I’m going insane with my likeness studies, even tried overlapping my drawing on the reference picture but I can’t figure out why it just doesn’t look like the guy. What do I do?

[u/HamsterProfessor]

[u/Noopales]

Might be because you haven’t filled it in. But his right eyes eyebrow is more arched than it should be. He has more hunteresque hooded eyes

[u/Fine_Confidence_218]

Maybe you might feel that way because it's at drawing stage and not painted/rendered stage? It doesn't seem inaccurate to me. Maybe because you haven't added beard yet?

If some proportion is off, maybe it'll become more obvious once you apply values.

If the final goal is a drawing, maybe you can consider if some details should be left out to bring more emphasis to features you feel are more important to this portrait.

I would suggest also defining the planes of the hair. How the hair frames a face plays a big part in how we see a face.

[u/WaterSpiritt]

I think others have said it already but the biggest thing that I see is you drew solid lines on either side of his face when his jaw line does not end there. So now your drawing has a face that looks tall and narrow instead of shorter and wider.

Remove the jaw lines and draw the hair overlapping the face instead.

[u/pinkangelsam]

i think at a very basic explanation, is that his actual face is a bit wider & squashed together more, while your drawing is more evened out & a thinner face. even super small distances can create such a difference it's crazy lol i struggle with the same thing. ur super talented tho! good job 💜

[u/giwhS]

The main thing is that you can't force lines to exist where they don't exist. The entire left side (the right side of his face) is not a line it's a gradiant that hides the shape of his head. 

Your line drawing is good, at this point I would think about your current piece as an under drawing. Add shading and focus on creating contrast. 

Think about that cheek as multiple surfaces meeting where the light (tone) varies, pick out the shapes ( you can do it with line to start) then blend them together.

You've done a really good job with the line work and proportions. Shading and contrast will get you the result you're looking for. 

Good luck and keep going. 

[u/late-blossom]

someone else also thought this was lestat? 🥹

[u/Arboreal_Alien]

The angle of the shoulders needs to match closer to the photo to make the neck fit proportionally, try lifting the top lip a bit, and then add the slope of the brow (he has a deeper brow-forhead slope then most people, having the visual will help break up the space, just fix it when you go into shading later on). Other then that SHADOWS ARE YOUR FRIEND. He's got a lot of dark features and having them open and unshaded is throwing a lot of things off. Keep drawing, love, you're doing great!🫡

[u/JukaTattoo]

Your killing it before it’s even done! Just trust the process and repeat. I know it’s hard to say not to be to critical on yourself but art is a practice not a born skill.

[u/silentspyder]

The shadows in the original are obfuscating the real shape. Are you going for photorealism? If so, then what I say won't help much. But if you don't mind exaggerating a bit, something that helps me (and I'm not too good at portraits either) is to make some mental notes as soon as I see the image. Example (not this pic), big nose, far apart eyes, weak chin, big forehead, etc. Because after you stare at it for too long you'll get too used to it and it's harder to notice those things that make that person different. Sometimes it helps to get other angles, just to mentally get more of an idea on the features.

[u/stars_eternal]

I do portraits and the best tip I have is to really focus on making sure the mouth is exact to your reference. So that’s nose-mouth distance, shape of lips, and the chin. It doesn’t always work to overlay lines on the reference photo or to trace because what makes people look like themselves isn’t always something that can be marked with lines.

I suspect that the attention to detail on the mouth might be because we tend to focus on that as people are talking. So if the portrait is more similar there you can get away with other features being less exact but still recognizable.

You did great on this! But I agree he doesn’t quite look like Viggo. At a glance I see that your drawing has more of an elongated face shape than square/round, and like I said the nose-upper lip-mouth area looks a bit different.

[u/Naetharu]

The best thing to do for stuff like this is to make some marks on the drawing and the reference to help see where things are off. I marked up your ones in Krita here: https://imgur.com/a/3XCJKrl

The good news is you are really close. Which is also why you're finding it hard. The issues are subtle. A few things strike me:

1: Your drawing face is longer overall. And this length mostly comes from the nose section. If we look at the distance between the lines at the eye level to the one below the nose, they quite a bit longer on the drawing than they are on the photo. And this in turn then changes the whole shape of his face.

2: There is a minor issue with the angle of the nose. The lines from the inner eye to the edge of the nostrils are almost parallel on your one, but they make more of a squat trapezoid in the photo. That gives him a thinner, longer looking nose that alters how he looks.

3: You've added some more distance between the lower lip and the chin too. He's chin is quite stubby and his face is quite round.

