Tweak my subscriber's art with Commentary

hey everyone the portrait here in this video i'm going to do some tweaks on one of my patreon drawings and doing some commentary hopefully it will help you the right side i'm not going to touch and all my adjustment will go on the left image i think this drawing is pretty good considering the experience of the patron but i always notice the same little issues that that can easily push his art to the next level and given that art is subjective our goal is realism okay first um i'm gonna make some small proportional adjustment this is not the the main goal of this uh tweaking because you get better at it as time goes on but generally there's a little bit of a dip between the cheekbone technically the zygomatic bone and the jaw so roughly around this uh the area right below the eyes and the jaw you will not be this perfectly round generally speaking so i'm going to bring that in a little bit these are these are very very small adjustments and notice how the right well from our point of view the right eyebrow is much higher than the left eyebrow when they should be much more symmetrical so we're going to bring that down a little bit okay i'll consider that good enough as the proportion tweak the the issues that i see a lot from this particular um patron is that he tends to neglect the transition buffer zones basically if you want to transition let's say a you know like a shadow area to a light area there should be a buffer zone where it goes from dark to uh bright and uh as an example so let's say here like the difference between um between one value and the next value it's like it suddenly changes like almost immediately changes from one value to the next with no buffers with no gradient in in there so it gives the viewers this kind of illusion and i'm sure a lot of you noticed by now and you know the artist himself i'm sure noticed by now you give the viewer that the impression that everything's very very angular and sharp and also make sure that you know there's there's really a place there are there are situations like this but there's really a place where you'll see like a shadow under the eyes but then suddenly it goes into like a bright value somewhere and also there's no shadow here so there's a little bit of inconsistency right there uh the highlight on the lips is a little um off but but i think this is unfinished piece so the ice the coloring of the eyes inside the eyes could be a little bit darker uh even if the person you are drawing has blue eyes generally depending on the lighting it's not going to be this bright and so of course we're going to tweak that and we're going to make a little bit more rounder so the first thing i'm going to do is uh let's assume i'm using charcoal pencil or whatever right we're going to go over the uh the valley of the face just by doing that i'm adding kind of an overall mid-tone to the face and we tend to over exaggerate what we see in terms of uh contrast so any part of the picture that's bright we tend to over emphasize it and any part of the pictures that is dark we tend to over emphasize it and we tend to not pay too much attention especially early on as a beginner to any area that is a mid-tone value because a lot of differences that we tend to notice in the joints we always tend to exaggerate it then we tend to think that the differences are much larger than what is actually there and so far i'm just going to give this entire image kind of a mid-tone because there's very few areas in the image that would be like super bright and i might and i might go over some of the dark parts that i destroyed with my mid-tones i do like how you did how you uh make sure that the super dark parts in the drawing that describes depth you are not afraid of using really dark values which is good because a lot of people have that problem now i'm going to start working with some light tones typically above the eyebrow that is a place that cuts a little bit more light if you look at the human skull it bulges outward so not uncommon to have a little bit of highlight above the eyebrow and then between the eyebrow there typically is kind of a valley which means it's going to be a little bit darker and notice carefully about where the lighting shadow would be okay notice how now we got rid of this uh this this angle this crazy angle here uh let me try to pick a color right now there's no we try to get rid of any of such like super sharp angles that would depict the human face like we're not robots so there's very few places on the human face that would uh weren't such a very dramatic transition between light and dark it's generally fairly round even places that it's pretty angular they're generally is fairly round they have a little bit of a gradient that you need to take into consideration now that we did that let's let me uh start taking some of the tones and i might speed this part up [Music] again the eye and where the pupil is dictate a lot about whether a picture looks like the eyes are so important basically so you really want to get the proportion not just the position correct you want to get the values correct the shape of it and everything it's one place that i always say just you know it's okay to spend as much time as you need to make sure that this part of the drawing is done correctly and there is generally a little bit of dark shadow under the eyes just not quite as dramatic and of course you know this is quite kind of a fast tweak tweaking that i'm doing it's not meant to be resulting in like a perfect image but hopefully the principle that i talk about as i go under as i'm doing this will help um so far like be besides early on with that tiny bit of proportion correction there's nothing that i'm doing you couldn't do with just regular you know tools like charcoal by the way i'm doing this you'll see that hopefully hopefully you'll go you look okay by the end you see that a lot of the the places where we think what the value is is not what the actual values are for example um in the drawing right you have the you see all these values here they're almost as pure as white even though in reality there should be only be just a few spots that is at the brightest vast majority of the places on the face has some kind of value it's kind of like early on when people are afraid to put down like dark tones so now it's like pure just to make sure you're not afraid to put down enough midtone the more you play around with different tone values the more you can see how they change the way the online form appears to the viewer and the more then you know how to manipulate it and change it because all we're doing is really right we try to be creating this optical illusion with 2d tone values and that changes users perception of how high or how low something is to us so it's like it's like that z dimension x y z we tend to think that the the white part in the eyes is bright and when we draw we tend to just leave it as white but most times they don't necessarily catch all the light so while it is white most time it is in some kind of shade it's not perfectly rebounding all the light back to our eyes that's why the teeth what we think is in our mind we think it's white and the whites in the eyes they're not generally that white in the actual join sometimes they are but sometimes in certain parts they're actually quite dark so this so this is uh are all the places where you have to really pay attention to what is what are you actually observing or if you're doing concept art you know with the light actually reach there including all the parts that i seemingly sped up i have spent maybe like 10 minutes 15 minutes on this