Head Construction Sketchbook

[nouge]

Amazing seeing all these thoughts, drawings and studies. Very inspiring.

[Mechanical Man]

Thanks lionheartGFX and nouge. lionheartGFX copy away, I'm glad you find them helpful. Thank you for the links.

For photo ref I mostly use google images. Often I'm looking for other things and I come across and neat looking face so I stop and draw it real quick. These end up on sticky notes. Some times I'll be watching something like a TED talk or a lecture and I'll pause the video and draw the speaker, or do a search for images of that person or of people they are talking about. Sometimes I'll be looking to study a particular angle so I'll google "head up" or "profile"or "side view" Some times I want to look at light an shade so I'll google terms like "vintage portrait" or 1900's portrait" to get old black and white photos. If I feel like I'm not getting enough variety in my studies I will also google for different ages, facial type, ethnicities, or gender.

Below are more sphere/ellipse study. Id' like to get the full turn worked out on this one and animate it. It's taking forever. I keep losing track of what I'm doing and getting confused. I'm determined to get it worked out though. It seems that if this is going to be my foundation I had better know it really well.

More note head practice from photos.

The skull studies were inspired by this article on the facial place that I came across while looking for something else. The first two drawings are versions of the image from the article. I attempted to reduce the variation between the faces though. I wanted to see what the difference looked like if how far the muzzle stuck out was the only variable. For the second set I googled before and after photos of an underbite correction. I remembered them from looking up the term "prognathic" which I had come across when studying skulls.

And this is the last set of drawings from Karl Gnass's Head Hands and Feet class. 10 mins each. I'm signed up for figure drawing in the next term.

[TNiznet]

Awesome update! the skull studies look great.

[Oräli]

Everytime I see your drawings in the yellow paper I think that you're using post-it to draw... haha! But again, I'm still in love with your studies, and also, they're teaching me a lot!

[Mechanical Man]

Thanks guys

[Woolichooks]

I really like your detailed studies. If you don't mind, I'm going to start doing your sticky note quick drawings. It's a really cool idea. Keep posting!

[Cortes]

what exercises did you do to better understand the eye socket and where to place the eyes in the face? That is my stubborn problem area.

[Mechanical Man]

Thanks Woolichooks. I hope the sticky note drawings are as helpful to you as they have been to me. They seem to be just the right size. It's easier to keep proportions in check when I'm stuck in the box and they are too small for me to rely on complex details for getting things in the right place but big enough to clearly get the important stuff in.

Cortes, for the eye sockets, the thing I have found to be the most helpful has been looking at forensic facial reconstruction sculpture process photos

Here are some links -

http://www.jchaoideas.com/medical_im...nstruction.jpg
http://newsdesk.si.edu/sites/default...-1046B-078.jpg
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/nfglrygrl/3415404596/
http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/221910/view
http://danielfairbanks.net/portfolio...reconstruction

I've traced them, done freehand drawings and overlaying the photos to see how off I am, and aligned them as best I could next to and on top of each other on graph paper to see individual differences.

I would love to take a class at some point.

Facial X-rays are good to look at too, they won't give you eyeball placement but they will give you a nice clear view of the sockets. They are much further towards the front of the face than I originally thought. I took a lot of repetition, graph paper, tracings and overlays to myself to put that into practice and I still struggle with it.

I love the view the x-rays provide of the relationship between skull and flesh and the beautiful silhouettes of the profile. -

http://mazur.cz/data/usr_040_data/ceph3_big.jpg
http://c2-preview.prosites.com/14000...40008_ceph.jpg
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumbla...2574uIC87z.jpg

Eyes halfway between top of head and bottom of chin seems to be a well established rule and it works with the way I'm measuring. I've decided on half an eyeball in from the facial plane for my general model, but I don't know how universal that one is and it'll depend on how you're measuring. I'm using orthographic projection to figure out where to put them when the head is at an angle.

I spilt coffee on my sticky notes this week. There's still something wrong with the cheeks on my general model but I feel like I'm getting closer.. sometimes... I love the way the animation makes the the problems pop out. I should have included my plan drawing, I'll do that in the next post. It's a mess.

[Mechanical Man]

Stuff

[ForScience]

This is a really interesting project that you have going on here. Is your intent to create a textbook on head construction? You seem well on your way. It is a nit-picky thing, but I think your post that describes how the right-brain sees vs how the left brain sees is a bit inaccurate and over simplified. The left brain really doesn't care about proportion, in fact it only sees what it really wants to see. It doesn't take in details of forms at all, but just stores nouns like nose, eye etc. The right brain is also bogged down with emotional context and also has a hard time getting accurate proportions most of the time. If you drew just using the right side of your brain you would draw things that "felt" right, but were in actuality really inaccurate.

