Skull Skills Unplugged

So here I am again with more skulls, the last pure skulls for a while I feel, although I might draw the occasional one just to keep in some kind of practice.  Next up, more skulls, sort of.  Skulls with muscle on them in fact, and perhaps some figure drawing practice since I'm already rather rusty; but that's for the future. Right now we have the last lot of skulls I did, but this time without referring to anything while I drew them.  After each skull I went and looked at my anatomy books, or at a photograph to see where I went wrong, hoping to improve the next time.  I did, but I'm not going to lie, even on the best of the following the anatomy and proportions are decidedly dodgy.

Good:

So here we have the ones I like. The big one was drawn larger as I'd just sort of sketched in the teeth on the others without worrying whether they might be accurate or not (they're not). The teeth on the big one are likely wrong too, but at least you can see them. I think there may be too many molars or something, but given that I wasn't referring to anything (other than my own teeth with my tongue) they're probably better than they have any right to be. You can also see some of my style coming through in the cross hatching; funny how it came back to me without my even really trying. I could write a blog post on cross hatching alone I suspect.

Of the smaller sketches (and they really are fairly small, about an inch high I guess) I quite like all of them, but the one in the top right is my favorite; it's just got so much character for being just a skull; it's like the Clint Eastwood of grim doodles. OK, I'm stalling...

Bad:

You may note that clicking this one will not give you access to a larger image. This is because I didn't have enough large bad ones to fill one, so this is your lot. Clearly I tried and failed to draw a Grim Reaper in the bottom left there. Epic fail; the face is too flat, eyes too wide, and the hood is pretty feeble. Once I get the rest of the figure down I apparently need quite a bit of work on cloth as well...
The grey skull to it's left looks quite good at first glance, but if you compare it to the profile of the skull in this post you can probably tell there are some fairly major errors; not least the base of the jaw being parallel to the cheek bone going back to where the ears would be rather than heading up diagonally (I could look up the name of the bone, but it's too late and I'm too lazy).

And that's it for now. I don't know that I'm ever desperately going to need to draw a skull with no reference at all, but having a basic knowledge of what's going on under the skin is hopefully going to help with drawing heads in general.

Might be a while until the next post (again), I have family in town for the 4th of July weekend... Hmmm, I should probably thoroughly tidy the office/study tomorrow night as it will be doubling as a bedroom.