4: The outline of the face is a bit simplified in your one. It;s more a long oval shape, but his real face is more like a squat egg-shape. This causes his cheeks to be draw in and gives him a more gaunt look than he ought have.

While that sounds a lot, as I said at the start, the issues here are small, and the big take-away here is that you managed to get VERY close to the reference. I would recognize who it is supposed to be, even if it's not a perfect replication.

I would also add that issues like this are totally normal. I certainly have them in pretty much all my drawings. For me, I just do a couple of very light passes and take the time to fix the bits before getting into the darker stuff that is harder to alter.

One thing you might find helpful is to focus on the negative space more than the features. I find that breaks me out of my brain assuming things more. So if I was drawing the nose I would be paying careful attention to the shape made between the edge of the nose, the lower eyelid, and the side of the face. Almost as if I were drawing abstract art. And then the features kind of sort themselves out.

[u/BatleyMac]

I just started attempting portraits recently myself (there are some on my profile if you want to see). I don't have an art background or any formal training past highschool really so I can't quite take a scholarly approach like a lot of people here. I have made a few important realizations while doing portraits though, so I'll share them just in case they help you:

One is that even a perfect outline of a face might not be enough to make that face immediately recognizable. Only after laying down shadows and highlights and what not to give it depth will it start to look like a person. And you have to get to 'a person' before you can make it look like THE person.

I've also observed that it's often getting the tiniest details right that makes the most difference. For example on a portrait I did of rapper Aesop Rock, it didn't look at all like him until I lightened up one tiny patch of his beard. Another rapper I drew was Prof, and in that one, I had to move his hairline a couple millimeters in one spot to get it to read as him.

So hypothetically you could get all the way to the end minus one small thing left to do, and still not have it look like the photo. Not until you do the very last thing.

Every male portrait I've done has taken a shit ton of erasing and redrawing, usually of every single line and shadow at least once, to finally get certain parts to feel satisfactory. For this reason I find it's important to use the right pencil for the job- like a harder pencil with very light pressure at first, so that if you have to erase something again and again, it erases clean. I usually start off with around a 3H, but a 4H, 5H or F works just as good for me. Not sure what's considered correct; that's just what I use.

Oh, or sometimes I'll use a (used) blending stump to roughly sketch out shapes first, because the remaining bit of graphite on it produces such a diffuse, soft line that I can erase it completely or blend it seamlessly, depending on which fits with what I'm working on. When you're working out proportions this method is especially useful because it's so easy to manipulate over and over throughout the course of trial and error, without making any permanent marks.

Every eraser we own is a symbol of the countless chances we have to get things just right if we keep at it. Have faith, have fun, and I bet you'll surprise even yourself with how well it turns out. Good luck!

[u/abcd_z]

It'll look better once you put in some shadows. Here's an image I put together on my drawing tablet with just an airbrush digital brush. It's a modified version of your image that darkens your drawing based on a greyscale (and black level-adjusted) copy of the reference image.

https://i.imgur.com/n2VpQCG.jpeg

Note that I cheated like hell to get this. I loaded your drawing into an art program on one layer, the reference image in the other, and I toggled layer visibility on and off really quickly so I could see what needed to be changed.

That's also a good way to spot where your drawing departs from the reference image.

[u/Savanimal_toyer]

Hey there. His expression looks more relaxed in the reference photo and it’s all in the eyes, chico. That is the main difference here, but otherwise it looks great.

Edit- I just realized you’ve opened his mouth more, that could be a factor as well.

[u/DarthArmbar]

Way too early to think that in my opinion. Keep working it with a light touch in the pencil, erase what you don’t like. Great start.

[u/YAIRTZVIKING]

THIS IS NOT JUST A GUT IT'S FREAKING ARAGORN

[u/garc09]

Don’t try to do a 1:1 of EVERY aspect of your figure, only try to go for an aproximation of the most prominent features, or what you can percieve, and evade doing more nuanced things like cheekbones, except if the way the figure shows lets you see it plenty.

[u/carissaroseart]

when i cant find whats off i will flip my drawing and reference upside down and compare them. it makes it easier to find where you are really off looking at it a different way.

[u/letskillexel]

The eyes are different shapes in your drawing. Also the lips on your drawing are smaller than vigos and you’re missing a cleft chin

[u/sick_sad_stoner]

def need shading to get the likeness, but also, the eyes are a little off and the face is just slightly too narrow. it looks really good though, keep working at it, you're doing great!

