Faced With Fear: Conquering Your Fears of Illustrating Faces | The Masculine Face

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Melissa, and welcome to the second session of my series, Faced With Fear: Conquering Your Fears of Illustrating Faces. As I'm sure you've gathered, I really like puns and alliterations. Anyway throughout this series, I'll take you through the fundamentals of drawing and coloring, feminine and masculine character portraits. In my first class, I went over typically feminine features, so in this one I'll be going over typically masculine features. Obviously, in 15 minutes you can't really cover everything there is to know. Like for example, I don't really go over expressions or have to draw teeth and hair. [inaudible] that. These classes are really just meant to provide you with the building blocks of drawing faces and to hopefully help you get over that initial fear of starting out. As before, you don't need any illustration or character design experience for this and no software is required. So hit "Enroll", and let's get to drawing. 2. Reference Recommendation: I've decided to give one reference recommendation per class. This time I'm recommending this Character Design References Pinterest board. It's one of the most comprehensive reference resources that I've ever been able to find. It has everything organized by category and, practically, every single category you could ever want or imagined. For this class, it's got character anatomy mouth, character anatomy nose, character anatomy eyes, and there's various different little tutorials in there by different people, heading reference etc. It's truly amazing. I love it so much. I use it for inspiration. If I'm feeling blocked, I'll come in here and look through some of the characters that people have created. It seriously just helps so much to give me ideas of how I can draw certain things, or basically just to inspire me. It's really great, highly recommended. I've linked to this under class description. 3. Understanding Typically "Masculine" Features: In this video, I'm going to skip some things that are covered in the first class, and expand on some things that I didn't. If you want the full spectrum of the advice that I have to give, I recommend looking through that class as well. In the first class, I had a diagram of the eight basic facial shapes there to consider when you're designing a character. I wanted to just show you how few than can be translated with more typically masculine features. They don't vary too much from the feminine faces, but they do tend to be more angular and less fleshy or soft. This is just to show how facial shape can affect to character in three-quarter turn. Typically masculine facial features include info, a higher often uneven hairline, thick, flat, lower browse, large, more prominent browser nose, how low angular cheeks, flattery thinner lips, and heavier, sharper square jaw, and a thicker neck with an Adam's apple, also a wider chin. I forgot to include that. Similar to what I said in my last class, this doesn't mean that every male face has the same characteristics. This is again, just a generalized list of typically masculine features. That really just covers young proportionate faces. If you want to go crazy and have a lot of variety in your characters, you can try exaggerating features. Here I have a larger, protruding chin, really pointy nose, large ears, a long face. The possibilities are endless. You could try doodling or random shape and seeing if you can apply a face to it. Basically, try not to think too hard or limit yourself and just have fun with it. This is again to show how I start my drawings. I do a circle for the main part of the skull and two curves, directional lines to indicate where the eyes, nose, and mouth will go. For eyes in profile, think either a teardrop shape on its side or a rounded triangle. Then a very narrow oval for the iris and, or people. Then I just have another example on the far right. The teardrop shape is angled up, but it's still essentially a rounded triangle tear drop shape. I think how you draw the eyes is enlarge part where the style of your drawing really comes into play. Just because they can convey so much emotion in character. I just wanted to give you more examples of them. Here's another example of how I often draw noses with the oval for the base and an arch shape for the bridge. But you could also just start with a simple triangle and go from there. In the first class of the series, I went over how to draw mouths. But I'll talk about that again in the drawing demo. When you're shading the mouth, good thing to keep in mind is that the upper lip will usually be self curved down. It's better to shade the upper lip more and then highlight the bottom lip. I said before that thinner lips are generally more masculine feature, but that's not always the case and it's often not the case with dark-skinned people. That's why I gave this character fuller lips. This is just to show you that these ideas I've been talking about if masculine versus feminine features, are more just guidelines rather than hard set rules. This is also an example of how these principles can be applied to realism. Unless you're drawing a new very cartoony style where all the features are exaggerated and the head shape isn't necessarily proportionate, I guess this doesn't really apply. But if you are like me and you can tend to be proportionate with your cartoony style, you can