Ultimate Portrait Drawing - For All Levels

1. Course introduction 1: Hey, there. I'm Chris Petrocchi, and I want to welcome you to my portrait drawing boot camp, and just take a minute to tell you a few things to get you off to a good start. The course is self study, so you'll go at your own pace and convenience. There are five modules in total, which I built around a solid framework I developed called scaffold that corresponds to this acronym right here. Each module takes one of those key ideas and develops it in isolation so you can better understand the basic concepts and improve your skills incrementally. I provided focused exercises that will help you practice the concepts thoroughly, and there are over the shoulder tutorials which break down the structure of the head and features and show you exactly how I deal with specific aspects of the portrait drawing process. As you move through the course, you'll find that with daily practice, the fundamental ideas presented will become part of your thinking and approach to portraiture, and over time, your drawings will naturally start to improve. It may take a little time, but just stick with it. It will happen. Now, the very first thing you'll do in week one is a pre instruction drawing as a memento of where you are in your artistic process right now. So look for the pre instruction drawing assignment document in the introduction section with instructions to get you started. Post your work to the Facebook group as a personal statement and celebration that says, This is me right now. And I'm moving forward from here. A major thrust of this course in addition to getting technical skill is getting you a portfolio piece at the end that you could be proud of. So look for the traditional portrait document that explains that portrait that you'll be working on throughout the course. And by the end of it, you're going to have an awesome piece that you can be proud of. Okay, that's it. For now. I wish you all the best in the course, and I'm optimistic and hopeful that this course is going to be really good for you. In the next video, I'm going to introduce the drawing tools, so let's get started. 2. The Learning Process: A little bit about the learning process before we get started. Learning is difficult. It's not always smooth. And if you think of your learning process, the process of learning art here as like remodeling your apartment or your house. Well, with your house, you know where everything is. It's comfortable. You know where the food is, you know where to sleep. And let's say I come in to remodel and I move the food remove the food. I move the bed around, and take things apart. What are you going to have? Well, you're going to be uncomfortable because you won't know where everything is and it's going to be a mess. Really, that's how the process is. It's messy. I want to encourage you to get messy, get really messy, and it's okay. It's supposed to be a mess. If everything you know about art is on, let's say, your computer hard drive. And your hard drive. You've got everything you know about art there, and then you take a class and all this gigabytes of information is on your hard drive. But you take a class and basically, it's going to replace information. Now, if your hard drive is full of information that you're comfortable with, you know, you know how to use, you're doing pretty good. What happens when you put new info in? You're going to have to reorganize that hard drive in some way. So you're going to have to delete some files, and which ones are you going to delete? Are you going to keep the new information or are you going to stay with the old information? So you have some choices to make. And there's resistance in that process of learning. There's a lot of resistance and push pull, there's that reorganization which leaves everything a mess. So it's messy, be messy. It's okay. Make that room messy or remodel that house, and then little by little, put it back together. So in the beginning, you won't be making great drawings, maybe. Maybe you will, maybe you won't as you're learning, your drawings will tend to probably go down because you're again, getting rid of some old information and making room for new information. Your drawings may go down for a little while. So don't expect them to be great. Just give yourself a break, be easy with yourself in this learning process. And then I think it'll make it a little bit better, okay? All right. So let's move on to the first module. 3. The Tools Introduction: During this course, I will use both digital and traditional tools to talk about portrait drawing. So why is knowing the traditional tools so important? Well, I believe to make good portraits, we need the confidence to construct. And that's what the C stands for in my seven step scaffold method to portrait drawing. I'll go more into that later, but what does the confidence to construct actually mean? It's about having confidence in the marks that we make, and part of that comes from a positive connection with the tools. That kind of allows you to make the marks that you want to make more consistently and makes drawing less frustrating. The drawing is not easy. But when you have the confidence to construct, you have that positive feeling that comes with that that buys you up and spurs you on to further success. Think about it like an NBA player or a track star. They have to perform at a high level, day in and day out. So they're going to have good equipment like Nike shoes, re boop. And it's really no different for the artist and the relationship for their tools, so they can perform at a consistent high level. Bottom line is if you know your tools, you're planning for success. And I think that's by far the biggest thing you can do to advance your artist strep. These tools that I'm going to show you, they're just suggestions. They're the tools that I use. You can use this as a jumping off point, a starting point, but feel free to use the tools that work for you. And I'll have a PDF download of the tools description in the description box of this course. So let's step over to the drawing table and I'll introduce the tools to you. Okay, let's talk about the typical drawing tool I use. Here on the left, I have pencils. And I love the carbothlo made by stabil and I choose a couple of different colors of that. And I think you can also charge these with water and they'll paint with watercolor. And then I have the generals charcoal pencil, and I'll use soft and hard grades, anything from six B to four B to two B to HB. And then next to that, I have cont, and it comes kind of like a block with squared off edges, and I will sharpen that with my sandpaper to a very fine point. I think you can see that. And same thing with the compressed charcoal. It comes in a barrel, but I'll take it and put it into the sandpaper and just rock it back and forth like that until it is chiseled fine hard edge, and that makes it kind of a three and one tool instead of just a one dimensional tool. And so this sandpaper is 80 grade made by three M, but something like 80 grade will do. And it's better than those Emory board things where you just use one side. This does the work twice as fast because you're wearing down the whole tool. And with a pencil, too, I'll do that. I will put it into in between, and I'll hold it with my basically three fingers on one side and balanced by the thumb on the other side, and I'll feel for that tip, and I'll just rock it back and forth. And also, I'll turn it I'm rocking it back and forth, left to right, and I'm also turning it and wearing down the charcoal until it is a very fine tapered point. Okay, moving on, I have vine charcoal, and it comes in very thin sticks, which I break. They're pretty long and I break them down into smaller pieces, depending on what area I need to cover. They have medium. They have a really large stick, and those are awesome. When you combine the willow or the vine charcoal with compressed, it's like velvet. It's amazing. I use white conte for highlights. Also, I have a white charcoal pencil for highlights. And then here are my modifiers. So those are erasers, plastic Mars eraser, needed rubber eraser for more gradations and subtle changes. I have my stumps here, the tortelons and that's also for smudging, and there's different sizes of those. And then I have a plastic eraser and a clutch made by Stetler. And then the electric eraser made by Sakura Japan. A little bit expensive, but I like that to get a really fine highlight and to erase charcoal, sometimes you need something like that. So those are the tools. 4. The Tools 2 sharpening demo: Okay, now the way we do this is we hold the blade and we cut away from us and we just wear away the wood exposing the lead. You've got to be patient with this, and I would just go ahead and wear away one side down to the lead. That way, I have wood supporting the other side so it doesn't snap off. And you just continue to do that until all the wood is gone, and you have exposed Something like that. 5. SECTION 1: See & Construct: How to see like an artist. You know, most of us are enthralled with the idea of being able to draw. It's such a powerful skill to have. But so many get frustrated with drawing because they don't like what they see on the page. And in large part, it's not because people lack motor skills to make drawings. I believe everyone who's listening to me can do that. Rather, the problem occurs at the level of interpreting what you see. Let me say that again. The problem with drawing occurs at the level of interpreting what you see. Let me show you what I mean. To gain some insight into this, we're going to have to write some code and do a backdoor hack into the brain. Most people have no idea about how seeing actually works. Most people believe that what they see and what they think is the truth. Most people, when they see something like a car, they think that's a car. It's made out of metal and plastic and rubber. It's red in color. It's real, it's solid, and that's a fact, and there's no question about it. That's how most of us think. But this is how it actually works. You don't actually see with your eyes. All your eyes do is receive the photons, the sensory data, and your brain is the thing that creates the image. All our eyes do is receive the information, and then the brain interprets that information and gives its best guess at what it is. When it thinks, it knows what it is, then it projects up an image that we can see. You actually don't see with your eyes or hear with your ears. You actually see and hear with your brain. What we're seeing is not really what we can see, then it's more of our brain's best guess. Isn't that amazing? So, what you believe to be true affects your perception of reality. Don't believe me? Well, let's take a look at this checkerboard. What if I was to tell you that square A and square B are the same value? Well, let's take a look. If I paint the value from B up to A, you can see these are actually the same exact value. But there's a trick going on here because square B is cast in shadow from the cylinder. So it's darker than the light squares and the light, but it's reading still as a light square compared to the dark squares. So our brains having trouble interpreting