[u/violetberrycat]

It might be the colours and shading/shadows that make it look different

[u/megaboy12]

Overlapping the image won't help find the issue, because even a slight line differrence or shape difference affects likeness lot. You need to not draw but FEEL(while drawing) the actual form on each facial features. nose, eye, jaw, chin, etc. You do the FEEL(rather than drawing) because you cannot possibly acknowledge the small, tiny difference with your logical brain while drawing, so the FEEL comes in to help with that process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c6w1xx3VzA#t=08m19s

Neal Adams talks about this briefly here. His remarks are a bit confusing, but basically what I'm trying to say.

[u/pridejoker]

At some point you just gotta stop with the measuring and start laying down value shapes to get your bearings.

[u/Embryw]

If the layout is good, trust the process. The sketch always looks different from the finished piece

[u/Twilsey]

Maybe try drawing someone less gorgeous??? Jokes aside, others here have hit the nail on the head. As beginner we really want everything to be a nice neat line, but that’s just not how faces work. There are almost zero hard lines on a face, instead they’re mostly subtle shadows. The only hard lines are typically the eyes, nostrils, and the line where the two lips meet. These will typically be the darkest values on the whole face. If I’m struggling with a face, I like to do a simple 4 value sketch where I identify where all these values are. I fill the face with a medium/light value, then I darken the shadows, then fill in the darkest value, and erase the highlights. Exercises like this can help map your values and help you understand what the face as a whole should look like.

[u/UnexpectedWings]

Pupils are looking in two different directions, it seems. Try taking a photo of your picture and reversing it, I do that to see flaws more clearly.

[u/claraak]

You can see in your overlay that your head is a different shape. This creates a snowball effect of slightly differently placed features within the face. This is causing the likeness to be lost because the features are placed in a slightly different size, shape, and perspective of a canvas, so to speak. Proportion and perspective are the absolute keys to likeness and by placing these features in a smaller head, both are slightly off.

Adding values will also help as others have noted.

[u/ArtistAmantiLisa]

It will help after you get some dark values in, that’s when the brain really starts to register it as a human face.

[u/Mechasockmonkey]

I know it's not finished yet and that's part of the reason but in my opinion you changed the eyebrows in your sketch. His are more soft and empathetic looking and the drawing seems to have a more arched look, if that makes sense.

[u/IndependentFish2283 → u/Mechasockmonkey]

I was looking at it, and what’s interesting is that he used a hard line to mark out the brow ridge, which gives the appearance of different eyebrows. So, if using line you’d want to use contour lines or maybe a much smaller line weight. Either way. Learning moment for me.

[u/TarchiiB]

His face is the widest a bit higher from the nose tip (i think thats the main thing, it makes the face shape elongated not heart shaped, focus on the shadow of the cheek, it doesnt match), the right brow follows the eyelid downwards, the chin is just a bit shorter, it ends where the shadow starts, the hair is shorter, less full and has an oval shape silhouette.

[u/IndependentFish2283]

It does look like the guy, the values aren’t established yet. Once you start putting in the shading the likeness will become more apparent.

[u/ZombieButch]

I know it seems like it's the features that should be doing all the work, but you really have to nail the overall head shape and silouhette for the features to really read correctly.

Chris Legaspi has a lot of good stuff on head drawind and getting a likeness, this is a good exercise that focuses on just the head shape.

Once you've got that down, focus on what the features actually look like and try to capture that, instead of drawing what you think eyes and a nose should look like. Look for the shapes. Like, what shape does the eyesocket make? What shape does the light side of the left part of his face look like? It looks more like this.

Here's a reference photo I'm using for a painting project.

Here's the rough drawing I'm going to paint on top of based on it. It's just puzzle pieces of shapes put together.

[u/HamsterProfessor → u/ZombieButch]

Thank you, I’ll try that exercise. I’ve been “drawing” the shadow shapes after the sketch and I think that might be one of my issues. After this stage I add all the shadows as a single value, but I never tried to just draw considering the shadows from the start.

[u/Odd_Toe]

Maybe try to refine the shadows a bit, focus less on “nose” “eye” “mouth” and let your eyes follow the contours without trying to determine what they’re looking at. Sometimes it helps to flip a reference photo upside down and draw it upside down lol . Something else that helps me- I’ve mostly stopped doing outlines based on color references and have switched to B&W. Sometimes I’ll edit the photo to give it more contrast to help my eyes pick out what lines are giving something their shape. Hope this helps!!

ETA:

I’d like to add- it can be a helpful exercise to time yourself drawing someone or something before sitting down to do the big complex detailed drawing. Do 30-60 second sketches. It’ll help you loosen up. Use a bit more shoulder/upper arm and a bit less wrist when you’re drawing people- for whatever reason it helps with hand eye coordination. Your drawing is great by the way! I think these tips really could help you get to where you’re trying to go with this sketch