basically just apply more shading to your lines. Try doing that, try drawing the character and then seeing how realistic you can make it just by shading it. I've included a PDF of this Google slide under class project In case you want to use it for reference. I did that for the first class in the series as well in case you missed that. All right, it's time to draw. 4. Drawing Demo: Again, I always start with a circle on two directional lines. Then I draw the jaw and chin, and giving him an angular sharp jaw. Before I do any precise detailing, I block in where the features will go with simple shapes and lines and sometimes scribbles. Again, I drew an arch for the nose and an oval for the base of the nose. Now that I've got my simple shapes and everything looks like it's in the right place, I'm starting to detail work. This guy's mouth I'm just doing a mid line and a small line for the bottom lip, and when I'm deciding where the center is, is one I'm following the vertical guidelines that I draw, but also the center will always be straight down from the bottom center of the nose. I know I don't really go over how to draw hair in this series, but honestly, there's so many different styles and types of hair that it did really needs its own class in order for me to cover everything, and who knows, I might make a class in the future on it. But one thing I will say now is that you will generally want to draw the hair slightly over the score line. Because if you drew it right on the score line, then the hair doesn't really have any thickness. Also, just try using reference. I know I keep saying that, but it's because it's truly very helpful. Pick out a bunch of different pictures of different hair styles and try replicating them. There are certain styles that I've drawn a lot, so I've gotten used to them, but sometimes I get stuck, so I still use reference myself. I try to block in the shape of the javelin chin before going in and shaping it to my liking. Because that way you're less likely to have to erase that detail work later. Unfortunately for me, I had to erase and redraw it later, anyway because I should have blocked in the eyes, nose, and mouth first before shaping the jaw. If I'd done that, I would have seen that the jaw was a little too wide, but alas. Instead of drawing an oval for the base and the arch for the bridge, I'm just drawing a triangle and then I'll build the point to the nose and the nostrums around it later. If you're drawing a proportionate face, the top of the ears should generally line up with the eyebrows. For now, this is in three quarter turn the bit that's on the far side of the face or the part that you can't see as much of that's turned away from us, should be shorter than the half that's on the near side of the face. When he said didn't make any sense, I'm using the curved vertical line that I drew as my midpoint for the mouth. The right side of the mouth is shorter while the left is longer and obviously if he was facing the opposite direction, that would be switched. I'm trying to match the droopy style of eyes that I drew in the first drawing. I don't think these look like the same character. I think it's mostly because the front-facing view has a wider, more square face while the one in three quarter turn has a longer, more rectangular face. Which is funny, because I did a similar thing during the drawing demo in the first-class. Anyway, I went ahead and we drew him, and I think he looks a lot more like himself if you will. Getting your character to look like the same character throughout of your drawing is something that takes a lot of practice and is obviously not something I excel at, a lot of times. Again, I drew a rounded triangle for the nose, and the teardrop on its side for the eye. The nostril shape in profile can be a little tricky. It can be flipped horizontally if you like, how that looks better. The wide end of the tear drop shape is facing the same direction as is in the front view and three-quarter shown drawings that I did. But I think it looks good facing the other direction as well. It just depends on the drawing for me. Try drawing in each direction and seeing what you like best. Don't worry about drying hair if you don't want to, because this class is really just about the face and facial features, and I didn't bother to finish it, so you shouldn't have to, and then that is pretty much done. 5. Closing: As of Part 1, the project is to create a character turnaround. Only this time, obviously you should be practicing for masculine features. I want to stress here, that this is practice. If you are really unhappy with how your drawing turns out, I still really encourage you to post it here. Or at the very least, don't give up on drawing because it feel discouraged. Chances are you're not going to draw something you love the first time. It took me quite a few tries before I started to regularly drawing faces that I didn't dislike. I still think that I could use improvement because when you noticed, you'll always feel that way. I know it's easier said than done, but also try not to compare yourself with other artists because you don't know how long they've been drawing, you don't know the experience they have, or how unskilled they were when they started out. Besides, everyone improves at different paces anyway. Keep drawing, keep practicing. You will get better with time. Being an artist just takes a lot of patients. Thanks again for taking this and I wish you the best of luck.