Funny...you don't look Zorbatikish... (Due December 15, 2007)

[JonZ_]

can we use existant monsters/aliens? I play Halo and some Sci Fi **** lately and got me inspired to do some Covenants.

[alesoun]

Updated again. Never drawn an alien, so I used Korky the Cat as a base norm (with a few tweaks).

[enrigo]

Here's my 10 male heads, used some references and some made up ones:

(The bottom left one is suppose to be Ilaekae, my attempt to brown nose the teacher, heh heh)

[edgaronfo]

Here are my 10 male faces

[Maledict]

Here are my 3 sets of faces. Sorry for the crap quality, I really tried - I had a hard time with this exercise.

[Seedling]

Hi everyone! I just got word that Ilaekae’s modem had a collision with a falling ladder, resulting in small plastic bits and no internet access. He sends his apologies and says he will be back just as soon as the new modem arrives. In the mean time, I can try to fill in for him, even though his shoes are two sizes too large and have an interesting odor.

Let me go have a look at what you’ve been up to. . .

[Maledict]

Ah, no wonder - Thanks for informing us Seedling I sent Ilaekae a PM or two several days ago, to no avail, so either he ran away with a Scottish Redhead from the nether regions of the 607th layer of Baator, or he died. Hm, I love it when my fantasies run amok .

Thanks for filling in

The one that I had most problem with was the female faces, I couldn't get the features and the shape of the head to convey an effeminate effect. That and I'm crap at drawing faces, never had good practice with it. O_o

[Seedling]

Ten women, ten men, and ten other! Sounds like fun. Personally, I’m inclined to go stylistic with this assignment. That is, I’m inclined to see facial features pushed a bit in the direction of caricature. Not necessarily in the “ha-ha that’s a dorky picture of you at the carnival” caricature, but caricature in the sense of identifying the most importing landmarks of an individual’s face and then exaggerating those features.

With illustrated human faces, caricature can come in a range of exaggeration, from grossly distorted political figures on one end of the spectrum, to the exaggerated Adam’s apples of Norman Rockwell’s otherwise realistic figures.

With aliens, I think the best examples can be found in animated movies that feature multiples of a single type of animal. I had already mentioned the ants in A Bug’s Life; other examples would be the dalmatian puppies in 101 Dalmatians, the penguins in Happy Feet, and the rats in Ratatouille. If you haven't seen one of these movies, then go! See one!

I’ll be back later with comments on what you’ve drawn. . . (there’s only so much I can play here during work hours.)

[ElementalMist]

Wow, modem down, sucky. I have actually had a very similar issues with a modem. Right now the issue is however my scanner. We are not feeling the love, when we get along better, I will post mine. =^_^=

[enrigo]

I've been looking at World of Warcraft character creation in the game, it really gives me some interesting idea on how to create a monster-ish character. (But I ended up grinding levels for a few hours so it doesn't seems to worth it that much. LOL)

[Seedling]

Alesoun – nice work! I do see something rather consistently across all three kinds of your faces: there is a tendency for the distances between the specific facial features to be all the same. For example, on the humans, the distance between bottom-of-the-nose and mid-lips is slightly less than the distance from mid-lip to chin. So even though you have successfully drawn different ages and ethnic groups, there is still a look among the humans that they are all in the same family.

Among the Korky critters, that sameness of proportion is making the assignment hard for you, because it leaves you with nothing but cosmetic details to use to tell the critters apart. But comparing the first one to the last one, you do seem to already be slowly breaking yourself out of the mold.

TimV – Looking good so far. I do see some similarities: most of them have widow’s peaks, and several have the same slight smile. Keep going!

JonZ – I think it would be best if you made up your own alien, but if you’re particularly excited about someone else’s design, go ahead.

Enrigo - Ilaekae’s going to get a chuckle out of that. These are looking good! Keep going!

Egaronfo – Welcome to CA! These are looking good. There’s a certain roundness of the face that they all share, and in some cases the facial features are leaning a bit too far to the iconic side, meaning that instead of an individual’s specific eye, you’ve drawn more of the idealized symbol of an eye. But overall these are pretty unique. Keep up the good work!

Rabbi – I can see you are working hard at this. You are headed the right direction, but I think your faces could benefit by developing them further. It seems as if line control is getting in your way. Try drawing with very, very light lines, that can be easily erased. But don’t erase them. Let the light scribbles just stay there when you make a mistake. And when you decide a line is correct, then draw over it with one smooth, darker line.

Try using photo reference for those pesky female faces.

You haven’t got the goal of the alien faces quite right. Try again, but this time just pick one, and make variations on that one.

Cheers!

*********************



Here is something for all of you to try. Go hand your human drawings over to someone who knows you in real life. Ask if the drawings look like you. Chances are there is some resemblance, because we are generally more used to seeing and studying our own faces in self-portraits than we are used to looking at the faces of others.

