Originally a 100 head challenge, cut down to 50 when I realize how much of a huge undertaking doing a hundred heads were.
Why did I do this
I was coming out of 2 months of drawing assignments Foundational sketching 1 Brainstorm. There was an itch to scratch with doing more character oriented drawings, and I felt like my head drawings were lacking.
As a way to warm up away the rust and make some gains along the way. I decided that I would do a draw 50 challenge.
What makes this a challenge?
It probably isn't a challenge, more so a self imposed habit to do a few heads everyday so I net in some consistent practice.
How did I approach this.
For improvements to happen, I couldn't just mindless copy heads from references. I needed a criteria to gauge my performance. I want to get better at capturing likeness of characters via constructive means.
I saw a video of a constructional method for heads by simplifying the planes of the asaro head by the wonderful HadesPSD. And decided this was simple enough to base my practice.
Here's notes I've taken for myself after watching the video.
Feedback mechanism:
To ensure that I was capturing the likeness accurately via constructive means. I would frequently overlay my construction over the reference to see how far off I was.
For the first 20, I paid strict attention. Making sure that the construction was on point even if a milimeter off. For the latter half, I allowed myself to be more lax and allow a construction to be, so long as it's just a a little bit off.
I found that in the latter half of the head drawings, I rarely need to make major adjustments, if any at all, to my constructions as they were getting consistent in capturing likeness.
That's when I knew gains were kicking in.
Why I stop at 50:
Up till the 50th head, I was consistently doing 3 - 5 heads per day for 2 weeks straight. While the gains were consistent. It was also exhausting to keep up the grind. As I wasn't simply just copying the reference. There were great deal of thought and slow deliberation throughout.
Each head sessions were taking up an hour per day. Having a full time job means I get around 2 - 3 hours to draw per day. That's a huge investment.
At this point of time I wanted to do more personal pieces rather than grinding out raw skills. So I stopped permaturely before I could burnout from the challenge.
I have a bad habit of over-grinding foundations and never applying myself. So I have to be careful not to overextend practices. Especially if there isn't an immediate piece I can be applying the knowledge to.
For a venture meant to break my rust. I think it sufficed. I'm plenty happy of the head drawings that came out of this too.