This was written March 13, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Credits: 1
Introduction
Hello everyone and welcome back. Once again, I had a busy day, although I started drawing at 7:15pm, earlier than the last few days. I also chose set up a timer for 40mins (I did have a call at 8pm, good motivation to limit my session). I think the timers are definitely helping me keep things under control this week. Obviously, if I have more time in the future, I should definitely try to have longer sessions, since they allow me to experiment more and go deeper. But for now, I need to keep my sanity and get some sleep. Speaking of, I evaluated my tiredness at roughly 8/10; the lack of sleep is definitely catching up.
Exercises
To kick things off was the straight lines exercise. Somehow, I had a lot of trouble with those today, but that’s ok. I think it was because I needed time to get into it, and was drowsy and stressed about time. As for the wavy lines, this one went decently. Not amazing, but not too bad either. The circles were not great, but I did rush through them. Overall, the exercises took me roughly 7m30s.
Drawing
And now for the main course: The Drawing. Although I first had to clean my tablet, since its surface felt a little off.
The drawing started with the usual guidelines. A horizontal line, the head’s top, and a few additional guidelines. I then added the jaw, and used it as a reference for the neck’s cross-section. There were a few areas I struggled with here, but I think it’s gradually improving day-over-day. As for the cross-section, I initially put it too far to the front, and had to play around with the associated guideline to find the right horizontal position. As for the angles, I think I realized that the axes represent the head’s main axes, thus front to back and left to right. As such, they should represent these directions for the head in this 3d-space and align accordingly. This should give me a better reference for drawing them. If I can do that, all that’s left is drawing the correct length, and properly drawing the ellipse (which I don’t find trivial).
Next, I thickened the forehead’s central line to help with eye-socket placement, and added some horizontal guidelines for mouth, eyes and eyebrows. I also added nose, mouth and chin “guidelines”.
With the guidelines ready, I added a new layer, and worked on the head’s contour. This time, I was more careful with the left side, trying to properly adjust the slanted edge next to the eye, while attempting to neither make the cheek too puffy, nor have the edge too close to the central line. I think it looked ok with the guidelines. (Although I did end up adjusting it later). I also added a nose and smile.
Next up, the eye outlines. One thing I did notice here is, it seems like the left eye (on the right), should not be a circle, but an oval, with the part closer to the nose being the stouter “base”, and the outer one being the taller and narrower top.
I then added initial details to the eyes and sketched an ear. Overall, I think the eyes here are ok, albeit with some flaws. In particular, the right eye (on the left) looks “taller” than the other one. Moreover, the shape of the outline has some issues. However, some of these can be tweaked in subsequent steps, so it’s not a disaster. As for the ear, I’m a little disappointed in the result, which is in part due to rushing through it, instead of giving it its deserved attention. However, I better understand its placement now, at least on the horizontal. The top should go just below the top of the eyes, and the visible part of the outline should dip to about the center of the eyes.
As a last major step, I decided to finish the eyes, adding some reflection in them, along with eye-lashes. Looking back at it, I do think the left eye (on the right) looks a little too “short”, almost making it look injured. I also feel like it’s not looking in the correct direction. But these should be straightforward to improve on, simply a matter of practice. Beyond that, I think the rest of the eyes look fine.
At this stage, I was running out of time, but the face looked a little off. The nose and smile seemed poorly aligned, so I decided to move the nose. Looking back, I think this was a huge mistake. After all, the nose was properly aligned with the central line. I think the real issue here was the smile, which should be extended a bit further to the left, and possibly lowered slightly. Unfortunately, as a consequence of moving the nose, the center was misaligned, and I consequently decided to change the jawline. I think the new jawline actually looks worse. But alas, I ran out of time, and didn’t yet have the hindsight to know I shouldn’t have moved the nose. Overall, this took me 31 minutes to draw.
Conclusion
While I’m a little disappointed with the final result, I think this is still an improvement over the previous day’s drawing. In particular, I’m getting a better understand of the head’s shape, along with the proportion and placement of the various elements. Although I do wish I hadn’t made those final tweaks. For reference, here’s yesterday’s final drawing.
Gradual retrospection and application of my own feedback seems to slowly be paying off. Speaking of, one thing I should work on over the next iterations is to investigate the measurements for the guidelines (to improve spacing of the different elements). I also think I’ll hold out on this exercise until I translate the page for its presumably valuable information.
As for the statistics, the session took me roughly 40mins, writing about 43mins and reviewing about 40mins, for a total time spent on the article of 83mins, and a total session of 123mins (Or roughly 2 hours). This means reviewing took about as long as writing the article, and drawing was a third of the overall session.
One final note, I also decided to finally try to wait until after writing the article before uploading the pictures, which did help with the workflow.
Thank you for joining me once again on this roller coaster of a journey. I hope you’re all doing well! Have a lovely day.
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 22 (2024/03/15)