I've been focusing on this particular character recently.

 

[hide=Facial Concept][/hide]

[hide=Outfit Concept][/hide]

 

Feedback please :)

 

EDIT: fixed them up a little

The face sketches look pretty good! I know first hand how hard it can be to draw a face from the side.

I think the main thing you should try to do now is to clean up your linework. There's a couple ways you could do that, but the easiest one is by scanning your drawing and then using a program like Photoshop to draw over your sketch. There's a ton of free tutorials on this exact procedure. Here's a good one :

Yeah, the lines were a bit messy, that's because I near-max contrasted the scans to make them bolder (all-round bad idea, lol), otherwise I would have gone over the sketches in illustrator to clean them up. That would have been a lot easier to colour too, as opposed to hoping that the magic wand selector doesn't screw up. Thanks for the link btw.

 

What do you find most difficult about side-on faces? For me it's the nose-lip-chin ratio. I guess that's what I get for refusing to use references.

I had a bit of free time so I did some sketching in order to figure out my answer to your question. I agree with you, the hardest part is probably getting the distances right (eyes to nose, nose to mouth, mouth to chin, etc..).

I've included both the original sketch and a hasty paint over in SAI, and as you can see, you don't have to spend a lot of time on a computer to improve the image by quite a bit. Of course that might be harder if you don't own a graphics tablet.

 

 

 

Ah, ic, that's quite effective.

 

I tried using SAI over another sketch, but it really is damn near impossible without a graphics tablet XD I'll have to look into getting one. It's a bit frustrating to be held back by hardware.