This time I was working on figure drawing from a photo, I am pretty sure, of a super-buff James Roday (who is now also using his original surname, Rodriguez), who played one of the lead roles on the TV show "Psych." My first try, the head seemed WAY too small, so I spent some time comparing my drawing to the reference photo. I decided in the end that the main problem was that the shoulder was too wide/pointy, and the torso too thick, so in my revision I fixed those things. I also added some definition and shading here and there, including on the head. Here are the reference photo, the first draft drawing, and the revision:

While I believe that fixing the shoulder and decreasing the general torso width did make a big difference, it's now clear to me that the head is still much too small. The face also really doesn't look much like the face in the reference photo, but at least I feel like it's a believable face. Like, if I were reading a comic book and I saw the face I drew I would not question whether the artist ought not to be drawing comics. Usually I feel like my faces come right out of the uncanny valley, so this feels like a win. 

I do need to get better at sizing the head in proportion with the body, and I very much want to be more consistently able to draw recognizable portraits, so I believe next I will zoom in on the reference photo and draw just the face and shoulders, to get the head the right size in proportion to the shoulders, and to see how close I can come to the actual face in the photo.

I don't remember James Roday Rodriguez being this muscular in "Psych!" so I am wondering whether this is him, or maybe it's just someone else with similar facial features but much more testosterone, or maybe it's his head photoshopped onto a superhero. The shadow knows, I guess...