I’m blanking on her name right now, but there is an established illustrator who does a lot of editorial work for magazines. Her figures all have a funny squashed and knobby look to them. When she gave a lecture at RISD, I saw why: she had those same features! Another example I saw of this was the work of a fellow student whose shoulders were proportioned a little oddly. All of his figures had the same unusual proportion.

The moral of the story: make sure to spend time studying faces other than your own!

[TimV]

modem vs. ladder - Ouch!
guess it's obvious who won that one. My condolences for your modem, Ilaekae.

TimV – Looking good so far. I do see some similarities: most of them have widow’s peaks, and several have the same slight smile. Keep going!

hmmm...
I see what you mean. Funny how you develop habits like that. I'll need to pay a bit more attention when I draw faces.

I had to take an unexpected weekend trip. I'm hoping I can find a scanner so I can submit my other drawings in time. I'd love to submit them to get more feedback.

I'm having a great time with this one!!!

[Frumious Me]

Good job trying this everyone! I was so intimidated by this exercise, but once I got started it was fun. Made me realize I haven't practiced drawing different people enough, getting a sense of unique characteristics. I pretty much just tried to alter the eyes, cheekbones, nose, or lips. But it really didn't have any science to it.

Also, I found that each of these heads took me about 10 minutes, which seems long to me, but maybe that was just because I was trying to think of how they'd look different from the last one.

My aliens are sort of people shaped chameleo-goats. After I did them, I tried to come up with a different looking species, but they were all too nonsensical or just as anthropomorphic. I learned that I have no idea how to make angler fish look like individuals. I think I need to do this again, but larger and with reference.

[Ilaekae]

Thank you, Seedling Dear. Sorry everybody for the absence. Give me a few hours to scan through you efforts and post some thoughts.

************************************************** **

I posted this in my mentoring thread, but I'll put it here, too, so you know the truth...heeheehee


I hope you all had a good laugh over my little purdikament. I found it rather interesting actually. I discovered if you hot-wired a smashed modem with phone wire and taped the damn thing together, for some weird reason, you could SOMETIMES access your email account, but you couldn't get the browser to work. Still haven't figured that one out. I actually did get in here three times by hitting the whole mess with my shoe, so apparently I missed a loose piece of wiring somewhere...

Just so you understand what happened-- I have a back room that was added on by the previous owner (a sub-human mushroom with no construction skills what-so-ever, and the engineering abilities of a wombat) which I've been trying to rebuild and add bookshelves and some closets to for the last year or so in my spare time. It happens to be where the computer equipment is.

I also have six cats, one of which is a gray and black tabby named Tazz that thinks he's a dog, which may actually be the case, since he weighs 31 pounds, stands up on his hind end for head scratches and to beg for food, and follows me around like a puppy where ever I go. He, like myself, is NOT FAT! We are simply...big-boned. And like most...BIG-BONED...people, we don't often see our feet, especially when carrying a 50-pound box across the room. Tazz led the way as usual for about 10 feet, but suddenly decided it was time to stop cold, turn around and stand up for a head scratch...all completely out of my sight line... Now when two big-boned entities meet head-on, a rather graceful dance ensues, completely beyond the ability of a simple fat person/cat team. Add a fifty-pound box of books, and you have the equivalent of the Hindenberg crashing into downtown Milwaukee. Tazz went one way, the box went the other, and I grabbed for the only thing I could see to keep from going through the floor into the basement--a ladder. The ladder flipped, summersaulted over a pile of crap, and came down square on the edge of my computer table. it missed the comp by about 2", but totally obliterated my DSL modem and about 10 feet of tangled wiring. GoooOOOOoooood sound. End of story.

So...my apologies for being in so erratically for the last few days. The new modem is in, the wiring pretty much repaired, and everything seems to be working.

[enrigo]

My ten female heads, I'll try to get the monster one in tomorrow.

Glad to have you back Ilaekae

[Maledict]

Enrigo, do you have any advice for me on drawing female heads, as well as line quality and drawing control? I suck at both I need some help if you have some to spare, heheh...

By the way, would you happen to be Thai? I noticed that you said your location was Canada as well as Thailand.


Edit:

Thanks for the encouraging words Seedling, I really need to work on this...

My line quality is very bad, I can't make single continuous lines very easily, I always make scratchy lines. It's been something that I've been doing and drawing since I was very young, as I had no training to tell me otherwise. And I can't draw female faces to save my life, even though I'm drawing from reference, it still looks like a bona fide male face Any advice?

[Jason Rainville]

I'll get mine done tommorow, I swear

[Arish]

Ooh, this is such a fun exercise! Here's my male faces... I didn't use a ref for these, just to test the limits of my imagination (and laziness), so apologies if the proportions are a bit wonky.