this. If I show you the reason why is that value is relative. So B is surrounded by dark squares, whereas A is surrounded by light value squares. So if I put the same value behind both, you can see that these are the exact same value. So under certain conditions, the brain can be fulled particularly with respect to value. So our biggest problem to overcome in seeing like an artist is the brain, and it's sometimes faulty interpretation of what is in front of us that factors into producing a bad drawing. The brain has a left and a right hemisphere. The left brain is responsible for things like calculations, logic, math. Letters, words. It's reductionistic. It breaks things into its smallest parts. Was the right brain is responsible for creativity, music, intuition. It's more holistic in its approach, and it thinks in terms of pictures and patterns. So the right brain is primarily concerned with the whole or the gestalt. Got to overcome the powerful left brain and its ability to assign meaning to everything we see. It's a survival skill evolved over eons to help keep us alive in the face of Sabre two tigers. But with respect to drawing, it's death, and we need to break from it and find help almost solely from our right brain when we're trying to draw. All right, so how do we overcome it? Well, the answer might seem a little strange, but it's a ridiculously simple secret. It's surprising. It's so simple, it's not really a secret at all, but it's squint and compare. Now, what is that? Well, let me back up a little bit. Basically, we can use this strategy to our advantage to simplify detail and values, and that's huge. All the great masters used the squint and compare technique from Velazquez to DGA to Sargent to create their masterworks. Why? Because the job of the eyes is to take in sensory data and that data comes in the form of contrast. Let me say that again. The job of our eyes is to take in sensory data, and that data comes in the form of contrast. Remember that, primarily contrast a value. In fact, if there were no contrast, we wouldn't see much of anything except flat nothingness. But when you start to turn the lights on, watch this now, out of the void comes a face. And we recognize we register that face in terms of light and dark contrast. And light and dark contrast is the name of the game. It's how we register form change. It's why things look three D. It's because of changes in value and changes in value signal, form changes to our brain. So the big takeaway for us here is that the biggest problems to solve for the beginning jar are related to value. Let me outline them here, and then we'll take a look at them in detail. The first is muddy looking drawings, mixing up the value so that the lights are too dark and the darks are too light. Number two is sacrificing the whole for the parts. That is noticing and drawing too many value contrasts and emphasizing too many details. The third one is symbolic drawing, but we'll just stick with the first two, and we'll take a look at those in detail next. 6. See like an Artist 2 Main problem: In the last section, we established that the two main problems for the beginner are number one, muddy looking drawings caused by mixing up the light and dark values, and number two, sacrificing the whole for the parts. In other words, drawing too many value contrasts and emphasizing details. So all this had to do, basically, you could boil it down to sometimes the brain can be fooled, especially with value and the eye sees basically in terms of contrast in value. So we've got to solve the value problem, and we stipulated that solving it would be done by squinting and comparing. So we're going to get to that. But let's look at these two problems and break them down. We'll look at muddy looking drawings first. Okay, number one, muddy looking drawings caused by mixing up the light and dark values. So we have the photo reference here, and in the middle we have this really dirty looking drawing. That's what I mean by muddy. It's mixing up the values. So let's say in this area here, where it should be light, it's too dark. And then in this area here, where it should be dark, it's too light. And it just goes on and on like that. We can see areas that are in the shadow, but they're too light, okay? In here should be lighter, but it's too dark. So you're mixing up the light and dark values. The drawing here all the way to the right, this is a more harmonized in terms of its value. The darks are all unified into they're designed into a nice shadow pattern, and the lights are also designed well so that it looks more like the photo reference. It looks more natural. It doesn't look dirty, right? Because the lights and the darks are nicely separated. And that's not what's happening here. The lights and darks are not nicely separated. They're all mixed. The lights go into the darks and the darks come into the lights, okay? So that's number one, how to fix it is separate your lights and darks, and we'll get into that as we go forward. So let's look at number two, sacrificing the whole for the parts. Noticing and drawing too many value contrast, too many details. So again, we have the photo reference on the left, and then we've got in the middle here, a drawing that just has it looks spotty, you might say, it's spotty. That means there's lights and darks spotted all around, right? And there's too many contrasts. And that's kind of a distraction for the viewer because they can't really see your beautiful design. They can't really see the picture because they're looking at the trees instead of the forest, if you will. So these dark accents all over the place. Right? The light accents, there's too many lights where it could be a lot more calm down. You could say, you want to calm the values down. I mean, you don't want range all over the place. So I think you can see how this looks it looks noisy. Spotty and so on. And that's because they're drawing too many value contrasts, okay? We want less contrast and more harmony. So here we have the darks basically in their family, right? And so we kind of want to unify the darks and connect them wherever we can so that they're nicely designed. Okay? There's the darks up here, too. Right? And then the lights have their pattern that's also considered and designed. And so that could be you know, all this stuff, all the other stuff next to the darks, it has its pattern. And they're really if you can think of it, like light and dark puzzle pieces, a light puzzle piece and the dark puzzle pieces. And they're very clear. It's very clear and simplified. It's simple. So not everything is being painted all at once. The simplification has visual impact on the viewer because the most simple statement is usually the best. I hope that's clear. Let's move on. I'll get more clear as we go. So we need to talk about value if we're going to talk about squinting and comparing because the problem is with value, and squinting and comparing is the solution. So we have to understand value first. What is value? Value can be defined as how black, gray or white an area of an object is. We have a value scale here. This is called the value scale, and it's how black, gray or white an object is. Pretty simple. The local value of something. Let's define that. That's the essential value of an object surface without light or shadow. Something like this. It's basically a silhouette, nothing but one flat value. Light and shadow visually define objects. So it has something to do with light here comes into play and how light the laws of light and how light behaves. So if you have a flat circle with a local value that's sort of a middle gray, but you introduce light into the picture. Look at that. It goes bump, it pops. It's three D, and it's because of light these changes, right, in light from a light to middle to a little bit darker to a dark. The changes, and I'm going to use Delta as change equal the changes in value, let's say, equal a change in form. All right, so let's continue. We'll clarify that more. Here's some more examples. We basically interpret the volume of objects based on the light that reflects from them. And we all know this. So we basically have some flat local value, not much definition there, but we shine some direct light on them, their form is revealed. So light reveals form because it shows the breakaway of the planes. It shows the plane changes and the darks and lights. So the big idea, a different value equals a different plane. Try to remember that or a change. Remember Delta means change. Change in value equals a change in form. And that's just how we see form, how we see depth. In the real world, our I gets its cs about what is three D, what has formed by the change in value. Okay? So that's our little formula. A change in value equals a change in form or different value equals a different plane, different way to say it, same idea. So let's look at value a little bit more here. Here's our value scale at the bottom here, and it's one continuous tone. There's a lot of values in the world, and we don't need all those values. It's hard to draw when you're trying to draw every value in the universe, right? So we don't need that. We want to simplify things, and let's do that. Let's simplify it with ten steps of values from light to dark. Okay, that's better. But let's try and get it even more honed in, so it's easier for us. Let's take it down to five values. That's even better. Two values. This could be the most simple. Obviously, it is the most simple. We've gone from millions of values to ten values to five values down to two. I'd say that's a simplification for sure. How this works is when you squint down the value range is simplified. The details go away. All those little myriad of values merge into either the family of lights and the family of darks, either one of those. So let's look at an example on a human head. Here's the full value range. That's kind of too complicated. We want to make it simple. What do we do? We squint and compare. If I do a heavy squint, my eyes are almost closed. I can get to here. So we go from here, heavy squint to here. Notice what it does. I really gravitizes the thing. So you see the very graphic breakup into the family of darks, family of lights, nothing in between. That's good. If we open our eyes just a little bit, a little bit less of a squint, we can get three values. So we have all the shadows unified into one value. And then in the lights, we have two steps, right? We have one step here, two steps here. Those are all in the family of lights. The light family. The values. Let's open up our eyes just a little bit more and we get this introduced another value in the darks. So these are the reflected light here. Reflected light, bounce light, ambient light that are lighting up some planes, showing some plane changes in the family of darks. So now we've got four values. We have the family of lights of lights. We have the family of darks. We have a light value. We have a dark value. Let's just pretend this is dark. I can probably change that to black. Okay. Here's dark. Okay, that's better. And then we have two values of equal steps in between. This is white. And then this is a little less white, and this is a little less white. So let's go back