Alright. Now that I drew that big block of wood and threw flesh and hair on it, its time to try a bunch of different perspectives. These perspectives are tricky and I still have to master most of them. Even the classic frontal view is hard because every feature has to be really symmetrical. But I think I’m getting there… and you will too.

Frontal profile:

Getting the proportions on this perspective is wildly hard for beginners. The eyes and eyebrows have to be completely even. The face has to have the same shape on both sides. The more you draw, the more you want to dump all your art supplies out the window and swear to never pick up a pencil again.

I didn’t even bother drawing the hair on this example, since getting the hair to look right is a little different. I mostly focused on the parts of the face that didn’t have the ability to move around a lot. It took awhile of drawing and redrawing, but I finally got the proportions to where I was happy with them. Not completely happy, since I’ll always keep seeing things that are off. But I’m getting there.

Side Profile:

While the frontal profile took 45 minutes, the side profile took 12. Why? I don’t know! Side profiles seem like they’d be harder, since side profiles have an unusual shape that we are not used to thinking about. But side profiles also only show part of the face. That means there’s only one eye to draw, one ear to draw, and one nose!

Plus, it helps that I’m more warmed up. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to get that artist mind working and your lazy hand drawing. Isn’t that the hardest part with anything… getting started?

Quarter Profile:

Let’s do the quarter profile again. C’mon… its fun!

At some point, this picture went horribly wrong. It started when I was drawing the head and I made the head way too large. Then I made the neck way too small for the head, like the head was a bowling ball resting on a broom stick. I slowly chipped away at it by erasing and redrawing the head to fit everything else, and its starting to look like a normal human being (well, except the ear is kinda screwed up).

Quarter profiles are trickier than frontal or side profiles because you have to give different features different sizes. For this picture, the only features that changed sizes were the eyes and eyebrows. These are tricky to get right unless you use guidelines well. The easier part though was the sides of the face, since you often do not have to even draw the one side of the face unless you’re trying to be really detailed and 3-dimensional.

From Behind:

Now we have a character with ADD. He’s not even looking at the camera at all. What’s he looking at? Go to the comment box on the Contact Us page and tell us.

This view can be really easy to draw, since there’s no features to worry about except the ear. This view really only gets tricky if you don’t have any kind of reference picture. Why? Because we’re not used to thinking about what the back of someone’s head looks like. We’re used to thinking about those soulful eyes and charming smile, not that ever-present birthmark on the back of his neck.

Looking Down:

This one looks like an alien… but for good reason. The eye is stretched around a face that is round. This face isn’t much different from a side profile except that the face is tilted down and slightly more towards the camera in this one. For this one, the key was the draw the big, beautiful bald head. The rest of the picture drew itself.

From Above:

I almost forgot to draw an eyebrow on this guy. He would have had only one eyebrow, but luckily I caught it right before uploading the picture.

Guidelines are a blessing when drawing this profile. Guidelines make it possible to see exactly where the eyes, nose, and mouth land on this progressively 3-dimensional looking face. For a moment, it felt like my eyes were playing tricks on me and I was drawing on a real 3-D object. Crazy.

Floating:

The camera’s floating over this guy’s head. The tricky part of this one is making it look like he actually is looking down, rather than simply looking forward. This is accomplished by making his eyes look squished and pushing his nose and mouth closer to his chin. Raising his ears up and drawing lines on the side of his head also helps.

Looking Above:

Whoa… trickiest one so far. In this one, you barely draw the easiest part of the figure… the bright shining bald head. You also have to draw something tricky that’s almost never drawn: the underside of the chin and the inside of the nostrils. Gross…

This requires the culmination of all your proportion skills. The only good part is that you can make a character look up simply by pushing all his facial features to the top of his head. People pretty much assume that nobody has a nose in their forehead and eyes where their hair should be, so people will pretty much get the idea that your character is looking up no matter what you do.

So that does it. Eight faces drawn in 2 and a half hours. Of course, now they all need smoother lines, hair, more detailed eyes and eyebrows, coloring, shading (cell style or screentone), highlights, more color shades, a body, clothes, maybe some accessories, friends, a setting, and even a story. That’s how characters are built anyway. From the ground up.

Until next time… be safe… and start fasting in prep for Happy Thanksgiving!

Alex

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