I thought I'd test my ability to reconstruct a human being in vectorworld. I'm working from a photo as a reference (personal photo, not public). Subject shall remain anonymous to protect the innocent unless she wishes to associate herself with the finished work. The drawing is really just a basic outline of the face so far, but I figured it would be fun to document my progress here.



Well - at least it is recognizable as a human being, even if this simple drawing does not do the subject justice.

Are you tracing or freehand?

The outlines are traced, basically what I did was fit some ovals over the face to get the general proportions right, and the position of mouth, nose, and eyes etc, then turn the reference layer off and work from there, every so often switching it back on to see if I am generally on target. I have no training drawing humans so I have to start somewhere. Thinking back to last night it would have been cool had I saved the first collection of geometry, but alas it's too late for that now.

Iteration 2: "Hair is hard."

Iteration 3: "It's getting hairier."



I think it starts to look more like actual hair now; I'll eventually have to clean it up a little as it currently looks "too wild". I also think the highlight on the left side looks out of place.

Wow! Looking good to me, so far. And I might add, it's very helpful to me as a beginner, to be able to watch someone else's process. Thanks for putting up this topic.

Regarding the hair highlights, they seem too narrow to me. Like if the highlights extended further along the hair, here and there? But who am I to say? It really is looking good, in any case.

All best

Love the colouring so far. I really look forward to see the next progress.

Thanks, guys. I appreciate the encouraging words. Brynn, I am hardly an expert at this myself, and am still figuring it out as I go. I'll try to be a bit more descriptive of what I did. MicroUgly, others, if I did something dumb or inefficient somewhere, please do feel free to point it out.

The size of the highlights would depend, I guess, on the light source. I initially had made them somewhat bigger, but I thought it looked too much like gray/white hair in the end. I'll tweak the hair later, once everything falls into place a little more and I can work on the overall image, not just parts.

Iteration 4: "Let's take a stab at the face."



This is a fairly minor step that took me way too much time because I played with the colors too much (something that, you may remember, is never easy for me - the curse of the colorblind). I ended up using the color pick tool, and averaging it out over parts of the original photo to get accurate colors. I use three base colors; medium, highlight, shadow.

The lines are the same as in the previous draft, set to a width of 0,5mm and a blur of 15. I did end up adjusting the nose on both sides - the lines used to be "on top" of the nose, now they are basically depicting the sides of the nose.

I'll continue work on the skin tomorrow - it'll be lots of fiddling with gradients and blurs.

The left highlight really irritates me every time I look at this posting in the preview, expect it to be gone by the next update. I also think the right (from viewer's pov) eyebrow needs to be moved a little to the left and maybe even a tad down. Or maybe rotated a little... gotta tweak that too.

On the plus side... I think it starts to look human.

Iteration 5: "Gradients galore."



...which is actually a little bit of a lie, the highlights are mostly gradients, while the large, irregular darker areas are simply shapes with blur. I couldn't get the gradients to look right in these highly irregular shapes. They just don't follow contours (if there's a way to do that, I'd be interested in hearing about it). As a result, there are some imperfections but I think they aren't too noticeable unless you take a close look.

The highlights on the cheeks, especially the left one, could be a little stronger.

The left highlight in the hair is gone, and I think that was a very good decision.

I also quickly filled the eyes and mouth with solid colors, even though this is just a really quick thing and totally unrefined I think it helps surprisingly much.

Looking at it now, I still think the right eyebrow (right from viewer's pov) looks like it is at an odd angle... Or is that just me?

It's coming along very nicely.

nils wrote:Looking at it now, I still think the right eyebrow (right from viewer's pov) looks like it is at an odd angle... Or is that just me?

I don't think it's an odd angle, I think it's just that it doesn't mirror the left one--it looks a little thicker and slightly longer.

I am also surprised at how much the bits of color in eyes and mouth, add to the realism!

I don't see any problems with the right eyebrow, but that may be because I can't see the reference. If anything, it's ever so slightly less curved than the left one, and a little bit heavier.

My only other comment would be that the darker areas on her cheeks, the irregular shadows that you said you used a blur rather than gradient, look a little like a beard to me. You may want to check with your friends, re the color. I don't know the right words to say what I mean. But the color itself is in the right "family" so to speak, it works with the other colors. Maybe because those shapes are a solid color? I'm thinking this may be temporary, though. If you plan to add more complexity to the highlights and shadows, that may well solve the problem, without having to change the color. In general, I think all the facial highlights could be brighter or lighter.

But overall, I'm so impressed with this! You really have good feel for balance and proportion, in general, which is so important in portraits. I agree with micro, it's coming along nicely!