to black again. We can make this a little bit darker. And I'll cover this again, but the idea is to have a black, white, and then two intermediate values of equal jumps in between. And so we get to this four value. This is really important. This is what you want to shoot for when you squint and compare. You squint because it makes all the contrast. Well, it makes all the details go away and brings up the contrast of values in a way that simplifies it. And then you compare to see is this shape here? Is this value right here lighter or darker than this value? And you just compare This is lighter than this, right? This right here, Change back to white. This is darker than this. You're just comparing, right? And the more you do it, the better you get at this kind of comparison. So the squinting and the comparing, they both go together hand in glove. Is this lighter than this? That's the question you ask yourself. All you're asking is it lighter than the thing next to it or darker. That's the question you ask. You squint and you just ask these questions. It's very simple. But a lot of people don't know this and they're not trained to do it. And so they suffer from those problems that we discussed earlier. So it's four values, a light, a dark, two steps of equal jumps in between, and it gets you this, right? And this is the star right here. Here, you can go ahead and finish this thing out, render it, do whatever you want to do because it's solid. Tonally it has tonal structure to it. Or you could hand it off to someone else because your idea is so clear that, you know, anyone could finish it off because they know what you're trying to say. Okay? So that's value, and that's squinting and comparing. Practice this idea with objects around you in life. Just start squinting down and get used to what that feels like. And then what you're actually seeing through your eyes, see if you can separate out the details and kind of separate out the lights from the darks. You need a good light source to do that. And that's why we're going to talk about lights. But, yeah, go ahead and start squinting at things. And if people look at you funny, just say, Hey, I'm practicing my craft. We'll do more later on value, but that's it in a nutshell. So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about light, and then I'll do a demo. 7. See like an artist 3 Lighting Edit: In the last module, we talked about value and how light reveals form to us. The contrast in value is how we see form. Remember, different value, different plane, a value change equals a form change. So now we're going to look at lighting. And that's really important. There's a couple different kinds of light you should be aware of. What you're seeing here is an example of single source lighting. That is light that comes from a spotlight, a soft box or the sun. And the key feature and the characteristic is that the light and dark shapes are separate. They're almost like puzzle pieces, and you can separate them out into the family of lights and the family of darks. They're clear. Right, and that's good because we need clarity and simplification. And when you have a nice balance of light shapes and dark shapes, it helps your design for portrait painting. More important than drawing details like eyelashes, nose holes, and individual hairs is first dealing with the two dimensional shapes like triangles, circles, squares, et cetera. So if we look at any one of these, you can definitely see you know, the triangles, the circles, right, the square like shapes. Those, like you can see this light shape and that idea that they're like, dark and light puzzle pieces. There's a light puzzle piece. There's a light puzzle piece, right? Here's a dark puzzle piece. This whole part of the hair, right? That's a dark puzzle piece, right there. There's a dark puzzle piece. I try to unify the darks by squinting and comparing. When you squint and compare, you know, those values get real clear. The details go away, you get your value structure or your tonal structure going. And then you can paint in details later after you've got a nice, good sculptural kind of representation or at least first, it starts out with flat two D shapes. That's your main concern. The triangles, circles, squares, ovals or variations of shapes. Okay? And we'll continue to talk about this and clarify this. So don't worry about it. If you don't get it right away, we'll definitely be repeating this. So again, you can see super clear shapes, and you want to squint down and reduce things definitely to these kinds of shapes. You've got this shape. This shape. And you've got to make a decision what's a light thing and what's a dark thing. So you kind of have to understand you have to understand value. Once you understand value, you can start to make these distinctions, what's a light thing, what's a dark thing, and what shape is it? And then you can makes it more manageable to get things down on the paper, right? So these are the dark shapes. These are the dark puzzle pieces interlocking with the light puzzle pieces which are over here on this side. And the best draftsmen are the people who can see clearly in terms of shape, dark and light puzzle pieces interlocking to form a picture. Okay? So let's move on to the second type of lighting, which is diffuse lighting. All right, this is an example of diffuse lighting. And what separates this from direct lighting is that diffuse lighting is fuzzy. It's not so clear. One thing I forgot to mention about single source lighting is it's the best kind of lighting to show off the form. If we go back to this for a second, it shows the plane changes, and especially cast shadows, if we can find maybe a good cast shadow, even a shadow, but it shows the plane change from front plane to an under plane, right? Then it kind of disappears, but it comes out to a top plane, starts to become a front plane, and then turns under to a bottom plane, right? And that cast shadow here in the nose, that just shows this plane right here of the muzzle of the mouth right here. It shows that it's a plane protruding out. Where else can I find one? I think that's good enough. It's definitely the best kind of lighting for showing the form. Now, diffuse lighting on the other hand, not quite so much. It's fuzzy. There are lights and darks, right? But it's the local color of this hat separates it from the local color of the hair, right? So it's the local color, right? Her face. Is a light brown and her hair is dark brown, so that local color separates out. But it's not really good in terms of showing form because it's almost like a polaroid or a flash from your phone. It just lights up everything from the front. And there's no real opportunity to describe the plane changes because everything's getting all the same amount of light at once. But also, if you think of diffuse. Instead of one light source, there's like maybe hundreds of different of light sources because the sun is here, and let's say it's the rays are going through and they go through the clouds and then they get scattered, right? And they just go all which way, right? Completely scattered. And so the light sources, when it reaches down here, this person, it's bouncing all around, and so it's coming from every different direction, hundreds of different directions, and it's lighting up everything. So there's no real shadows, okay? Everything's soft. Now, this is good in some situations, like for beauty shots in photography. Right? Or fashion, especially with women. You don't want to show wrinkles. You don't want to show too many plane changes or hard lines in the face. You want to show soft round blended things. So this kind of diffuse light is good for beauty shots and showing someone making them look young. From a psychological point of view, it shows peace and tranquility and calmness. So there is that advantage to that. But it's harder to do, because, again, there aren't any shadow shapes. And so the shadow shapes are the best thing to show the form. And if there isn't that, then you have to there's a lot of passages, let's say, like in here, where there's nothing going on. Right? In here, in here. There's just no detail of plain changes, no light and dark variation in the cheek. Even how do you know where the nose starts and the cheek begins? You have something here which helps, right? But everything even the separation from the chin and the neck is just not there. So how do you create structure and sculptural drawing if there isn't any plain changes? It's hard to do. So you have to kind of relay rely more on details. Okay, let's show how this relates to squinting and comparing again, which is our main tool for solving this complexity of value and detail problem, right? From left to right, the first panel is obviously photo reference. If there's no squint, eyes wide open, you're just looking at the model you've got a full range of values, okay? It's fully real and it's sculptural, it's lifelike. You can see that the family of lights is separated clearly from the family of darks, and you have those puzzle pieces that you could almost cut out with scissors, right? They're so clear. And again, that's good for us because it's easy and it's good for us from a design standpoint to have that variety of value in there. Okay, if we go to the next panel here, that's a medium squint. So your eyes are just halfway squinted, let's say. And you're getting right, you're narrowing down the value range and you're getting less value that you have to deal with. And that's a good thing. I don't know if you can see it here, but we've got basically four values, right? Four values. You've got two in the light. So two on the light side. Which is here, one and two. So you have the light and then the half tone. And the half tone is the value right before it turns into the shadow. It's that step before it goes into the core shadow. That's your half tone. So you have your light And then you have your half tone. All right. So that's in the light, the family of lights. Okay. Now, in the darks, now this is where you might not be able to see it, but there's the obviously dark. And there are tones in here that are a little bit lighter. So you have, you know, a shadow. That's maybe, you know, 80% dark. And then you have a step lighter that's maybe let's say 70% dark. Okay. And that's in the family of darks. So it's four values. This reduces down to four four values. And that's what I like. Anything that's going to simplify all that complexity that we find here to here. I want that if we then go ahead and squint down all the way, we can get ourselves to two values, right? You have the light side and the dark side, right? The family of lights, the family of darks, and the puzzle pieces are very clear. You can cut them out. So this is where you go first. This is step one. Right? You squint down almost all the way until almost everything's just in darkness. And you look for those values that stay dark, and you look for the values that stay light, and then you separate them and you keep them separated. Make it really clear and overstate it at this point. Make it light and dark puzzle pieces. Basically, you're flattening you're flattening out reality. So you're taking something that's three D here, and you're moving it over to two D. That's your job. That's job number one. And then in your drawing, you go back to three D. I don't know if that sounds weird, but that's the process. It goes three D to two D for our analysis there. And then we draw it sculpturally, and we make it look three D with values and light and edges. Primarily here in this stage, we're looking for shapes, clear light and dark puzzle pieces and values. So it's the shapes and values that we're looking for. Heavy squint here, two values. Then we get that down on the page. And then we move to here, right? This is four values. It's a medium squint, right? We've got two values in the light and two values in the dark. We can handle that. It's efficient, it's fast, and it's fun. Okay. I'll see you in the next video. 