>Humans are the most difficult because they are what we're experts at. We see and react to human faces from the day we are born so it's tricky to get right. Don

>Humans are the most difficult because they are what we're experts at. We see and react to human faces from the day we are born so it's tricky to get right. Don't be discouraged. Totally agree. A few thoughts: 1. I watched a show once on TV that used a grid pattern approach that appealed to my engineering aesthetics. They made a transparent square grid pattern that was placed on the desired picture as a temporary overlay. You then create a scaled up grid in very, very light pencil on your desired sketch piece of paper. You finally, started to work the large outer boundaries first and then iterate inwards to the greater details of the face. By doing this, your proportions relative to one another stayed pretty spot on (almost like bumper rails) and yet you could then start to take more liberties with how to express the smaller details: - light vs. heavy shading - smudge vs. crisp - solid vs. wispy, etc ... While not the fastest way to begin sketching, it gives you confidence and made me better with each one. 2. I've learned that natural forms like Human faces never have well-defined lines - otherwise it looks too cartoon-like. Whether its because of bad eye-sight :-) or the 3-dimensional view, most boundaries tend to be fuzzy, gradations of tone and soft boundaries. 3. After the rough outside boundaries of a face, I focus on the eyes first and foremost. I will obsess on building out the eyes until they "look right" to me. I won't move past this until they feel right. I've found that neglecting or deferring the sketching of the eyes ... has always resulted in a face that I wasn't happy with. I can't express it precisely, but the entire mood, expressiveness and essence of face is evoked by the way you represent the eyes of a face, human or otherwise. 4. After practicing with just pencil sketches first, I then found pastel chalks to be a fun next step to take your finger smudging and shading to a whole new level. 5. Eventually, after some practice and experience - your eye for proportion gets so good that the grid becomes mostly unnecessary. You are then able to freehand other irregular body features much better like closeups of hands and legs as well as animals in general.