Face it - I have a long way to go

This week, we started on faces. Our first task was to sit across from someone else and each draw the other's face. We had a cheat sheet showing us some ideas about where the eyes appeared and so forth. (You can see my guide lines on this first drawing.) The goal of this lesson was to understand better the ratios of the face. For example, the forehead and everything above the eyes is about half the entire head, which seems counterintuitive. The face tends to be about five eyes-width across, and the bottom of the nose is about one eye width down from the middle of the eyes. And so forth.

I was pretty happy with this, but our next job was harder. After the teacher showed us another technique for measuring out the face, we were supposed to do self portraits using a hand held mirror. I worked hard on this, and the face is reasonably good, but it doesn't look anything like me (as far as I can see). Le sigh.

I worked on some other partial faces, but really need to try this one again. For one thing, my face is definitely larger on top and smaller on the bottom, and the mouth is too prominent here. Also, I need to work on hair, though I tried this again and again.

Incidentally, my counterpart, whose name is Larry, I think, gave me the portrait he did of me, which is a lot closer to what I look like. Perhaps looking at yourself in a small mirror isn't too effective, as his own self portrait wasn't that great either.