8. See like an artist 4 The Bad Xerox: With respect to our workflow of going from three D to two D back to three D, that initial two D analysis, right, it's really if you take a look at these examples, they're like they're bad Xeroxs, right? Notice how all the values are confined either to black or white and therefore very manageable. The shapes are flat and two D in nature, just like puzzle pieces that when put together in the right order and relationship, they constellate a face. All the details are left out. This is really important, and what you have left is the big overall big impression. That's what you're hunting for at the outset. So when you see your model, something like this, right, you squint down heavy squint till you get to something like this here or any of these. Want to see a camera or a dumb Xerox. The camera or the Xerox doesn't know what it's looking at. It doesn't interpret it and put meaning to it. So in other words, it doesn't really know that this is a hat or that this is skin or those are lights or clothes or whatever. It just records the values, just like I does. It takes in that sensory data, right? The brain puts the information and the meaning into it. We're trying to get away from that. We're just looking at things as dark and light puzzle pieces, and it might help you to turn this upside down and that way you get away from seeing things as noses, mouth, ears and identifiable things and just see abstract dark and light shapes. Okay, let me do a little demo for you of how I flatten things out. The first thing I'm going to do is squint at the model, and I'm going to decide what's a dark thing and what's a light thing. So I have to squint down pretty darn far to get the darks and lights to separate out. And then I analyze that. What's a dark thing? What's a light? That's my first question. The second thing is what kind of shape is it? So if I look at this, and I squint at her and I squint at my drawing, and I look at the light and dark puzzle pieces. I'm not drawing eyelashes at all. No eyebrow hairs. I'm just filling it in to see if that shape is designed well and it looks like it has the correct proportions. I'm not going pure black. It's maybe like a 50% gray at the beginning, right? Just squint at her, squint at the drawing. I have to keep reminding myself to do that because I want to open my eyes, and that's a temptation you're going to have to resist. Okay? There's the hair line right there comes around. Let's see what else we can get here. We have the curve of the cheek. I'm going to go ahead and put the nose in. The side of the nose is in the family of light, so I'm just going to leave it light. And I'm going to draw the plane change, again, flat two D. Keeping it real simple, concentrating. See if I can just get those dark puzzle pieces down and then fill it in so I can see my design. Okay, that cheek comes in and not really thinking cheek, right? I'm just thinking, what's that shape, and is it light or dark? Keep it to that, you have a lot easier time. Try not to try to forget the name of the things it is that you're looking at. You have to forget the name and draw it as if it's the first time you've ever seen it. The first time you've ever seen that curve. Remember, we're not doing anything three D yet. It's all two D, right? Just get the shape down, copy it, fill it in. Squint at the model, squint at your drawing. We are copying the shapes right now. But again, if that's all you do is copy, then that's the best you'll ever have. So we're going to do better than that. We're going to pull three D architecture out of these two D shapes, and that's going to be the next thing we'll do. See a little bit of dark shape there. Go ahead and fill in some of his cheek. I'm trying to keep it flat and organized so I can see it. Hair, boundary of the hair against the forehead. All right. And then we have the other eye socket, but again, not an eye socket. I'm thinking like a Dum Xerox putting in the shapes. It's easy. Just relax, squint at the model, then squint at my drawing. You can do this, right? I know you can. All the big masters did it. So why shouldn't I do it? There's the bump the eyebrow. Bump of the eye socket there, bump of the brow, then cheekbone and down. So you kind of get the picture. You see how it's coming together. And I make decisions. That little white shape in there, I'm going to go ahead and put it with the darks 'cause when I squint down, it kind of goes dark. Keep it simple. And that's it. And that's how fast it can go. And then the next step, we will be looking like a sculpting drawer, pulling three D architecture out of this with planes and rhythms and edges and all the rest. But for now, This is something you should definitely do. Maybe make a board like this with Photoshop or some Xeroxes and get it really get the values really separated out and contrasty and then do some of these analysis, kind of the two D analysis stuff. So you get down. Once you get down, it's fun, you know, and it's not rocket science. It's it's really easy, and it's surprising how easy it is. Once you get past the idea that you're trying, you know, you don't have to draw all these details. All you have to do is draw the shapes and the value. So once again, number one consideration, make everything flat and two D and just draw the shapes and then the values. And this is kind of like your blueprint. Like an architecture, they have a blueprint. Did I spell that right? Blueprint before they build the whole thing, they want to see what it's going to look like, what's going to work, and it's an inexpensive way to do it. And we don't want to spend a lot of time on this phase. We want to get it blocked in, and then we can spend our money on sculpting it and making it look three D and beautiful. So you've got your blueprint there and then that next step, making it look sculptural, and three D would be putting in, like, the foundation of a house. Alright, that's it. I hope that helps, and we'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Charcoal Demo 1 Shape Block In pt: Okay, we're going to jump in and do a little quick demo here. The first thing we need to do is analyze the model. Now, hopefully you've listened to the lectures in the first module about learning how to see. And so you'll kind of recognize this, I think that on the right, we have our eyes wide open. We can see all the value range. On the left is a heavy squint, and it separates out the light and dark puzzle pieces very clearly. It's one single source lighting, which is the best to show the form. We open up our eyes a little bit more, we get two values in the darks and two values in the lights. It's a four value system and that's what we're going to go for. Our first job is to do that initial two D analysis and then also to just look at the reference or the model and just squint down and compare what's happening. Before we jump in all excited, let's just slow down and see what's going on here. So it seems to me this model, the way it's lit is maybe 60% dark and 40% light or maybe 70 30. And I'm looking at the shadow shapes and the light shapes. So I'm going to really edit this thing down into a very low resolution idea just to get it on the page. So that's my job, right? So we've got the The four values. We got black. We got white, and then we have a step, two steps in between of equal jump, that gives us two values in the light and two values in the dark. It's family of light, family of darks, let's keep it like that. I'm going to give myself a key 50%, right? That'll keep my values organized and in control. So that's my main thing is to keep in control of this. And I want to look like a bad Xerox does and analyze the light and dark information, the value contrast. So my first thing after that is to space and place the elements, right? So I'm going to try and get the proportion of everything. So the eyes are in the center, the eyebrows. So it's the average angles, right? The angle of the gaze from top of the forehead to the chin, find that angle and find the angle of the eyes, right? It's a little bit off center. It's not completely horizontal. I want to make a note of that. And then the eyebrows are just a little bit above the eyes. In between the chin, halfway and the eyebrow line is the nose generally on average, right? So let's go ahead and make a note of that halfway. On the angle of the chin and where it makes that direction change the angle of the cheek on the far side. She's got a very angular face which helps. And then the cut in or the break in the eye socket to the eyebrow, and then to the forehead. All right. Kind of hard to see in the back there, but I'm just going to guess so I can look at the whitest part from that cheek on the left side all the way to the farthest side of where her hair is, and just make a guess there. I can measure the height to the width, and I can do that on the model as well and kind of get a rough estimate. I'm going to go general to specific, big to small. As if I'm 20 feet away from the person. All I can see is the overall big impression. That's what I'm looking for. So Let's see where I'm going to space and place that nomes. Keep it real simple, kind of like a prism or a number two. There's a number two there. Just put that in. Of course, it's just a tool to help me get it there. It's not a number two. Then from the bottom of the nose to bottom of the chin, halfway, generally on average will be the split of the lips. If I place the eyes, if I can get a sense of where the eyes are, the eyeballs, my nose up. And what helps there's tear duct to tear duct, there's one eye width. If I can get the idea where the tear duct is, I can put the eyeball in there. Then if I drop a plumb line down, at the angle of the models gaze, I can find generally on average where the end of the mouth is going to be on both sides. If I extend it down all the way, that'll give me where the chin fits in to the jaw basically. That's a really important landmark. Let's see. I'm going to stay in that block in phase. So you're going to find you have tendencies, tendencies that you have to look out for that you have to kind of fix it might be making the nose too small or it might be making the eyes too close together, something, whatever it is, you'll start to know your weak points, and that's why we practice to find our weak points and then at least know that they're there and avoid those traps. All right. I want to jump in. I see details, I want to