I therefore come back here to ask you for advice on the level of drawing faces.
I focused on 2-3 minutes (I have a bad habit of coming back to an unfinished face in time) exercises and wondering what I could do to improve myself even more.
My main focus is to depict emotions/dissociate myself from the same face syndrome.
There's a technique i like to do is that you draw the face and expression first, and then, if you want, finish the contour of the head. With that, you focus on the isolated elements.
I know that depending on the time of the exercise there's not much time left, but the human expression is so complex that it uses almost all face muscles, and thus, it may need to shade a little bit the following areas: cheeks, nose, mouth expressions (by itself!), eyebrows... Heck, i think mouth, nose and eyebrows can make expressions on their own!
So, try and find different expressions out there and don't be hasty about doing them with little time. The important thing is to catch the feeling of the human face and give some more time and attention to it.
I see, I think I'll increase my time limit then to really catch human expressions like you said, thanks for the advice! I'm also following this technique you mentionned, very useful indeed.
Good morning, Zenlaeth, and great work on your range of gestures, silhouettes, and relationships and forms of your faces and figures. Way to go and keep going and keep trying real hard. I appreciate your goal to dissociate yourself from the dreaded same-face-syndrome. I think that it can make your facial expressions more rigider and less human and less in sync with how your character thinks and feels in any given situation.
When it comes to a criticism or two, constructive at that, I feel that these faces and expressions don't seem sufficiently cartooniest and humanest enough to me. How would you kindly free up your dominant and non-dominant hands with 30 mins of 30 second blind gesture drawings of expressions and mugs? (120 scribbles done blindly)
Because if you can do this, then most of your faces and expressions will become the most exaggerated and spontaneous in your acting choices. For most all info, please look into this video down below, or two or more.
In addition, in real life, not all faces are exactly the same on either side, even though some faces are more or less the same and/or different than others, except, as a bonus, here's this link right here.
Kindly take these thingies with the smallest grain of salt of all, and good night. Go back to sleep.
Thanks for these videos, I'll take a look at them. Your approach of making my drawings more cartooniest seems interesting and will probably improve my skill with emotions, I will try it in my next sessions and see where it takes me!
Learn more about form and shapes, it's a good thing to have increased knowledge with this fundamental specially if you are drawing faces in perspective.
There's a material from Aaron Blaise about character design, where he talks about the importance of understanding body mass and how it interacts with each other to develop the figure in drawing, and it's super useful for understanding facial expressions. Makes it much more simple to understand how the structure of the face behaves while doing a certain expression.
For example, the mass that we have on the eyebrows area. Notice how when we frown, they contract in the middle of the face and make wrinkles. Or how in an anger expression (grrrr) makes the mass sitting under the eyes and on the laterals of the nose contract with the eyebrows.
It's makes the job of depicting expressions easier when you understand what provokes the structure the behave in a certain way.
Alvo
1 year ago.
