Portrait | Katie

Hey Y'all!

Hello and welcome back to emanate artworx. I hope you had a great weekend, wherever you are 🎯! Here's a new portrait to start the week off right.

Katie
Emanate Artworx - SCAB
1536x2048
Made with IbisPaint X

To be honest, I missed my mark with Katie! I kinda got the look I was going for with her, but also kinda didn't get it 😅. I wanted a vengeful expression, or at least an evil smile, but yeah. She looks like she's doing fine 😏.

Regardless, I was picturing a colorful shading technique and a bold pose, something a little different from my other recent portrait studies. So from that standpoint this is a success.

Reflecting
👀 Looking back on this piece, I feel it's another instance where time spent on a a better sketch would have served me well. Since I have been noticing a theme of "could have used a better sketch" in my past worx, I decided to address it by practicing every day.

The Formula
Every day for the last 10 days (21 July - 31 July) I have completed the same portrait sketch routine to sharpen my sketching abilities and improve my speed and accuracy.

Even if I didn't have time to work on a more complete portrait, I made sure to spend time practicing these portrait sketches every day. Working within multiple short time constraints really helped me focus on the most important structures of the head and face to capture the likeness ⚡️quickly.

I'm using reference.sketchdaily.net/en to complete the following set of 3 sketching drills once every day:

●30 poses per day total
○20 poses in 30 seconds each
○8 poses in 1 minute each
○2 poses in 5 minutes each

🗣🗣
I learned this skill training tip from YouTuber 🌷Alicja Nai (around 8:44 mark). In 10 days I already see an improvement in my ability to get the basic aspects of a likeness down quickly, so I would call this a useful tip for anyone who wants to improve their sketching skills.

Process