Try looking at something for 10-20 seconds then turn around and draw as much as you can remember. Memorize stranger's faces as you're going about your day, then as soon as you can get a sketchpad and draw what you remember. At first you won't remember much but soon you'll start remembering stuff. A nose, a mouth, a chin.
Questions I Have Regarding Painting
- How do the features of the head fit together to create a unified whole?
- What interesting effects can be created by distorting the placement of the features?
- What's the quickest way to memorize the porportions of the human skeleton?
- How do the muscles 'sit' on the face? How do they 'sit' on the rest of the body?
- How do you see colors the way they are? does it matter if you distort them?
- To what extent can you distort colors?
- What are the key characteristics of colors?
- What are the key characteristics of pigments?
- What are the key characteristics of light?
- How do you mix colors correctly?
- How do you put each color you see in the right place?
- Can you get hues right but the values wrong? Or does one depend on the other? vice versa?
- What happens if you get the colors right but the hues wrong? If the opposite?
- How do different light sources affect the hues?
- How do different light sources affect the values?
- How does the structure of the face affect the transitions from one value into another?
- How does the skin tone affect the hues and values?
- What is contrast?
- How do different bone structures affect the figure's character?
- How do different skin tones affect the figure's character?
- How do different combinations of noses, eyes, mouths, and ears affect the figure's character?
- What is character?
- Is character more than just getting the contour, values and hues right?
- What is a good painting?
- Why bother painting a good painting?
- Is a popular painting necessarily a good one?
- What's the difference between the female skeleton and the male skeleton?
- How do you go about learning how to draw a certain subject matter from your imagination?
- What's the minimum amount of knowledge you have to know about a subject before you can draw it from memory?
- What makes one composition good and another bad?
- Is the concept of a good composition a made up human invention?
- Is Hazel Dooney a great artist or a commercial hack?
- If I remove one brush stroke from a painting is still the same painting? What if I remove two? Three? When does it become something else?