Females and aliens coming soon.

[enrigo]

RabbiSatan:Yes, I am actually Thai, but I just moved to Canada 2 months ago.

About the head drawing, I would suggest trying to not focus on the construction lines that much. It sure is good for measuring and stuff like that. But like Glenn Vilppu likes to say "There's no rules, just tools", using these lines is great but stressing at it too much and it will be likely to restrict you, it turns from a tool in to a rule so to speak.

I've found some good article on line quality a while ago and here's one:
http://gamma.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=16582
and another one is about inking but there's a lot about arm movement and drawing good lines:
http://www.tomrichmond.com/blog/?p=181

I don't know if my advice is any good, since I am also struggling with these problems. But I think that it helped me by not being uptight with the construction lines. I got the idea from a martial art novel that has a part about a thug without fighting style could fight better than a beginner martial artist who are restricted by his fighting style.

[Maledict]

Thanks enrigo I'll take a look at those.

Are you using reference for your heads or are you doing them from imagination?

I'm also of Thai nationality - I was born in Thailand, but I'm currently living in Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, I can't read or write Thai, much to my eternal shame. Nor can I do the same for Cantonese, much to my even greater eternal shame .

[enrigo]

I used references for some of them, the ones that look wonky is probably from imagination.

[Maledict]

Thanks again Enrigo, but I'm just a little bit confused. Do you use construction lines at all? I just tried to do so without them just now, and the features were all over the place and messed up. And I'm now drawing from ref, and my female faces either are all misplaced, or still seem like male faces. Arghakf;asjllscm;asmacsakgaaahah *dies*

[Ilaekae]

Sorry to leave you dangling, Rabbi'...I was off the net for four or five days due to stupidity and resulting mechanical problems.

Try this... Do you have access to some general magines like fashion magazines for men and or women, or teenage interest magazines with lots of pictures in of the different sexes? These are obviously models, so they'll be retouched up the wazoo and a hell of a lot "prettier" than most of us, but they will help at least on one thing...if you study them and compare the male features with female features, you realize there is actually very little difference between the sexes unless you exaggerate the features. Pretty boys look like pretty girls. Ugly boys look like ugly girls. Old people look remarkably alike because both faces age the same. The same applies to the very young.

When you try to draw one sex or the other, you have to stress the various things that make one LOOK more male or female to the average person. If both have the same shape of head, the difference is in the features, and this difference is VERY subtle. The muscles around the mouth and front of the jaw are more pronounced on a man. THEREFORE, to make someone look female, we minimize this. We make a woman look "babyish" to some degree.

People assume all men are big rough gnarly dudes, even though we know that isn't true. So we use this misinformation that everybody accepts as true and use it. When we draw a man, we make him look rugged, bigger jaw, big eyebrows, deep-set eyes, big BIG prominant features, a fair amount of wrinkles and obvious bone shadows. That way, when we move to draw the female face, we can do the opposite. Slightly smaller features, and not as obvious. Women are smoother. Daintier (unless they're married to me...). Not as wrinkled because they really work at not being wrinkled. their eyes look bigger because they work at that, too, with make-up.

Just keep in mind that in real life, the two sexes look remarkably the same. The most obvious clues we have to base our best guess on when tryin' to find a date is the extra stuff--the hairstyles, the make-up or lack of it, the general overall feel of the muscle vs. fat (more muscle, male--more fat [smoothness], female).

Don't get frustrated with this. It's actually an extremely difficult assignment when you seriously get into it. That's why I gave it. A lot of people look at something like this and say, "Shit...piece o'cake!" The people who have had a good bit of experience wrestling with this kind of problem KNOW how hard it is...

[Rogzilla]

Well as I am returning to ConceptArt after being gone for a while, I have only just discovered this thread. I don't know if I will be able finish this tomorrow but I will try, at the very least, to finish it on my own time. I had a blast doing these male faces and I definitely need to add some variety to my female faces.

[Ilaekae]

Don't worry if you have to take an extra day or so. I was out myself, and it will take me a while to play catch up here.

[enrigo]

Rabbi: I was trying to say, more like using construction lines but go loosely with it, because you probably will have to erase them a few times and change thing around a bit.

[Maledict]

Thanks to you both Ilaekae and Enrigo, I'll just continue drawing female faces until I start to get them I guess...*sigh* Oh well, one of life's little challenges .

[chaosrocks]

hey ilae...he said thailand! theres even a worse problem there tellin the sexes about if you include"lady boys" in the puzzle... this is a great assignment I should get off my ass and do it

welcome back
crx

[enrigo]

Ahhh... Thailand, home of the internet trolls and masculine ladies(?) I'm starting to feel home sick.

[Seedling]

Welcome back Ilaekae! I'm rofling at your tale!