Reily Mask 1

OK, if I go hatching/crosshatching faces, I need lots of lines. Problem: lots of lines indicate disturbances, rough surfaces, chaos and a lack of decisiveness from the artist. Unless they follow a clear, clean and meaningful pattern. Soooo. This is basically a Reily Abstraction of the face, with a lot of liner marks on top. No shades intended, no added features. The goal is to develop a clear, clean and meaningful pattern, that on its own already indicates the depth of the face, and identifies the features. Don't tell me that the line quality is atrocious, because I know it is. This is purely experimental at this stage, not even at prototype stage. First attempt, I started with lines from behind the ears, going across the forehead, to indicate the form of the skull first. The pattern for eye lids and lips are pretty much predetermined by the human skin, which already gave them a pattern of microfolds, that I probably shouldn't ignore. The Reily Abstraction for the face contains a lot of circles and half-circles centering around the mouth, so I used them as a guideline for lines indicating the plane of the face. The lines for the cheekbones are used to modify the centrical pattern and work quite well. The skull pattern and plane of the face pattern meet at the classical browline, which allows some more freedom of design at the overlap of the patterns.