting skills. I did not trace the drawing - I spent a good hour carefully measuring the limiting lines around the head and finding a few key construction points so I could place the eye line, the brow line, the center line and the mouth. With that all done I sketched the rest in freehand and kept checking accuracy by pasting the drawing onto of the pic. Then I'd move things around using either liquify filter/transform tools or just be erasing/redrawing, until finally when I acted it down it looked like this. Good enough. Next time though I think I need to trace a cleaner drawing over the scratchy ugly one, with nicer cleaner lines, a bit thicker. 

I'm pretty proud of my first real constructive head drawing. Once you've got the main construction points clearly marked as I did above the rest is pretty easy, and it's actually easier when you're looking at a real head (or a picture of one) than from the imagination. I was amazed at how well it went after that - every shadow, every highlights almost every mark I needed to make after that went right along one of the construction lines and ended up being just right. 

3 hours well spent. I used only the default hard round/soft round brushes, and after a couple of comp 101 thumbnails done entirely with chalk and pastel brushes I really appreciate the control the default brushes give. I just used chalk and dry brush right at the end for a couple of surface effects - probably the best use for those funky type brushes. It needs a bit more work, but right now I'm super happy with it. My painting never looked so good!!