squint, simplify, compare, look back and forth, squint at the model, squint at my drawing and look at this light puzzle piece on that sheet, the right side, and just see its width to height. I'm always asking myself, how tall is that thing? How wide is it? How tall is it compared to something else? I'm always relating one thing to the next. It just sometimes looks so ugly, you want to jump in and make it look pretty, but I'm not going to do that. I think this hair is going to be closer. It's going to curve down. I'm going to look at that triangle right in here that light piece. If I can see it. If I can, I'll look at the dark puzzle pieces and draw that see if I can see that. Draw what you can see and what you know. This is like putting in the plumbing. If you do this stage well, then your drawing will be on a firm footing. It's harder to mess it up. If you get it wrong at this stage, there's no saving it. You can put all kinds of frosting on top, but you'll never be able to save it without ripping the pipe in out, taking the walls out. You know, it's going to be some major work to bang it back into shape. So we want to try and do the hard work now. That way we don't have to suffer later. Let's move this chin just slightly up. Always room for refining. I have a feeling. I might want to move it up, but I'm trying to gauge that distance from the far cheek and the edge of the jaw going up to the ear. It's probably pretty good right there. It's a pretty angular bone structure. And let's see what's this puzzle piece back. She's back lid. She's got a rim light, a kicker, as they call it photography. And so I sculped out this cheek into the rhythm of the mouth. Or even going into the bottom of the rhythm in the mouth. I can find the chin. And let's put the neck in. We don't want to forget the neck. People always forget the neck and it's a big mistake with the angle of the shoulder to the back muscle, the neck. Everything's connected. Okay. Let's check that. Doesn't have to be perfect. It's low resolution. This is the fun time or you can be a little bit loose, you're 20 feet away. All you can see is the overall impression of the person. You can't see any details, but you know it's them because the silhouette is so powerful, our brain can recognize silhouettes. It's a silhouette recognizing machine. Let's see. Where's this filtrm gonna be? And then the lips. Still wondering where that is going to be. Maybe it's there. It feels more right. I'm What am I going to do? I've got this dark on her forehead. I think I'll bring it into the darks. So when I squint down, all this stuff just goes into dark. Right? So after I get my two D puzzle pieces, then I start to fill in, again, with a flat, kind of a key like that. No, I don't want to go any darker than that cause things will start to I'll lose control of my values. If I do. Take a little sip of water. So I don't want to lose control of my values, right now, I just want to stay stay calm, stay in control, if at all possible. What's the shape of this eyebrow here? That gives me that shape now of the light puzzle piece next to it. I see if that's right. Then I can wrap the eyelid around the eyeball. Start to think a little bit like a sculptor here to pull that three D architecture out. Now that lower lid is going to come around the bottom of the eyeball. Then it's got the shadow of that lower lid. I'm just going to put that shape in a little triangle here. That's wrapping around and then we've got the eyeball in there somewhere. That's almost all in the shadow. That's in shadow there. A I think this is going to cut this in just a little bit shorter. Let's work on the close side from the tear duct to the upper lid. Supraorbital supraorbital bone right, super meaning above. Just think of pulling that eyelid over the top. I'm still in that blocking phase. That really goes into dark there. Let me just squint down. I got the tear duct. I think it's a porpoise shape right here. You can use anything that helps you to recognize the shapes. Don't think of them as pupil, eyeball, eyelashes. You'll get lost in detail. Think of them as pure light and dark shapes and how wide are they? How high are they? Is it a round thing? Is it a square thing? Is it a triangle thing? Very simple stuff. There's a little triangle piece right in here, just below the eyebrow on that supraorbital bone and then it just goes in the shadow right there. Let me go ahead and put that in. Once I get this thing posterized and flattened out, I can look at the design, see if everything is spaced and placed and proportioned well and then, I can start to design each section from the big to the smaller refining facets. I'm forcing myself to squint the model, squint my drawing. Get that shape under there. And this phase it's that two D analysis that you have to do it. It's a translation phase. It's somewhat of a copying translation phase. But it's one of the tools available to you to get your foot inside the door of drawing, get it going because it's pretty complex. But if you can stay like that dumb Xerox, it should be okay. Se we have hot. I got a sliver of light here. Let's put that neck in just to make sense of things. When it's connected, and the heads connected to a neck, it looks way better. Doesn't float. Let's flatten that out and separate the dark from the light. See how that goes. It's very soft in there. I I can almost all put this into dark. I see a little oval there. I can put that in. Just thinking really simple terms. So far so good. I'm going to go ahead and hit the very tight, hard edged part of that lower lid, and then everything just goes in the shadow. So beautiful. So subtle but really there's just about five or six things you need to know about how light creates the form and how how we interpret that in our eyes as form and then it's somewhat easy. Stay out of that and let's stay in the lock in. Let's look at the nose here. It's a tight large facial groove right there. Wing of the nose, slight circle circle all that cartilage of the nose. Who knows? It's not that smooth. All right, so let's fill it in. Find the puzzle pieces, fill them in. You find the puzzle pieces, you can hire someone just to fill them in for you because anybody can do that. So you've got this sort of copying phase, looking at the two D puzzle pieces, and then your job after that is to make it better to embellish it. But you can't embellish it until you've got something on the page, you know? All right, so I'm going to go here and look for where the end of that s is on the far side. Just 10. Charcoal Demo 1 Shape Block In pt2: And that kind of fades out, there's almost nothing there. Let's go ahead and put that highlight in. Looks like that soft box they've got lighting her is not an octagon, but it's a rectangle. Rectangular light there. Lighting her up. And then the curve on the R lid is really pronounced because it's in perspective and it's foreshortened. So there foreshortened things are, the more exaggerated the curve. Let's see here we are the shape of the upper lid casting a shadow. So we're seeing the underside of that upper lid. Let's put that in feeling the shape. That's the lacrima right there, lower part of the orbit of the eye. That's a tricky place. If you just keep it simple and look at the shapes. Very simple shape. You'll be okay. Let's find the front plane of the mouth. Going to cut through those little peaks on the upper lip, keep a bow right there, call it. I'm just going to put that in. I Go for it here. Going to tell me because I've got it in the right place. Then we've got the terminus of the lips on the far side. Lower lip fits into the upper lip, so that comes out and it overlaps the upper lip on the far side. I've got some pre full lips here. Then there's the tubercle. I'll teach you that later. Sometimes anatomy comes in handy. Sometimes you don't need it. So sometimes where you can't see things, you can use your anatomy to help you out, right? Like in the dark areas. But in the dark areas in the shadow, you don't want hard edges and contrast. That's why they're shadows. They're kind of fuzzy, and you can't see anything in there. So keep it fuzzy. That makes a shadow look like a shadow. Upper lip overlaps the lower lip so that lower lips can be coming out. Then there's a little light shape right there. I'm going to put that in. I want to miss that because it's important. Then what find that shadow shape under the lower lip. That plane there is casting a shadow. Causing a little depression right there or because of the depression. That plane goes in away from the light and then comes out from the chin, right? Comes into the light again, so goes out like that. So let's clarify. Let's clean up a little bit of this. I like drawings that you can see how it's built up. It's like it looks authentic. It's got lines and it's got depth that way. So I don't take everything out. I don't super clean everything all the time. You know, if I can get away with it. Clean up where I have to and then leave the process in I just got the little barrel of the mouth, that bump there. Pretty subtle. Get the keystone here. That's what's commonly referred to. This superciliary arch area is the keystone just very subtly slopes away from the light and then back out to the nose. Let's see what's going on here. We've got a nasal bone, I still need to stay out of the details. Let's squint down and look what happens here on the upper lip. It's really hard edge. I can look at the edges and the shapes. I just crispin them up when I need to a big mistake that beginner students make. I see all the time is that the line quality throughout the piece is the same everywhere and it has a certain look. Then when you start to control your line quality, your thicks and thins, your chisel hard, thin lines and then your wispy lines that can go into just nothingness. That's what really gives a drawing interest because it's that variety, that visual variety that creates the interest. That's something you learn over time. Is just disappears right here in the middle of that upper lip and then it defines again. Let's go ahead and fill in this shape and see if the width of the lower lip comes into focus here. Okay, so right here, I got this big puzzle piece, and I'm just going to go same direction with the flat part of my pencil, and it keeps it It helps me just to see the shape. If it's noisy and I'm cross hatching and it has blotchy darks and lights in it, I won't be able to see my design, and I'll be focused on that rather than, you know, the thing that I want you to focus on, namely this beautiful woman, a model. Okay. So I can kind of get a sense of how we're doing here. I'm just going to soften up that and bring it. This is where that nasal passage is, the rhythm of the nose comes out just a little bit, bumps out, and it hits the cheek. It's very subtle, very tricky area right here where the plane of the nose meets the plane of the chin. Where is it, bring this up just a little bit. Then I'm going to swing down the bottom. Of the cheek that turns away from the light so it goes in the shadow and I'll keep it in the shadow. It's definitely in the shadows when I squint down, gosh, all this stuff just goes away, merges together. We've got the cashadow of the nose on the cheek and it's