drawing obviously if i to if i were to spend a lot more time i can make the drawing look a lot more photorealistic and or whatever but the point is i want to show you the principle and not to create you know like a perfect joint it's like hey you know you don't really have to do that much and suddenly your work becomes a lot more realistic and better and just by smooth the entire area out especially from from the the dark part here to the light part here instead of creating just a very sharp change i made a into like a smooth tone transition and that was able to give you a much more natural perception of the form of the of the nose now i'm just going to look at any part another part of my about your drawing is that while you had the this is always important with regarding the eye while you you do the reflection of the eye and i can see that in there because the rest of your eyes iris is so bright it makes that reflection almost like non-perceivable now i can give you some quick pointers regarding the hair as i mentioned i don't want to spend too long on the on the joint to make it like super perfect i want to show how easily somebody can just quickly make some changes to a drawing so that it gets to the next level really fast and what they have already accomplished it's not really that far away from this this is basically like 15 minutes maybe half hour right if you're doing with charcoal and you take your time uh regarding hair you did a good job but you didn't pay pay a little bit more attention i have a tutorial on on hair on styles of hair pay a little bit more attention to the structure of the hair and make the form a little bit more readable and makes more sense to the viewers so let me show you what i mean i'm gonna still stick with this brush that's gonna probably slow me down quite a bit [Music] overall i'm gonna give it a little bit dark tone so i can put the white in there so we're gonna start from here and i'm sorry guys if this looks terrible because i'm this is definitely not the brush that i would use for hair now some not something that i'm used to when i'm doing digital work because they have special brushes that is good for doing hair and so on but this is how i would this this looks very much like how would i would do hair if you see my joints how i would just use my eraser and create all the highlights in here you'll be able to make the form a little bit more uh i wonder if i should make the background a little bit darker maybe i should do that right let's do that make the little bit darker so that we can see the white of the hair comes out all right and we need to highlight of the hair you do want you know certain parts to be super white especially against the background that is not too dark and the way i'm doing it it might not be perfect so you can probably spend time and really observe what you see and make it the the hair even better than what i'm doing just follow the path of the highlight that you see and generally you will do a fine job with it make sure the background is dark when it needs to be darkened you know people always ask me oh yeah i do hair it's like hair is actually one of the and those who i have seen my tutorial on patreon know this hair is one of the part always one of the parts in my drawing where i spend the least amount of time on and i find the most you know relaxing time doing just because how easy it is relatively speaking there's some room light come from behind that kind of that highlight the hair i'm just going to give you some idea and from here you see that this part here is a little tricky i can see how this part is a little tricky like the hair is brushed over and you try to and i say you are trying to do that but because um i think maybe the way you use the charcoal or the way you didn't uh use the eraser that i recommended perfectly that you are not able to make all these little strands of hair you end up making like large areas of whites there so if you just do that and suddenly even just with me just doing such a horrible job at it right now just doing so fast you'll see some kind of form happening and i'm actually following some of your like the forms you already made putting highlight in there i'm probably missing highlights here and there which you can add in later it's all about just you know see it as instead of like individual strengths because then you drive yourself nuts if you try to draw hair that way see it as like mass volumes and then the straight hairs you can just add in there but generally overall first i'll see it as like a mass volume of hair that flows this way that way um and then add details in later and i'll come down and it looks like the some of the highlights are here and it comes down back here and of course you can add some stray hair that is black with some straight hair that is white that is called that is hatching light because some that's what happens in real life some hair uh are caught in the light and rebound the light in your eyes and some hair i just faded into a not touching light but their straight hair anyway and so they are black versus background and some hairs are white sorry i'm gonna sorry i'm this is your signature right here i'm not i don't want to you know get covered completely so all right so notice the difference that i make i can't keep going but i don't think that would keep going would it uh provide any more benefit because my point is really the uh the principle of everything i'm doing and honestly i'm looking at the clock right now i've been spending a total of less than like half an hour maybe on this uh on this change and hopefully you guys can see the difference between the left one and the right one and the point i want the arts to take away from this is not to be like discouraged or anything like that but to realize how close your drawing is actually to you know the left side drawing version because all your need to do is to add some you already covered most of the stuff i barely touched the proportions that much i just changed some of the way you would describe form with tone value and one of the things like um i would reiterate as i pointed out that i always see in your particular drawing is that you tend to always make you know very sharp divisions between different zones and i want to and i want to show you that you know the the difference is actually not that quite big but majority of times um our face are in the difference between light and dark values are not huge at all so you want to keep it a mid-tone and save the highlights for the place that needs the highlights and uh you know use the dark tones on place that needs the dark tones and another important point that i want to point out is definitely always pay attention to the eyes and make sure the ice and iris and highlight are placed correctly including the color of the eyes in the uh the white part of the eyeball because they're never pure white same thing with the teeth teeth we think it's pure white but they're generally in the shadows so they're generally they're never pure white but overall great job um i was able to take whatever you did and i was able to draw this in uh you know 20 minutes half hour if i were to start from scratch there's no way i can do that you know so it's take this as realizing how close you actually are to the next level and i hope you guys were able to take away some tips from this video and find it helpful remember you can always join my patreon by following the link on the in the description or on screen and i'll probably make this into a series that i would do more consistently if people like to see it alright thanks for watching guys and i'll talk to you next time cheers