d r a g o n b o n e s    

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.

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.

In honor of the 4th of July: