d r a g o n b o n e s    

So last time we got the bare basics of the ‘generic human head’ laid out. This time we’ll go into a little more detail. When you finish today’s lesson, you’ll have a recognizable human face.

Taking the basic foundation that we created in the first phase, we start by fleshing out some of the basic features of the face.

Each of the basic features are easy enough to add now that we’ve marked out where they all go. Using those landmarks we created for the center of the eyes, nose, and mouth, we can give ourselves additional guidelines.

From the interior of the eyes, we can draw light lines straight down to the outer edges of the nostrils. Simply extend the mark we created to show the base of the nose to these new width markers.

Drawing a line from the center point connecting the horizontal and vertical mid lines through the outer edges of the nostrils, we give ourselves a rough basis for the exterior end points of the mouth.

Here we see that the space between the interior points of the eyes should be roughly one eye width apart.

The green guidelines also show us where the top center point will be for the cheek bones. The critical point here is to continue to use the existing information that we have to find the locations of features we have not yet marked. Keeping our focus on this will help immensely when working on portraiture in the future.

Let’s remove those guidelines and see what we’ve got. It’s starting to look like an actual human face! Now it’s time to start adding some more defining features.

Let’s face it – in the world of professional illustration, time = money. It’s true in most professions, but when the work to create your product is work that you can’t delegate, you need as much time to produce as you can get your hands on. Many of us still have to do the rest of our ‘run the engine’ work on our own and that makes the time crunch even worse.

We Need to Work Faster

How do you make yourself more productive in less time? How do you make yourself more efficient? You work on speed. You work on understanding forms and figures and settings so that you can draw them faster.

Possibly the best tool that I’ve ever come across to help with this very thing are the tools made available by the awesome Kim at her website Pixelovely.com. She’s crafted a set of automated web tools for displaying photos of reference images for artists to work from – in a timed fashion.

Did I mention that she offers this to the public for free? (You can, and IMHO should donate to her via Paypal, but she doesn’t require it for the user of her site.)

Currently the tools allow you to use both human figures and a wide range of animals for reference material. Humans can be filtered by both gender and clothed or nude. Animals can be broken down by type (birds, canine, insects, etc). All of the above can be gone through in time increments of  30 seconds, 60 seconds, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or 10 minutes for fast sketching. If you prefer to take your time and focus on quality over quantity? No problem. Kim’s got you covered by allowing you to ‘take a class’ and set the timer to 30 minutes, 1, 2, 3, or 6 hours.

Did I mention that it’s free?

How Photographers Can Help

Kim/Pixelovely really could use your help. She would like to expand the set of tools to include two new options – one for portraits, and one for hands/feet. Any of you who are willing to donate your existing photos (or some portion thereof) should contact her via her contact form and let her know!

She does give credit for every photo with a link to the site of your choice and you would have her (and my!) thanks. So you would receive a little publicity and some gratitude for work you’ve already done. Doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to me, and you would be helping artists everywhere get better at working faster. What a way to support your fellow artists! So if you’re a portrait or hand/foot photographer, please please please drop her a quick email and lend a hand.

I know I will be.

(Thank you!)

Ok – I can hear you groaning now. Here’s the thing – we have to start this little experiment off somewhere, and I find that it never hurts to drop back to the basics. Review what you know and make sure you understand it and understand it well. So that’s what we’re going to do here.

The Basic Infrastructure of the Head

Everything starts with its base. Before you build a towering skyscraper, you have to create the foundation. Those of you who are into martial arts can appreciate how vastly different things are when you have your stance correct. Art is no different – you need a strong foundation for a strong final image.

Step 1

Step 1. Start with an oval. Split it in half both vertically and horizontally. This gives you a simple map to start building on. Keep the division lines light if you’re working with pencil – you’ll want to remove them completely later on.

Just as a slight side note: I must apologize. I found it more difficult than I had imagined when I went to draw a simple oval. Because I know when the final illustration is meant to be, I found myself tapering the bottom to create a chin like shape. I’m certain that a few of my teachers over the years would be telling me “Draw what you see – not what you think you know.” I have no oval that I’m drawing from, but the concept applies. It bears noting that you should always attempt to do away with your pre conceived notions when trying something new – even if you don’t succeed completely.

Steps 2 & 3

Step 2. Half way between the vertical center line and the left and right outer edges of the oval, make a light mark. This will give you the center points of each eye.

Step 3. Half way between the horizontal center line and the bottom of the oval, create another mark. This will give you the location of the base of the nose.

Step 4. Follow the mark denoting the base of the nose to the outer left and right edges of the oval. This will give you the base of each of the ears. (The horizontal center line gives you the top edge of the ears.)

Steps 4 & 5

Step 5. A line half way down the vertical center line between the base of the nose and the bottom of the oval gives you the center of the mouth.

We now have the very basic elements of our simplified face. Whenever I reach this stage I always find myself thinking that the face looks a bit like that of an android. Like something from iRobot.

A Word About the ‘Defaults’

It amuses me whenever I read a tutorial or book covering the basics of proportions. We’re an amazing species with worlds of difference from one person to the next. We do, however, mostly have some standard features that fall within general dimensions. What’s more, if we start from a place of ‘there is no standard’, it makes it much more difficult to get the nuances of people’s unique features correct.

How do I draw someone’s eyes farther apart than normal if there’s no ‘normal’?

I point this all out because I don’t want to offend when I refer to things as being ‘normal’ or ‘standard’. If you find that your own ears hang lower than what I define as ‘normal’, please know that I don’t mean to say that you’re some kind of freak of nature. You just are different from the baseline I’m creating to give us a starting point.

In truth, I think that it’s those things about us that make us unique that others find the most intriguing. And for the record? Intriguing is good.

Final Infrastructure

This post is a part of the work I’m doing as my entry in both NaNoWriMo and NaNoDrawMo 2011. I would love to get your thoughts on this post or any of the others in the series. Feel free to comment following this post or email me.

Edited to Add: See Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

I’ve decided to participate in NanoWriMo again this year. It’s been a long time, and it’s probably well overdue. I enjoy writing in general, but I seem to have a bad habit of letting Life get in the way. As many of you who know me personally are aware, I often struggle to just keep up with all the art projects I want to do, and writing is at least one notch down the ladder from illustration, so yeah…

The Idea

I’m bending the rules a bit. The idea with Nano is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month’s time. I’m looking to do the same volume of writing, but in a different format – namely blog posts. I’ll be writing blog posts for Dragonbones.net and scheduling them to go out (at most) once per week. I figured that my poor site has been neglected over the years, and it’s time to fix that. I’m using Nano as the incentive to push through and create the posts that I keep meaning to write, but never get round to. I know that I’ve got plenty to share with folks, and it’s time for me to stop finding excuses not to.

The Format

I’m going to be creating posts for Dragonbones and refining those posts later to develop a book. Each post will center on one topic which I hope to cover in sufficient detail so I will have a strong foundation when I start to build out the book. I’ll eventually take what feedback I get from folks (via comments on this site and others) and rewrite (or flesh out) the posts, compile / edit / etc each of them and voila – the greatest art/illustration book ever written.

Ok, maybe not, but I’d like to think that it will at be well worthwhile.

Each of the posts will hover somewhere in the 500 – 1000 word limit. I think that anything less will feel like I haven’t covered the topic du jour well enough, and anything more will feel like I let myself run on.

I’ll cover things like art exercises, tricks of the trade, marketing for artists, and any other elements I can come up with or folks say that they would like to read.

That’s right – I said that I will take feedback – both on individual topics that I write about and on topics that folks would like to know more about. That’s where you come in.

Your Help

I’d loooove to get your thoughts on things. While I will only be releasing roughly 1 post per week on the site, I’ll be talking about new posts I want to do here and on my blog. I could really use your help via that feedback. Go ahead and let me know what you think – about any element of this project.

Think I’m rambling too much? Let me know.

Think I need a more diverse set of topics? Tell me.

Think I should never again put pen to paper? Well… you can tell me that, but I’m probably not likely to take your advice. If you’ve got some valid critiques though – I promise I’ll consider them. I’ll probably even reply.

Which brings up another point – I’m planning on being as interactive as I can be during this little fiesta. I can’t promise I’ll reply to everyone all the time, but I’ll get as close to that as my time will allow.

Well, it’s time to get started. Thanks for checking this out, and I look forward to your input!