Subject: Yeah, follow your instinct.
Author:
Posted on: 2012-07-27 00:29:00 UTC
If it looks like a human head, it's probably like a human head. If it doesn't, it probably isn't. :P
Midline, definitely. Your instinct was correct.
Instead of concentrating on my agent and mission like a good little intern, my time for the last 6 moths has been take up by.. artwork, specifically focusing on my most recent fic project and my agent's back story
http://kifkeykrunchies.deviantart.com/
Most recently, I have tried my hand at portraits at front profile. I like to think that I'm getting a bit better, especially with eye placement.
Somehow, these drawings strike me as uncanny. I can't pinpoint it, but I think it's the fact that the faces are so large. The facial features seem kinda lost in them.
Also, the varying degree of realism. You're trying really hard with the eyes while having barely any shading or dynamics. I don't think a tutorial for facial expression helps that much before you've got the face itself down. Start slowly.
To be honest... I'm alot better at the writing part (or so I'd like to believe) and I just drew these so I wouldn't have to rely on outside images while visualizing my characters and their (very rough) appearance.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I should have lumped them in with what I label my "good stuff". Mostly it was an outgrowth of not finding any good face templates for the facial tattoo designs I'm assigning to the Leng Viet.
(If I have been a tactless pillock and/or made dumb blanket statements at any point in this, please inform me. Concrit the concrit, so to speak.)
As an amateur artist myself, and as an artist who specializes in drawing face both from the front and in profile, I say this: Look at people's faces. For eye placement, look at people's faces. Look at tutorials for how to draw the human face written by people who show knowledge of how the body is put together in real life. Eyes are, approximately, in the middle of the head. The 'upside-down egg' way of drawing the head from the front is one I've found works, as well as drawing a circle and then the jaw. I draw guidelines through the horizontal and vertical middles and it helps keeps things in place. I look at tutorials, I watch tutorials, and I practice imitating what I see.
Specific crit: you draw eyes too high. Nearly everything else looks about right, but the misplaced eyes are the center of focus and they make the whole image look off. The eyebrows do look right, they're at about the height of the top of the ears, but the eyes are squeezed in under them.
You also draw mouths too wide to be quite right; the general rule of thumb I've picked up is that the very edges of the mouth fall squarely under the middle of the pupil when the eyes are facing straight forward, they actually look a bit smaller, and in more stylized styles mouths are often smaller still.
I say again, look at people and draw them, look at tutorials and imitate the general principles, and do what you're already doing and practice.
I kinda thought that Tracy looked a bit too like a green martian. I thought it was just the narrowness of the head.
My first instinct was to draw the eyes along the mid-line but my higher placement was due to the influence of the tutorials I have been using. However, given that the artist in question does draw in a slightly cartoonish style, a little modification just may be what I need.
Thank you.
If it looks like a human head, it's probably like a human head. If it doesn't, it probably isn't. :P
Midline, definitely. Your instinct was correct.
http://kifkeykrunchies.deviantart.com/art/Tracy-Williams-with-fixed-eyes-and-mouth-317200385
Look any better?
I'm still no Leonardo.
Have modified the untattooed Marie Trinh Portrait.
http://kifkeykrunchies.deviantart.com/art/Marie-Trinh-a-revision-317315202
The mouth is maaaybe a little high (though thinking about my sister's it's within human norms so that's just genetic differences from what I consider an aesthetically pleasing face) and she looks more like she's about to take a nap than have a go at someone (the eyebrows are too relaxed too be for fighting), but it's no longer creepily not quite right. Here's a sort of guide to facial expressions, also go through this person's other tutorials they've got some pretty neat tutorials on how the body is put together with an aim to teaching just enough that an artist can draw the human body accurately. Nothing specifically for portraits, though.
I'm sure Leonardo da Vinci's first attempts at drawing weren't photo-realistic in the slightest. (There's a joke, wherein someone asks a musician how to get to Carnegie Hall... the punchline being "Practice, practice, practice!")
That's the guide that got me off on the wrong track on eye placement. I have been looking at the emotion guide and am considering buying the book.
The eyebrows.. this, as I thought I said, is supposed to represent the calm face of unsuspecting doom, causing the familiar to begin to step back and the unwary to take the offer for conversation in a back alley at it's face.
As to the mouth.. hey, I had to leave some sign of a family history of inbreeding-with-a-side-of-Mythos.
Well. It's not the one I learned the most basic basic basics from, that was something that's been eaten by the Internet or I'd show it to you. I found it useful for the simplified ways of drawing the body... Really all I can say is look at people, look at the general proportions of their faces, and practice practice practice. And remember: the eyes are in the middle of the head! Oh and Mark Crilley has some pretty good video tutorials on how to draw things, in a more stylized style than what you seem to be trying for but the general principles of where things go on the face are the same no matter what style you eventually go for and he does do more realistic art styles when his subscribers request it.
Hee.
the "tired" look was something I had a bit of a problem with. Maybe it had to do with my interpretation of the "Nordic" face model from majnouna (saxon, dutch, and danish ancestors of the English.)
Hrmm. I don't know. I've never tried to draw a character as a specific anything, just drew what came out of my pencil and then categorized them (or not) once I've solidified what they look like... I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but from the words you've written my advice is to just draw Miss Williams the way that looks like it's her, and if that happens to fit with a certain face model then cool, and if it doesn't, oh well.
These were always supposed to be rough-sketches/drawing exercises done more to flesh out specific features and keep them stable in my minds eye than be fine art.
Thanks for everything, however.