....I feel like that artist just... isn't good at capturing likenesses.
Like, good at rendering watercolours, good at inking, good at drawing a well-proportioned and pretty face... but so focused on the stylistic shortcuts they've picked up for drawing and painting "generically attractive adult woman face" that they're replacing Zendaya's real features with those shortcuts.
They don't draw her jaw as Zendaya's jaw, but as the stronger, more defined jaw of his ideal of an attractive woman. They give her these really defined cheekbones that had me like "nooooo!" when they painted them in, because the line art on one of them was a pretty okay likeness before that. It doesn't look like Zendaya because the jaw and overall bone structure is too strong, the eyebrows have been thinned, the mouth has been made less wide, the face has been lengthened.... And then the colours seem to really push her skintone in a weird direction... which I know they're stylised, but a lot of them are making her skintone very golden, when it's more of a cooler pink brown than a warm golden brown, so again, it looks less like Zendaya if you do that.
When drawing portraits, personally I have a few rules for how to get a portrait that looks good, but also really looks and feels like that person:
- Never work from and just copy one reference if possible. If you're not drawing from life, try to get multiple images, so you can understand the person's face in three dimensions and what the key features are, not copy the flattened version you'll see in a photo.
- The other reason to get multiple photos, and ideally to learn a little about the person, is that the pose capturing the person's personality, even if you're just posing a head and shoulders, will really do a lot of the heavy lifting.
- You have to put in that person's less conventionally attractive or fashionable features for it to really look like them, but you need to do it lovingly.
So if I wanted to draw Zendaya... I'd grab a bunch of pics of her first and identify the features that make it look like Znedaya. She has a short, heart-shaped face wiith a small, pointed chin, and soft, young-looking features. She has a broad-ish, but overall very small and softly defined nose with a low bridge. She has a very distinctive wide mouth that forms a bow shape when she smiles, thick, but very tidy eyebrows with a smooth arch shape, and wide-spaced eyes that have a friendly arched sort of shape. She tends to have a sardonic, knowing sort of face. Her expressions are restrained and tend to have a "knowing" feel to them, and the mysterious depth is kind of what makes her look attractive; her smile always seems to have a hint of sadness; she seems wise and confident beyond her years. You can't really capture that if you just copy a photo.
