#it’s not a very clean drawing. i’m struggling a bit with finished pieces atm

[bluvlet]

checkmate.

[mcrmadness]

Guys, I have this one pencil WIP I need a bit help with...

It’s still a WIP as I said but I wanted to ask: what’s wrong with Bela’s face? I can’t see it properly anymore. Does it even look like Bela yet? The reference photo is not the best one and believe me or not - Bela’s eye is the most difficult part in this whole thing. Here’s the reference photo and of course it’s easy to tell from this it’s Bela because why wouldn’t it be him, but it’s super difficult to draw right when this is the original:

The 21-years-old me really was a genius while choosing this photo to draw. Not.

Based on the eyes of the photobombing Rod (lol), I think also Bela’s eye do the same red-eye thing (how is it called in English? In Finnish it’s just red-eye...) and I tried to draw this without such effect but idk how to draw eyes from that angle. I googled for reference photos but it’s still so small that it’s hard to really draw that way with a pencil (the iris/pupil thing literally the size of the tip of the pencil). Also Bela’s head is slightly tilted and my hand is so good at drawing straight lines even without rulers that it feels almost impossible to draw anything that is even slightly tilted. I sometimes try to tilt the reference photos as well as the paper so that I could still draw not-tilted images but I just struggle at figuring out which way to turn the paper to make it look tilted on the paper, and tilted on the right direction too. I think there’s also something about the shape of Bela’s skull that I need to fix, I’m just not entirely sure what is it... move his forehead forward or make the back of his head bigger? I’m not entirely sure yet.

I also have to point out that this is actually a very old WIP originally. I started it in 2012 (yes I’m old, yes I turned 21 that year...) and I left it as a lineart that I thought I’d never continue, but I did in 2019 but wasn’t happy with the faces which is why I never posted it anywhere but also never used fixative on. (The old scans are under the cut for the first time ever to see.) So, almost everything that you see in today’s WIP is original (at least from the 2019 version) but just blended because I got a bit too much into blending so that I just needed to try that out with this one too and see if they (the eyeshadow applicators mainly) still work like little magic wands. And oh yes, they do indeed.

What I have drawn again or fixed are: the heads, Bela’s right hand (aka the one at Farin’s side), the side/back line of Farin’s jacket and his left leg (right one in the drawing). I might still need to do something about Bela’s legs because they look a bit weird for some reason but as you can see, the background in the reference photo is black so I have had to improvise there a little. That’s also the reason for why the end of the guitar looks really bad - it gets cropped out in the photo, but I might still try to fix that one too eventually.

Talking of the other things wrong in the drawing and what I’m still gonna fix one way or another - Farin’s mouth is too big (woooow). I haven’t had the courage to resize it because I’m afraid it would never look as nice as it does now but I’m afraid I have to do that anyway if I want to make it look correct. His whole head actually ended up being way too big and I have managed to narrow everything else down so far but not the mouth because I haven’t wanted to, yet. Also I have given him this cunning grin instead of just a smile so I need to move his lower jaw backwards a little, I see.

So my question is the same as in the beginning: does Bela look like Bela yet? Or does he at least look like he does in that photo? Is there something in particular that is still way too off that I should fix since I can’t see that? I do have this photo turned into black and white to make it easier to draw, and I’m still going to soften some lines in the final piece but atm I’m just trying to get Bela’s face look correct, as well as Farin’s mouth, and I will be going through everything else in this drawing later on to see if there’s anything else with proportions and such to fix (plus just cleaning up the highlights etc.) before I can call it finished.

Feel free to point out also if there’s something you see that I didn’t mention. Chances are that I either a) haven’t see it myself yet or b) just forgot to mention it.

Here’s the lineart WIP from 2012:

This is how it looked like in 2019 - I redrew almost everything in that original WIP actually:

I somehow had completely forgotten about blending because I hadn’t drawn anything in YEARS. So after my previous really successfull attempt with blending, I decided to try with this one again and it alone made already a huge impact on the drawing.