close to the cheek, so it has a harder edge. I maintains its integrity here. Continuing to squint. Okay. And then we still have this big shape of the hair. So I'm going to go ahead and put that in. I probably just got in with some vine charcoal. Vine charcoal is really soft. It's made from burning the twigs of grapes grapevine, grape plants, and they just burn it until it turns into charcoal. Now that shape, the hair. And then I'll just move my pencil, get that chisel fine triple ot brush line to it. Using the side of the pencil. Really effective. Lets see this shape. It gets a little bit into the family of lights right there. But it's just basically a shape. Um, Um, I can't see anything in here, so I'm just going to go ahead and not put anything in there as much as I can. You can see the edge, boundary between the hair and the forehead, and then I'll just let it, let it go. So contrast where the light meets the dark, but just let it fade into a shape. The shadow is the shape. It's driven by shape, whereas the light side is driven by structure and color if you're painting. Let's dig out that depression right there because that's pretty dark. Squint down. It's pretty dark in here. And then it turns into just a nothing edge like a cloud. Here we have a little bit of a bounce light coming underneath the chin. But it's still in the shadow. It's that reflected light, but it's not going to get as light as the light side because then the uuu, the tonal structure will start to get very confused and the viewer will feel that and it won't feel good to them. You don't want that. This is all soft in here. I don't want you looking there, so I'm going to quiet that down. Do you have a little bit of a fold here. In the light side, that half tone, charcoal is very tricky because it gets muddy and dark real quick, so it's not too forgiving in the light side. So you almost want to have nothing in the lights or very little. See that where it's getting a little out of hand here, so I have to go back and pick it out. I don't want to be too rough with it. I could see some strands of hair here coming out where the part is and then down this way over the forehead. I'll take that opportunity to put in a couple of those. Okay. Now in a position we can look at our edges a little bit more. I go ahead and use this little protector and I can get in here and my palm will be smearing all the charcoal. I can define the eyebrow and some of the eyelashes. I just group the eyelashes. I keep them really simple. Otherwise, they start to look real fake. I just put in a few. If you put in too many, they start to call attention and they look stuck on where the eyebrow turns or the orbital bone turns under a little bit of shadow there. And that upper lid casts a shadow onto the cornea, onto the iris and the pupil. I'm going to put a gradation there. That's what really makes it look real is that sense of wetness, sense that it's a glass orb. Very reflective. You've got the specular highlight, and then you've got the black of the pupil, which is an amazing hole that lets the light in. That's why it's so black there goes right. Back to the nerves in the back of the eye. Forget the name right now, optical nerve. I've got that. I want to create a little occlusion shadow here that happens mid gets really tight. Let's define this a little bit more. Eyebrow hair, keep it simple, almost like a nike swooshe shape or an eagle wing or something and then just rock back and forth to get a little bit of hair in there, but again, not drawing hairs. I could still squint and compare throughout the whole process. And then I'll use my black highlights see I've been holding back from using black black because black black are reserved for those areas where I really want you to look. I want the viewer to look there first. So art directing the piece. You can put it, you know, in the eyes is a good place under the nose as well because that gets usually a dark shadow with hard edges. Then we've got that lower lid that has Then the skin it wraps around the lower part of the eyeball and then it meets the cheek so it's tight right there. But not too much. Then this just goes into 11. Charcoal Demo 1 Shape Block In pt3: All right. There's that lower plane of the lower lip that goes back. Is a front plane. Let's put in that shadow for the upper lip at the terminus. Squint down. Lose the details and look for the shapes. Reflected light under the nose, and it comes up into the ball of the nose. It gets dark there. Let's just to find the shape, a little more shadow shape. Then we'll give a little sense of the nostril. Just a little ma, little quotation mark. Your eye and your hand are going to get real coordinated and real sensitive to just changes almost in topography. You're looking at changes in a map, the highs and the lows, registering as darks and lights, and you're just going to get really good at seeing that stuff. Not a lot of light gets in here, so it's kind of occluded, call it an occlusion shadow. She moves into the barrel of the mouth. Dark this up a little bit. M. That's just really soft right there, that transition. Give a little half tone to the bar cheek so that the nose kind of emerges out from there. It's all get lost gets lost back in there. Even the sclera is not white as most people think it is, it's a ball and it's the top part is getting a little bit more than the bottom part because it turns away from the light. There'll be a shadow that comes over the top plane of the lower lid. I hinted at that goes into nothingness and the structure is lost. Establish that core shadow to the edge of the lips. Idea of light holds dark. So that dark is holding in the far side of her cheek and I sock it, so it kind of gives it some dimension. Let's get darker in here. Now I'm just refining, refining, fixing, refining, all the time. You could just go on and on, right? Never stop. H. Things get wiped away. You got to re establish them, problems crop up, get to fix them. Squinting and comparing, looking back and forth from your drawing to the reference, over and over again. Unifying shapes where you can. I mean, unifying values, family of darks, keep those together, family of lights, keep those together. That's too bright. I don't want that to be as bright as the highlight right there, push that. Part of the white of the eye, push that back a bit. Trying to resolve the shapes. Soft in here. The rhythm of the mouth kind of meets that chance very. Very soft. Ping a little bit of sense of that part of the hair right there. That's where the gesture of the head is on the top of the skull follows the part of the hair. Put that in. Hint at that. I just fades into nothingness. I just give a sense of pushing that top of the skull back because it's falling away from the light just a little bit. I don't want to establish that front plane of the nose as a bottom plane separate from the front plane of the nose. Yeah. It's coming along. It's good stuff. It's like going out on an exploration, right? You never know what's going to happen. It could all fall apart. Your ship could be wrecked at sea. But that's why we do it, right? We explore and we find out we reach the shore and it's awesome. Soft and hard edges. Then let's just kind of shape this off. We want everything to be designed well if we can. Even if we can't finish it, if we've got a good foundation, good, clear, simple statements, no matter where we stop, it'll look good, right? Because Because we kind of understand how to build the drawing step by step. M. And now I'm just doing the tertiary details. I'm kind of just refining, making sure everything reads, everything's sitting in its right place. And then Go ahead and just shaping this part. I can't see it goes into nothing and so I can treat it as just let that edge fall away into the background. So we don't notice it, right? But she's in an environment, not just stuck on the page. A little bit of highlight here. Top plane left. Try to take out some of those construction lines, so nobody knows how we did it. I And then step back and just look, see if everything's kind of cool. Pull out some rim light that camera light that's happening off camera right. I can just beef up the edges just a bit. T out that number two. So there we go. Again, you could go on and on, but we're going to stop and call that a wrap. All right. We'll see you in the next video. 12. Planes Rhythms 1 practice 1: Okay, let's look at the planes and the rhythms of the head. Nothing beats these tools for simplifying the complexities of the head, and that was indeed the exact intention of its creator, Frank Riley, thus the name Riley abstraction. His purpose, according to his words, were to help his students understand and organize the anatomy of human form without getting lost in the complexities. Frank Riley, he was a respected artist at the Arts Students League of New York, and he was teaching there in the 30s through the 60s. And his influences date back to the French Academy of the 19th century. And he studied with George Bridgman. If you don't know who he is, you should find out, definitely. And Bridgman studied with Jean Leon Jerome. And that guy was one of the most prominent artists of the French Academy. So Riley developed these approaches to drawing to help his students, you know, organize all that complexity of the head and the form. And that method was taught by Fred Fixler in Los Angeles. And that's where I got these was from Fred Fixer's website, and Fixler had been a student of Frank Riley. Okay, so that's to put it into context a little bit. And I ran into was first exposed to the rhythms by one of my teachers, Sheldon Bornstein and his teacher, and mine was the famed Glen Vilpoo. So when I first discovered the rhythms and the planes, you know, at first, I really didn't like them, to be honest. They're very mechanical and robotic. There's too many hard lines in there, and I'm a tone person, and I resisted it. I didn't see all those planes in the face. I saw beautiful rounded forms, and these didn't look beautiful to me. When I discovered their utility, I was all in and used them. So the Riley abstraction is a kind of diagram, and it's a great tool to show the box like structure of the head and the features of the face so that your drawings look three D. When you're practicing the drawing, the planes, and the rhythms, the point is to overdo the box, overdo the diagram to give a better explanation of the things you're trying to show. Knowing the planes and rhythms of the head helps you draw through your shapes and connect everything together. You have to do a dozen or so of these diagrammatic drawings to become familiar with them, so you can use them as tools to draw the face and better explain what's being represented. Again, you've got to do them half a dozen times or 12 times before they get into your muscle memory. Once they're there, you have the power to draw the head from every different angle. So you need to get this inside your brain, inside your muscle memory, and then draw them from imagination. So remember, it's a diagram. It's not real life. It's a kind of blueprint. So just do it enough so that it becomes part of your tool kit. And then when you draw the model, make sure to draw the model and not just draw a