So here I go looking for attention again - My pencil drawings

Point of advice: Resize your images to a more manageable size. This makes it easier for people (like me) to view your images easily and all at once, which in turns makes it easier for me to judge your techniques and give you advice on what to work on.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I don't think pencil softness is your problem. Or lead softness, if I understand you correctly. There should be no reason why you couldn't effectively use a one pencil for the whole piece. (For example, I use a #2 mechanical pencil for ALL of my pencil works.)

The main issue I see here, and it's an issue that a lot of amateur artists have: You're drawing what you think you see, and not what you see. You've probably heard that before, and I know it seems contradictory, but it really isn't. I wish there was some way, some shortcut I could give you, that would put you on the fast track to awesome portraits, but really the trick is to just keep doing them. When I was in college, for my lifedrawing class, we had to do 5 sketches, one per page in our sketchbook. This is where I really started to notice improvement, when things finally started to "click." Also, I suggest getting a good how-to draw anatomy book (just browse the art section of your local bookstore.) that shows you HOW things are structured, i.e noses, eyes, etc. and copying out of that. That kind of exercise will help you to understand how things are built so when you see something, you can really SEE it.

And honestly, at this point I would worry not about proper shading but getting all the parts in the right places and making it look good and "correct" without any shading at all. Once you can do that, then you can start studying the way light and shadow work.

Your cartoon stuff is very awkward looking. Very stiff. This comes from a lack of general anatomical structure and a lack of drawing experience in general. In order to do effective anthropomorphic animal characters, you need both a knowledge of human anatomy and the animal you are trying to cartoon. You can't just put big ears and big eyes on a vague representation of a cat and call it a day.

That's all I've got.

If you don't mind, would you mind posting some of your "art" art? I'm interested to see what you do with a finished piece.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Vigilius

There's also the part of the fact that I can't stand a lot of the academic drawing style because I think their ideal way of portrait drawing loses a lot of character and personality, if you know anatomy through and through you're not really able to draw portraits, but you're able to draw what the anatomy books taught you how it "should" be (although I know it IS necessary to learn it, I get scared of becoming one of those people who can't draw anything else then Greek statues if you know what I mean).

That is completely untrue.

When you know how things are built, you can look at something and see how it breaks down in terms of that knowledge, and then you can rebuild it on the page properly, instead of guessing.

I don't know why you think that doing exercises like that will corrupt your style into some kind of classical figure drawing machine, or why that would be such a bad thing. If I could draw like Leonardo DaVinci, I think that would be just peachy.

Believe it or not, I understand why you are so resistant to the advice that you have been given, and that you feel above the things we are trying to tell you because I was once there myself. Trust me when I say that there's always new stuff to learn and there's no reason to be resistant to it, regardless of what level you think you are.

Please, do me a favor: Go to your bookstore and look for a book by Giovanni Civardi - Drawing the Human Body And Anatomical Guide. This is a good book to do exercises from, and it features multiple angles of multiple parts, male and female, in a style which is fairly "modern." There are no Greek statues in there. You don't have to promise anything, just look at it. Maybe you'll get some ideas, maybe it will show you what you DON'T want to do, or maybe you'll end up buying it. I still reference it myself from time to time.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.