#this lowkey was me practicing different angles and face shapes

[lixenn]

Happy New Year!

To celebrate the new tidings and to express my gratitude to my beautiful discord folks who made last year so much more bearable I decided to go on a sketching spree.

And.

Draw all the OCs I could find visual refs for.

Because I'm insane 🫡

So let me list them all with tags because we need to do this all good and proper:

@butterrdream's Apple

@dreamieparadise's Momina Luqman

@unwrathful's Chiara

@einsatzzz's Ishioka Rei

@dontknow-willaddlater's Nagoya Mai

@rahxe-things's Yamashita Kazumi

@moonlit-mystery-writer's Celeste Thorne

@tangomagnolija's Lamette

@melonchanverse's Murakami Itsuki

@myrmyrtheorca's Lidija Kastelic Cavalieri

@yunnebbia's Suzuki Ageha

(please have mercy if i mispelled anything those were a lot of names at once OTL)

Anyways thanks for hanging out with me guys, let's have another year that's filled with lots of OC gushing and fandom ramblings! 💜💜✨🫂

[itemss]

Hi! I'm sure you've heard this a lot already, but your realistic portrait series is so good! I love the detail and variation that you put into each face. I was wondering if you had any tips or exercises that you do to help you study realistic human anatomy? I like to draw and have been studying a book about heads, but no matter what I do my faces always end up looking super "anime" >.

Thank you!

As for the tips, it’s hard to give any if I didn’t see your drawings, but I’m sure the 2 most important things are drawing from reference and a lot of practice. 

Have a folder for reference pictures, collect them in net whenever you see  photos that you think could help you. While drawing don’t try to copy the reference face, just watch how everything you need looks like, watch where shadows are, compare the size and position of each element with other elements (like you know that the nose is halfway between the eyes - it’s obvious example, just compare other things like that). Observe the variations you mentioned - each person has a different shape of face, eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, chin etc. Let your reference pictures have people in different positions, as you want to learn drawing faces from different angles and fitting the rest of the body. Remember that the character you’re drawing doesn’t have to look exactly like the person on the reference photo. You can use more than one reference for your pictures, like one for the pose, another for eyes, etc. Drawing faces realistically is SUPER hard when you don’t use references.

And as I wrote before - practice a lot and don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t turn out well, just enjoy the drawing and it will eventually get better. 

To be honest I wouldn’t say I am good at the stuff… Actually, for me, drawing faces is the most difficult thing in the “anatomy” topic and I have to learn A LOT. I often upload a picture and then lowkey hate myself for it because the next day I see how badly I drew something. But I learned not to care - If I did, I would never finish and upload anything. If i don’t, I can just move on to the next picture and learn more and I know that few months later I will be able to easily draw it right. 

And well, as I said, I can’t give you any specific tips since I don’t know how your “anime face” problem look like and how you want to draw. I don’t really like drawing extra realistic stuff, semi-real is more fun for me, and I draw mostly for fun so I don’t often force myself to draw really-realistically :) So there’s another tip: Enjoy the drawing process, try all sorts of stuff and find what you feel most comfortable at^^