Anyway that is a long crit on a really small detail. I love your project. I am excited to see where it goes.

[Mechanical Man]

Thank you ForScience - It's a study, that's all. I hope to end it with a clear description of my process and results. Your comment on the brain stuff is not nit picky at all, it's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for when I made that post.

Harold Speed wrote The Practice and Science of Drawing in 1913 and the first edition of Betty Edwards Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain was published in 1979. Understanding has changed since then. Edwards says in the 2012 edition that she now uses the terms L-Mode and R-mode instead of left and right sides of the brain, because she knows that what she has doesn't fit quite right. A lot of what Edwards and Speed say makes sense to me, but I'm not content to let it not fit quite right. Do you have a source of information on this topic that you can point me to?

This is what I got from Iian McGilchrist via RSA The Divided Brain -

Right: Sustained, Broad, Open, Vigilant, Alert
Left: Narrow, Sharply Focused attention to detail

Language is in both hemispheres
Reason is in both hemispheres
Emotion is in both hemispheres
Visual imagery is in both hemispheres

-----

I'm excited to be back in class. The model is Stacy E Walker, same as post #7. There's a neat interview with her posted here. Poses are 3's, 5's, and 2's.

This animation still needs work, the forehead, far eye socket and nose jump out at me, but I like the direction it took.

Edit: forgot link to The Divided Brain

[Mechanical Man]

7 min drawings from class, more stickies and two more passes at the head animation. I did this set on separate pieces of overlaid punched paper so that I could hand flip them. The second side of the turn is mirrored from the first. The second set is edited from the first and I edited the eyes in the second set digitally. They got too messy to fix by hand.

[TNiznet]

Great updates =D, there are so much to learn from you. I really dig those figures, it feels very animated, you have to post some more figure drawings!

[Mechanical Man]

Thanks TNiznet.

I'm only doing the figures when I can't get a view of the model's face =) I'm focusing only on the head in order to control variables while trying to learn the basic principals. The idea is that once learned they can be applied to any subject. I think the human face is ideal to do this with because humans are so much better at picking out the things that are wrong with a human face than anything else. So far the idea seems to be working, I think my figure drawings have improved even though I haven't been doing many.

I am very heavily influenced by the old disney animations. I am striving for the kind of solidity, consistency, simplicity and design found in animations like Sleeping Beauty.

The model this week was John Maki in Karl Gnass's figure drawing class. Poses were 3 and 5 mins.

The drawings of Captain Janeway are on stickies. I desaturated them so that they would read as different from the normal sticky studies I've been doing because they are a different exercise. I want to see if I can get some consistency in structure and likeness by practicing doing many drawings of the same person. Also getting more practice with expressions this way. I'm googling "Captain Janeway expressions" for the reference photos.

And I'm back to trying to better work out the sphere because when I look at the problems with my head animation that still seems to be a problem. There are 10 drawings here, 8 are flipped for a total of 18.

[p sage]

Wow, dude. The improvement is coming. I'm seeing a lot more economy in your strokes... the Janeway faces show this brilliantly.

The studying is translating directly to a higher skill level. Congratulations.

[Mechanical Man]

Thank you p sage

[Mechanical Man]

1 and 3 min figure drawings. Was too tired to work on heads that night. The bear and Janeway were both drawn with the sphere template from my first post underneath as a guide.

[deputyballer]

very good work your doing. seeing your notes is helping me understand head construction a little better

[TNiznet]

You have the most beautiful feel for motion in your figures Tania, I felt like dancing after viewing your last set of gestures. I also love your recent cats in your blog, Id like to take Calico home lol.


Edit:Grammar

[Mechanical Man]

Thank you deputyballer, I'm glad it helps. You are doing good studies as well.

Wow thank you TNiznet, that's awesome. My teacher Karl Gnass deserves a lot of credit for inspiring me to really focus on the life and spirt of a pose and he always has fantastic, dynamic models. He says ask yourself what the model is doing and draw that. Tell a story, don't simply copy what you see.

I came across this article on drawing caricatures this past week. The reasons given for learning how to draw and average face describe exactly why I am working on a general model. Was a good reminder.

From the article: "This face is lodged deep in my brain. If you practice this face until it becomes effortless, you’ll make it your template for all other faces. Your hand will want to draw this face. If the person you’re drawing has a big chin, You’ll instantly judge how much bigger it is than this chin. If the person you’re drawing has ears that are a little small, you’ll instantly judge how much smaller."

The two sets of heads are 5 and 2 mins. From Karl's class

[Mechanical Man]

More notes from Voyager