I like the way your draw faces. I mean it - I'm not just saying that. You have a very good eye for the framing of faces - with the hair and all, I mean - and the proportions of said faces. The eyes are well-shaped, particularly the faces in the lower left-hand corner - the...is that Gir? The one with the unbuttoned shirt, anyway, and the single head drawing directly below that.
The faces are pretty much there already, in terms of lineart. The hair could use a bit of work, tho - it's pretty good on a couple of those drawings, but on some it looks a bit stiff and two-dimensional. I'd suggest trying to block out the shapes of hair a little, to get an eye for the flow.
Hn...it's hard to describe, but what I do, sometimes, is... well, anime-style, and indeed in most of the CoH hairstyles, you don't really see many slender individual strands of hair. You get, essentially, large pointy sticks of hair. This is true. However, they still do layer over each other and
flow - what I sometimes do is draw each major block individually, then rub out the boundary lines on the final version - it's only to get an overall shape for the hairstyle that looks more solid and natural. Far as 'natural' can be applied to anime art, anyway.
EDIT:
this pic and
this other one are images where I started out by blocking out the hair strands as individual pieces, but ended up
keeping at least some of the boundary lines in the final version because I felt it worked. Typically I don't do that; I erase most of the lines on the final piece, just leaving the overall hair shape, but I don't have a WIP image to show for that. I find it helps define the overall hair form, but your milage may vary.
Do you do other angles besides the front-on shot for heads and faces? Nothing
wrong with that, honestly. But it does spring to mind since I don't see much variation on that there. Granted, that's always something that kicks me in the ass myself, still. How are you with male faces and hairstyles, also? As I said earlier, your proportions and aesthetics are pretty damn good for the female figures, but I do wonder...
Anyway, you're right, tho, they are poor scans. More's the pity. The quality of the scans...what's the limiting factor, in getting this stuff online? What are you using for the scanner? Or paper size and equipment, for that matter? I take it you're trying to punch pure pencils through on a pretty low-grade scanner at low resolution, which... ain't gonna turn out well, so I'm
guessing that there's a fair bit of your work that's being lost in transition.
Any chance of scanning at higher DPI? I take it the original drawings ain't that large to begin with, or that detail heavy, but I'd also presume they ain't that
small or messed up at the edges, like the first two black-white ones. Did you pump up the contrast/brightness to try and clean up the lines? 'cause I'm guessing that's what you did, but it probably makes the final product look a lot worse than it should either.
...failing clean scans, have you experimented with inking techniques? It's not a perfect solution, but many scanners really do hate straight pencils, particularly subtle shades.
EDIT 2: just to be clear here, I think you're pretty good, I'm just trying to provide constructive feedback, rather than saying stuff like GIRL IN UNBUTTONED SHIRT MADE ME LOL. Which it did. But that's not the point. =D
Honestly, your face and basic figure work is very good already. and hair's pretty close. I think your main remaining challenges are hands and feet...which are harder areas to nail (curse you fingers and toes >_< CURSE YOU CURSE YOU). I try blocking them out with basic shapes as well, most of the time.
Which is another question I have, really - are you drawing lineart straight off, or do you begin by, say, drawing stick figure framework and filling in details?
-- Acyl