Holy crap! I accidentally finished the coursework!
The last section was definitely an overview and only took a couple hours, and now I’m flabbergasted that I’m finished! I HAVE mentally committed to 100, so I’m going to do some more anatomy stuff, but good heavens! And the truth is that if I hadn’t done all the face/head work stuff, I’d have finished at about 80 hours, probably. Which is fine: I’d figured I would finish earlier than 100 hours, but even if it had taken me the whole 100, I also still gave myself 6 months to do this and finished it in a bit over 3, so that’s really cool. :D
In general I feel strongly that either the woman putting this 100 hours thing together completely over-estimated the usefulness of the face/facial features/head tutorials because she couldn’t see past her own superior ability and felt they were of appropriate level, or, having done an excellent job putting together tutorials for the first 75% of this, kind of felt like the people end of it was “and this might be what you want to do with everything you’ve learned” rather than being a really well put-together segment for faces/heads.
But the Udemy course kind of did the same thing with the faces/bodies stuff, so IDK, maybe it’s the end of the course just being like “let’s just get this over with now,” or “you’re going to need a lot more specifically dedicated lessons to be good at this anyway so I’ll just do a really basic overview.” I’m beginning to suspect the latter, honestly, but in both cases I find it disappointing. For some reason, though, I find it MORE disappointing with the 100 Hours thing, possibly because she’d done such a great job up to this point and because I think it was a really difficult level-up for her partner.
The short version of why they’re less good than the earlier stuff is basically “it’s all way too fast/assumes a level of skill the student doesn’t necessarily have/is really almost intended to be a “watch how I, a really good artist, do this thing,” which…the point here is that THE STUDENT does the thing, so…
So like with the Namor-lookin’ dude’s head down there, like, the artist doing it had clearly internalized the Loomis method and it was meant to be “block out the shapes before you even try the Loomis method!” but, like, you have to be really quite good to do that. So his head is too narrow at the top and too wide at the jaw and the entire thing is supposed to be glancing downward, which it…is not. Feh. I don’t think it’s terrible, but it’s not as good as it could have been.
Technically this next bit was a “draw realistic hair” lesson, but as I’m not interested in doing that, I spent a couple-three hours tracing the models from the lesson and working on more stylized hair, and then tried these two freehand. Once more, I went in to with the intention of just doing a basic head shape and focusing on the hair, and once more, went beyond the remit of my own intentions, but I’m kind of pleased with how the little girl turned out, because kids are hard to draw.
I’m quite pleased with the young woman sketch below, which is juuuust about as realistic as I care to draw, thenkewverramuch. Her eyes were a little lopsided at the end of my first session, but it’s hard to get eyes right, and they were PRETTY CLOSE, all things considered. I figured I’d leave them alone because fixing them would be so hard.
In the end, I spent probably a total of 2.5 hours on this over a couple sessions, because I got very tired and knew if I kept going after the first pic, I’d screw the hair up, and I thought that would be Too Damn Bad, because I felt like I’d been doing a good job. And then I even kind of fixed her eye! That was one of the more nerve-wracking things I’ve done in this whole project! The odds of screwing it up even more were so much higher than any odds of improvement!
And this finishes the ‘human heads’ part of the 100 hours course:
It was another ‘block it in instead of loomis-heading it,’ and I did better this time, I think.
I tried to take pictures of the in-progress sketch, from the very beginning to the end, so you could kind of see the process here. Like in the 3rd picture of the 3 across, you may observe that her jaw has been made less wide, and her ear moved in, which…well, it’s closer to what it was supposed to be, anyway.
And here are the last couple sketches for the course, which really were overview things. The first is no better than I could have done at the beginning of this; the second probably is, although I hate that naif waif pose that’s so common to the male gaze. And then the last one is just a sketch I did from a reference, not part of the class.
So that’s the bulk of the 100 Hours project! I’m not stopping here, but I’ll have to think about how I’ll label what I’m doing going forward. Probably just with 100 Hours, tbh. :)