This is a face study I drew over the weekend.

My concept was essentially a shouting man wearing an African-inspired hat and face paint done as a sports team logo. I'd drawn basic logos in the past, but this time I had a fairly complex vision and wanted to do my best to realize it. The biggest issue with this was that I had no confidence in my ability to draw an anatomically correct face in this pose. So, as much as I initially disliked the idea, I found a stock image in a similar pose and started by tracing over it.

Despite my initial misgivings, it didn't take long for me to realize how valuable this exercise was. Tracing the face wasn't a process of mindlessly copying something as it already existed; I was looking at a real person in a picture and making decisions on which lines to keep, which to erase or shorten, how to vary things like line width and shape, and when to exaggerate or alter certain features to make the image fit my stylized vision.

It certainly also helped that this was the stock image I chose:

You may have noticed that it's different from my final drawing in pretty much every way other than the pose. This helped to ensure I stayed focused on carrying over only the facial anatomy. While it wasn't necessarily my goal to pick an image different from my final vision, I certainly prioritized matching the facial expression, body pose, and viewing angle far above finding an image that looked superficially like the one in my head.

If this were more than a fun exercise I would likely have spent more time on it (there's a few particularly ugly bits of linework I'd have done another pass on), but overall I found this to be an extremely valuable learning experience and thought it might be useful or fun for other people as well.