The image you have there now is probably the best you've ever done, and that's awesome! Be excited! That said, it's still flat, and it seems to me that you're more trying to reproduce stuff you've seen before instead of breaking the form down and building it from the ground up. In other words, it seems to me that you got to the nose part and went "ok, here's a nose, and I've seen other paintings put a shadow here, so I will too.." We all do this.
Painting = sculpting with value. Your issues, I think, lie mostly with your drawing skills. You're still drawing things instead of constructing things with shapes. When you draw initially, think about the simplest shape required to represent an object. So instead of saying "ok, I'm going to draw a mouth now..." think "ok, what 3D shapes make up the mouth? A rhombus.. some cylinders..." etc. If you can start breaking down objects in this way, suddenly painting will start to feel a lot more like sculpting, which will then drive you towards a better painting automatically.
FK OFF!! ---just kidding! I see what youre saying, and honestly i started with a base sketch of a face. i have an array of pose sheets that i use and i chose one of the faces and went from there. I've also noticed...whenever i paint faces...the light is always coming from the same direction! I think I'm broken...or i just need to see things from all angles...find some nice source or go out and get some of my own. I'm at the art institute and theres plenty of pretty people to use for source.
Thankyou for your comments and the link was useful~
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Painting = sculpting with value. Your issues, I think, lie mostly with your drawing skills. You're still drawing things instead of constructing things with shapes. When you draw initially, think about the simplest shape required to represent an object. So instead of saying "ok, I'm going to draw a mouth now..." think "ok, what 3D shapes make up the mouth? A rhombus.. some cylinders..." etc. If you can start breaking down objects in this way, suddenly painting will start to feel a lot more like sculpting, which will then drive you towards a better painting automatically.
Check this post out by James Gurney to see what I mean: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/03/plane-heads.html
Thankyou for your comments