Illustration WIP

Hi! It's been a while. I've started working part-time again, so now it's been a bit harder to find the time to work on stuff. I also landed two freelance jobs -- one in June and the other in September, so I was really happy about that. I'll talk about them at some other point.

So, I started working on this illustration a while back in September:

It was supposed to be a warmup, where I would take a picture that I like and replicate what I like specifically about the picture (I used this Dracula poster).

But I ran into this problem:

I'm not sure if you can see it, but the face is uneven. Or maybe you noticed it in the original image pff

Here's a closer, side-by-side comparison. 

I went through multiple iterations trying to fix it, and even once I settled on something, it lost its appeal for me. Now it just looks kind of stiff and boring.

This reminds me of the speed-paints I used to watch where people would invert their image many times throughout the process. I can't remember if this is a common issue for front-facing views or for all types of images though. I particularly have this problem (or at least notice it) when drawing front-facing views, so I may spend some time practicing that and maybe studying facial proportions while I'm at it.

After doing some character sketches the other day, I've predicted two solutions:

1) draw on a bigger canvas: draw with bigger strokes by zooming in. You get more details in that way too, and it feels more purposeful that scribbling the entire figure from far away.

2) draw the whole eyeball first, focusing on placement, before adding in eyelids/stylistic elements

The plan is to pick this back up and actually finish it. Maybe I'll have a few pages of studies too.