What am I missing?

[u/kind-shark]

Hi drawers,
I’ve spent many hours now trying to get a realistic sketch of Lucy Gray Baird from the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I know I’m not a terrible drawer, and I’ve succeeded with portraits before, but I can’t seem to get a likeness here! I am drawing it fairly small, which is likely contributing to my challenges. I ultimately want to paint this, but I need to get a solid drawing down before that, and I’m really stuck. Any tips or advice hugely appreciated. I’ve done a couple versions of this drawing but I’ll just share my best one, as well as the reference photo.

[u/link-navi]

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[u/Bentu_nan]

My very amateur amd in no way skilled gut feeling.

Because the picture has such a massive contrast between hair and face, its flattened your grayscale values for the face. So its basically unshaded in most of it, making what shading that is there feel more stark than it is.

Im not sure that helps, but thats my initial impression!

[u/kind-shark → u/Bentu_nan]

That’s super helpful, thank you!! So build the mid-tone grays?

[u/Bentu_nan → u/kind-shark]

I think so.

Maybe bring up the dark from the picture alot to. It will read as black still.

[u/museumofmoderngifs]

https://reddit.com/link/p7acfpt/video/axzoh0cg60nh1/player

Hey, thanks for sharing your drawing! I recorded 3 minutes of feedback for you in this video. Hope it's helpful!

- Often to achieve a likeness, we need to first focus on the biggest shapes rather than the small details of the features or shading. This is counterintuitive since it feels like a likeness is all about the small details specific to that person, but the small details can't be resolved accurately without the big shapes first!

- I agree that drawing bigger would help :)