diagram, okay? Let me show you how I used these. When I worked at electronic arts, I did hundreds of character designs as a lead character designer on the Godfather, Lord of the Rings. And I used this exact method. And you can see some of the approaches that I took on the left side over here. And they show the rhythms, okay? I don't know if you can see that. And then the finish on the right. That's the way that I constructed them. I started this way and was able to do hundreds of character designs. So, you know, these things are really powerful. You can make a living at art if you're looking to make a living, you want to get into games. I've been there, and this is how I did it. So it's very effective. And everything that I'm going to teach you I did in this studio, it was a great joy, actually. Here's some close ups of some of those characters. So you can see a wide variety of characters. In this one, we can close up a little bit. You can kind of see the underdrawing really well. It's a great start. It's loose. So it's got the framework there of the rhythms and the planes, and then you can put your beautiful paint on top of a firm structure. So this is like like a blueprint and putting in the framework, and then you can put your beautiful paint as a decoration. So doing a drawing is like building a house. First, you have a blueprint, then you have a foundation, and then you put the walls and the plumbing, electricity, and then you put your decoration and your paint on top. So drawing the head is a lot like that. It's also like building a song. You put in the drums and the bass for the foundation, and then you have your melody over the top in terms of a singer, guitar player, and so on. You can think of it like that if that's helpful. All right, so here is basically the idea for your studies. And what I would recommend that you do is you can do this in Photoshop or have a tracing paper overlay of some photo reference. So find some photo reference of photos that inspire you in different lighting conditions, and you can practice finding the planes and rhythms, and you draw them over the top of the photo. That's a great way to practice. Again, it's a way to get it into your muscle memory. And I did it. I'd recommend you doing it so that it gets in there quicker and then you don't have to struggle over this, but it is a bit abstract. It's a Riley abstraction, after all. And so to get through it, you need to just expose yourself to it a number of times, and then it'll become easy for you. So let's do a couple right now. 13. Planes Rhythms 2 Practice 2: Alright, we're going to talk about the planes of the face and the Riley abstraction. Before I do, I want to dedicate this lesson to Glen Orbick, who was one of my teachers. He was a great teacher, and he's since passed on, so he taught me so much, and I just want to acknowledge him and dedicate this to him. So thanks, Glen. We've talked before about squinting and comparing and to reduce the complexity and find the shapes. And so if you open your eyes wide open, you get this, right? If you shut them down almost all the way, you get something like what a bad Xerox sees, right? And here's something in the middle. So we're going to move on to kind of the structure, so this is the shapes. And, you know, using the two D is what the camera sees. It doesn't know what it sees, and that's what we're looking for in this phase. So now when we go to the structural phase, Okay, of the planes or the rhythms, we're just going to do the planes today. But it's a way to get your foot into the door of the drawing, so to speak. So, right, the camera doesn't know what it's looking at. It's just mimicking light and dark patterns. So if the best you can do is just mimic light and dark patterns. You're only going to get a good copy. That's going to be the best thing you can get and have, and your job is to make it better. It's like copying Chinese. If you don't know how to speak the language, the best you can do is copy it exactly, but if you don't know what it says, you won't be able to communicate anything. So the planes and the rhythms help you take the two D shapes and ask yourself, you know, how do I make it better? How do I make it clearer? How do I make it less confusing? What can I do to give it more structure, and so on. So just doing the two dimensional shapes, get your foot into the door of the drawing, but it gets you started in the right direction, but it won't get you a finished drawing. But it's a great start. So pushing the idea of the planes is great practice, and it helps to remind you where you're going and to stay away from copying, okay? So I have to do this and just to brush up on it, and again, keep myself from copying. The best way to do this is to look at a photo and use that photo to point out the planes and the rhythms. So let's do that. Right now, so I got a piece of tracing paper, and I'm just going to use, like, a big big marker so you can see it. So as I look at the plane diagram and I look at my photo, I'm just going to try and find where I find the planes, right? And you can find the planes either by the light and shadow division, right? That's where the front plane meets side plane. Right? And I'm just looking for the simple structures that I can find on the human face on the model, right? Right there where the nose meets the cheek, it doesn't jump out at you, but I can go ahead and define it there, right? I can see eye sock it into cheek, right? And then down into chin box right? And so I'm relating the two. I'm relating this abstract chart to something real. And that's going to help me when I get in front of the model, you know? So I can see where on the nose, this is a top plane changes to an underplane, right? Top plane, side plane. Same thing with these eyes, just go ahead and put that stuff in there. Don't worry about anatomy and eyelashes and nose holes and stuff. Just go for these big broad ideas, right? So where would I find this connection from the cheek, back to the jaw, right? And separating that back half of the jaw from the front half of the jaw would be, you know, somewhere here and going back like that. Okay? It's helpful to, um and do this because you can see real clear fronts, real clear sides, right? And you can just construct this and then space and place the features where they belong. And you can do this just like I'm doing with a big marker, you can do it with charcoal pencil, right? It doesn't matter. You can do this in Photoshop, just as long as you do it, right? And get this in your visual library in your muscle memory. Once you do it, you'll never not see it when you look at a face. You'll never forget the idea of the planes of the head and the abstractions when you see someone's human face. Okay? So for example, I can take this idea of connecting from the septum of the nose down to the chin to find where the chin changes direction from front to side. Right? And that goes through that basically shows me a true front, the front of the face, as opposed to a plane turning away, right? It goes through the peaks of the upper lip. It gives me that And then it gives me where the lower lip that W kind of has its peaks. And then it shows me how wide the jaw is on average, right? So this part is true front, right? This part turns away, so I can just give that little tone there. Just to highlight that. These parts turn away. Two different planes, right? And that gives me that illusion of structure. Right? And it shows me where if I didn't have any light, you know, this was all from memory, from imagination. You know, I can put down where that shadow would be. And it won't be guesswork and smudgy and then make my drawing look like mud. You know, I know where that shadows gonna be if my light is coming from, you know, top, right. From the right, right? I could shade those eye sockets. I could shade this side of the nose. Okay. I could shade where that chin starts to turn away from the light. Okay. Now, on women, you can't really get away with drawing a bunch of lines at a bunch of hard edges on their face. You can't show a bunch of plain changes. So we're looking here at Andrew Loomis, and, you know, let's say you had Let's say you had a box or a house, right? And it was you're looking at the corner of the house. And it's being lit evenly at the corner. So there's no value change showing you the structure. So, how are you going to show the structure on the house? Were you going to draw the things on the house, right? The door, window, right? You're going to use the details on the house to help you describe the dimension and the plane changes. So the same thing like with a woman's face, You're not going to draw a bunch of hard edges and box like structures on the face their skin and face is smooth, right? That's what makes it pretty and differentiates it from men in most cases. So what Loomis has given us here is he's lining up, you know, he's showing you the plane changes with, like, the features, like the eyebrow. That's where that plane change is, right? He's giving it to you. Here, same thing. We're looking slightly down on this head, and we can tell that because we have that corner here, right, where the forehead meets the side plane of the side of the head of the temple, right? And then we've got that constellation of that front plane going this way and the side plane going that way. And those two things I can line up the eyebrow with the top of the ear. And so it's that idea of the box, right? And I'm using this plane A and this plane B, I'm using these descriptions. To tell me that we're looking down on this. So same thing with this. We're showing off the box, and we're using some minimal feature. We're using the features to show us where the points are, giving us enough information to show us where the plane changes are. You can see he's giving a little tone here to show the cheek turns under, but not much information here. You know, he's lining up the nose here with the ear, right? We've got that. And so we've got the ear and the nose kind of showing us that we're looking slightly down because the ear is higher than the brow and higher than the nose. And you can do that, whether you're looking up or looking down. You've got that same idea of the box. You've got these two planes with this inside corner, and they kind of conspire to conceive that corner. And by lining up cross contours along the fronts of those planes, you get plane A, plane B, and you can put in an ear here and you can put in a sense of, you know, the eyes here. That's going to give you a sense that we're looking up on this right? We're looking up on that head. We can do it pretty, you know, pretty easily, pretty quickly, but that box really helps us, you know, get there. Otherwise, there's a lot of, you know, guesswork, okay? So do these exercises, do them until it kind of gets into your in your mind. You can see here on this shot, even the shine, right? If you look at the shine, we always look at the shadow to tell us where the plane changes are on the core shadow, but the shine also tells us where the plane changes are. The shine is there for a reason. And so the highlights also tell us where plane changes are from, you know, front plane of the nose to the side plane. Okay? That's important, too. So we're just getting the ideas from these from this practice, we're distilling out the plane changes really clearly and make sure we're just getting, you know, information that this front plane turns to an under plane, and it turns to kind of a top plane, front plane and down to a side plane, right? We've got front, side, front side. That's the kind of good stuff we want to get out of this. It's a diagram. It looks ugly. It's not a pretty drawing. Don't worry. You don't want to make pretty drawings. You're getting tons of information from this exercise. And when you put it into your real life drawing and character designs, it's going to be you're going to be amazed, you know, at how quickly things go, how good you feel, how confident you feel. You have that confidence to construct. So I've done this planar analysis, right, using the planes of the face, but you can also do the same thing with the rhythms with basically the Riley rhythms here, and you can see I've done it here. Same exact thing, tracing paper over the top and just binding the rhythms. So I have my chart here, and then I'm looking forward on the model. It's great stuff. I hope this helped you, and I'll see you in the next module. 