A Friend Of Mine Just Sent Me Some Of Your Art Tips And I Loved Them! Since I Was A Kid I Could Draw,

A friend of mine just sent me some of your art tips and I loved them! Since I was a kid I could draw, but it was always a straight up copy of already finished drawings simply for the pure joy of drawing, but now I wanna draw on my own and I'm finding it very difficult! I'm still trying to figure out an artstyle, and I practice things alone (lips, eyes, nose) and they seem to be okay, but when I try to put them together on a face, it doesn't work, like the eyes is not the previous eyes I've been practicing and such. Do I need to practice the face as a whole? Am I doing something wrong?

Awesome, I’m so glad you like ‘em! Ah shit, look what you’ve done, you’ve made me practice anatomy (jkjk this is affectionate!)

In answer, yes absolutely you gotta practice the face as a whole! Don’t worry, most people start from just practicing individual facial features on their own! It’s super easy to tunnel vision! Those studies will also help you going forward, so it’s not time wasted!

A general disclaimer before I keep going: I went to school for animation and never took a proper anatomy class, so these are all tips and tricks I’ve either picked up along the way or figured out on my own. Take them with a grain of salt!

Ok first I think everyone’s seen a diagram of how to measure where facial features sit on the face so I’ll just copy/paste an image to get that out of the way. ***one thing to keep in mind is how the face is divided into thirds:

**** Important Note: Spend some time studying the skull too! For simplicity’s sake, here are some basic landmark parts of the structure you should be aware of:

Next, there’s three methods of drawing the head that I frankenstein together:

1) The Loomis Method is I think the easiest to start playing with head/face perspective drawings. Using the above method of dividing the head into thirds, we can put that on this super simple head model and rotate it in 3D.

Here’s a great video by Stan Prokopenko that goes into more depth on the method!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAOldLWIDSM

2) For musculature, I like referencing the Reilly Method because the round shapes it uses help me understand how different parts squish into each other.

3) For painting/rendering ref, I really like using the Asaro Head because it really helps as reference on how lighting breaks up the planes of the face. (I’m still a ways away from publicly posting most paintings I’ve done tho) No demo for this one because painting takes me 84 yrs

EDIT: This isn’t my painting btw

*** One crucial thing I’d want to point out is that you should also practice drawing heads without painstakingly following measurements and guidelines. 1) everyone’s head/face are different and will have different proportions and 2) you want to get used to drawing without limiting yourself to one method as a crutch! These are all just tools to help you on your journey!

4) As far as simplifying the face goes, the pretty common way I’ve seen/used is to divide the head into two sections: the eyes and brow area, then the area below the cheekbones. This is where the bean face that everyone was mad about in 2015 comes from lololol (we’ve moved on from bean-hate, right? pls?)

One last note: Most of what I’ve posted on my blog has faces with floaty features, so don’t reference my stuff for your own good LMAO

Hope this helps!

-Alka