d r a g o n b o n e s    

I’ve done another set of 3 minute portraits. To see who these three are based on, click here for for the reference images.

While we’re on the topic of quick portraits, I have a new project in mind. These 3 minute portraits are great for scratching my ‘don’t want to focus for too long on one thing’ mindset, but not so great for catching true likenesses. With that in mind, I’m thinking that 5 minutes should do the trick. Today it occurred to me that a large collection of such portraits would make for an interesting gallery showing. Perhaps interesting enough to warrant my first public show.

How many would I need to create to warrant a show? Well, I got to thinking that 1 work week’s worth should do the trick.

40 hours / 5 minutes per portraits =480 portraits.

Yeah – that’s a lot of portraits, but you don’t get better without practice so I guess it’s time to practice. A lot.

I’ll post more about that soon.

Every now and again, I find myself with some free time.

No really. It’s rare, but it does happen.

When that happens, I like to offer up the opportunity for folks to pay what they want for commissions.

You did, in fact, read that correctly. Pay what you want. If that’s $1, then it’s $1. If that’s $5,000,000? Well, I’ll try really hard to make the art live up to the commission price.

How It Works

1. Confirm that my Commission status (on the right) is set to OPEN.
2. Confirm that the Pay What You Want option (PWYW) is also set to OPEN. (Please note: if this option is NOT set to open when you request the work, I reserve the right to refund your money. This likely means that time is tight, but not tight enough to close commissions completely.)
3. Use the Donate via Paypal button in the upper right corner of this page to send me your commission fee.
4. Contact me via my contact form. Let me know the following information via the form:
1. What you’re commissioning me to draw. Be as descriptive as possible! The more information you give me, the closer I can come to drawing what’s in your head.
2. How much you sent me for the commission, and what email address you sent it from. This is to help avoid any criss crossing for multiple commissions or commissioners.
5. I will email you to confirm that I have received both the information and the commission money. I will likely have a sketch attached to this email. If I plan on doing more work/revisions, I’ll ask you to confirm that I’m headed in the right direction based on the sketch. If I feel that the sketch is complete, I’ll let you know in this email.
6. I welcome your thoughts/comments/critiques.

Please Note: I reserve the right to do as much or as little as I feel is warranted by your commission fee. If you feel that my work is only worth $1 (or if that’s all you can spare) then you’re not likely to get an illustration that took me 15 hours to complete. I will, however, likely give you more than your money’s worth in general – I do have a reputation to uphold.

Giving yourself pre-defined limitations is often the fastest way to improve your art skills. It gets you to think outside the box and improvise. You don’t grow your leg muscles by sitting on the sofa and you don’t grow your art muscles by doing the same kind of art day in and day out.

Recognizing this, I’ve decided to make a big portion of these posts into a collection of art exercises for folks to try out as just one more way to improve. Tutorials are great, but exercises force us to put what we learn in those tutorials into practice.

What You Need

Really, you could use whatever medium you like for this exercise, but the idea here is stealth, so you’ll often find that smaller is better. A pocket sized sketchbook and a simple pen or pencil is my usual set of tools when doing this particular exercise. Aside from your tools, you will need a place to work that has lots of people. Diners, malls, and festivals are favorites of mine.

How It Works

The idea here is quite simple. Try drawing someone’s portrait without them noticing you. If they see you working on their likeness, then you ‘lose’ the exercise.

How This Helps You

This exercise helps you improve in a few directions:

1. It helps to make you social. Many artists are loners by their nature. We’re observers of our society. I know that I often find myself hidden away somewhere for a few moments of peace and quiet. If left to my own devices, I might do this a bit too often. This exercise helps to prevent that. In the event that you ‘lose’ with one person, you will often find yourself talking to that person about your work. You might even make a new friend. Which leads us to…
2. It helps you to market your artwork. I’ve known a number of different types of artists over the years and not many of them have been good at marketing their artwork. Artists want to focus on making art. That much is understandable. But making connections with other people is often when gets the art sold. Selling the artwork allows the artist to keep making art. The cycle breaks if any of these components are missing, and this exercise is on great way to make those connections that often help sell artwork – even if indirectly.
3. It helps you to prioritize. We often get caught up when we’re working on an image. It’s easy to get overly focussed on the curve of this person’s chin, or the general shape of that person’s hair. Drawing in this ‘guerilla’ fashion makes you get down the necessities fast. Gesture lines are all the more critical to capture someone’s expression.

As a wrap up to this series on drawing the Basic Human Face (part 1 | part 2) I wanted to add a little nuance to the face we’ve built out.

Creating the Map

Using the center line and matching points on the interior of the ears, I created some angles to show the curvature of the cheeks. You can see how the intersection points create a map of sorts for added details in the following image.

I find that using lines and vertices like this help immensely when drawing likenesses, which I’ll get into in more detail in a later post. Suffice to say that it’s a good habit to get into, and it makes it clear why folks have always told me that ‘artists are good at geometry’. This, for the record, is not always the case – just ask my high school geometry teacher.

Adding the Deets

Here you can see the added details I used the guidelines for. Simple delineation of the cheek bones and smile lines fall easily along the intersection points of my guides.

Protip: While it’s not exactly this simple, a good thing to keep in mind is this: the more detail you add to a face, the older the person looks. This easy trick makes it a simple matter to make a character look old or young – just by adding or removing additional information from our illustrations. Notice how much older this character looks just from the image above?

I also altered the poor guy’s haircut, because the simple ‘dome cut’ from above was making me nuts.

What other details could we add to this face? How would we map them out beforehand to know where to place those features?

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.