14. Planes Rhythms 3 Light and Shadow: All right, let's go in just a little bit deeper and show how effective these are in showing off the plane changes. That will definitely make your drawings better. Imagine we had a light here, right, and it's shining down on the model. Basically, you can light once you know these planes, you can light your own drawings, your own visions, right? Quickly and easily. Because you know where to put the shading because you know where the plane changes are, and it makes sense. Most people's drawings suffer from an inaccurate placement of value. And so it just looks like smudging and kind of muddy, unclear. And the clarity of this based on the anatomical structure of the head, makes your drawings very informative and very powerful. Okay? So let's say the light was coming from the left, top left. Where would I put the Where would I put the value, right? Well, if I know where the plane changes are, it's easy. I'm telling you, it's easy. Let's just do it. Okay, side plane of the nose into the cheek. No problem. You could even put cast shadow of the nose onto the upper part of the barrel of the mouth, upper lip, under the lower lip shadow and the chin box, and there you go, right? You could even describe how this plane is slightly turned away from the light and the plane to the left of it. And then this definitely goes and takes a major plane change, goes into the shadows, right? Strong, quick and easy. Let's do I don't know, we can do let's do another one that's the light shining from the bottom. Okay? So what would we do there? Well, I would imagine light would not get to the top of the head. I would maybe expose part of the brow right there. There's a depression right there. This part of the nose would get the shadow. The underplane of the nose would not. I think the side plane would get the shadow too. And then part of this, let's see. We'd have the cheek turning into the lower lid, that would get some shadow, and then the lower lid wouldn't and the upper lid would and then the inside of the eye sock it wouldn't. So it's kind of a dark, light, dark, light pattern there, right? Cheekbone into the lower lid. Maybe this would be a little more in shadow. So the keystone would be in light, right? You see how that's coming out? Okay, the barrel, the mouse, the upper lid, where the filtrm is, the upper sort of part of that barrel. Would be in shadow. The upper lid or the upper lip would be in light. The lower lip would be in shadow. The plane below the lower lip would be in shadow, and then the chin box, you'd see part of the box going away from the light, and part of that front plane would be more facing the light, so it'd be lighter. And what else could we have here? Maybe something like this. We might be able to just maybe that ear is casting a shadow onto the head, right? Something like that. We could light everything like this and we could do it. If we just think through the problem, right, and we know where the plane changes are, we just put the shadows on the surfaces that are turning away from the light. And then It's pretty easy. So you see how that is? I mean, I just kind of thought through what I thought the plane changes, where they were turning away from the light. And I put the shadow there, and that's it. Now, that's fun, and I can use that on my illustrations, my paintings, my portrait drawings, my thumbnails and conceiving new things or getting down on paper, things that I imagined or dreamt about. I have power to express that now and communicate it to others. And if I'm on a team working on a movie or a game development, that's powerful, right? If I can communicate visually and that's my job, then, hey, that is employment right there. That's money. So I would encourage you to do these kind of studies to where you put the lights and darks based on the plane changes and where the lighting setup is. And once you do a few of those, you'll totally know exactly how to use this. Oh, yeah, before we go on, I wanted to come back to the rhythms of the head, just so you know, I've done these on my YouTube channel, and I go through all the steps from front face, three quarter and side view of how you do Riley abstraction lay in. So this one's there for you to view on my YouTube channel at Draw Juice. So if you're kind of wondering how to go about doing this, just hop on over to draw juice on my YouTube channel and check it out. 15. Charcoal demo 2 construct with confidence part 1 : All right, everybody, let's move on to the next step in our process. You know, someone said art is like having high standards. You've got to draw the line somewhere, okay? So let's get started. Now, in the last session, we talked about doing the two D analysis of the simple shapes. Today, we're going to be talking about constructing with confidence. And so we're going to talk about kind of a process that looks like you see things in three D, and we take it and we translate it into two D. And then we buy through illusion and value and construction, two D shapes, we turn it back into three D. So it's kind of a three D to two D to three D process. You might find that helpful. So last time we talked about analyzing the two D shapes, right? And that's a tool you can use to get your foot inside the drawing and get it started. And if you do basically a two D analysis and you kind of get your values in, so you have your family of lights separated from your family of darks, and you copy that pattern really well, that's good. But it's not enough. It won't get you a finished drawing. So the next step is to basically use the planes and rhythms to start to go to the next level. So, you know, having a good copy is like, you know, being able to copy the Chinese alphabet. You can't speak the language. Right? Then all you can do is copy the alphabet, but you don't know what anything means. So you can't say anything and express yourself in a meaningful way. So now we're going to take the planes and the rhythms and start to pull three D architecture out of it. We're going to start constructing. We're going to start sculpting. And we're going to basically try to describe the drawing better. We're looking for good descriptions, not fancy drawings. And when you start to put the plane changes in and the form changes, you're asking yourself, you know, how can I take that two D analysis and make it better? You know, where can I take a hard plane change, a very soft form, hard form, you know, crisp edges, soft edges, where it turns, how can I bring that out in the drawing? So all those kind of descriptions. So that's what the planes and the rhythms are for, okay? So that's what we're going to do now. And so let me start by taking a colored pencil, like an orange and I'm using orange because it's dark enough to see on a light paper, but light enough at the end, it won't show up in the drawing. So the head is basically right? Oval, and I have to add the back of the head. I'm drawing really light. Always drawing lightly. I'm going to find the average angles, just like we did last time. Find the eyes in the center on average. Okay. I'll take where that front facing base would be, and I'll just add the difference onto the back. And that would be a way to get me the back of the cranial mass. It's in the ballpark. Okay. The brow is here just above the eyes. And from the brow to the chin, that halfway point will be the nose and halfway between the nose and the chin will be the mouth, on average, the split of the lips, basically. Okay, so far so good. Try to keep it really simple. I can go from that bump on the cheek. The whitest part of the face is usually the cheeks. And I can find the back of the skull, the whitest part of the skull, right? The whitest part of this whole thing. Kind of find that. And then the height right, let's say here to here. Now I can take that hairline and go one third to the brow, one third to the nose, one third to the chin. I can go that way, too. So I can go halves, I can go thirds, whatever gets me there. So let's put the ear in so I go to get that angle of the jaw. Simplify that. Lower part of the jaw to the chin box. And I've got a rhythm right there of the chin. I know that barrel of the mouth is going to bulge out. It's not going to be on that flat plane of the face. It's coming out. So I'm going to draw a contour over that. Right? And I can even build that barrel up if I need to, to make the point, make it clear. See, I'll pull a rhythm here. This rhythm dividing the side of the head from basically the front of the head. If I continue it all the way down, it hits some really important landmarks. That corner of the brow hits the corner of the cheek bone and then divides the front of the jaw from the back of the jaw, basically that maceter chewing muscle. And then I can line up the brow and the nose with some horizontal guidelines and get that ear that will be in the third, that middle third, somewhere in here. And that'll be the ear can be one third of that upper ear. The middle part of the third is the concha or opening of the ear and then the lobe. Okay. So let's see if we can get these rhythms going here. I'll alternate between holding the pencil like this with an open palm inside the palm and then a palm down, kind of a finger grip. Build the sockets of the eyes. I think that's again, trying to stay in my process going general to specific, you know, big to small. My first move was divide the side of the head from the front of the head. Look for average angles, look for relationships. I know that eyeball is going to sit in there. Et's get the globella in here. Fancy name for the brow ridge. Draw over that into the keystone. Okay, I want to pull a rhythm from the helix that defines the side of the head, then the top of the cheek, and then goes all the way over the muzzle of the mouth and then kind of turns into the defines the ends of the lips there. The most narrow part of the terminus of the lips. I can draw that plumb line from the iris down to define on either side where the lips are going to end, where the chin bits in to the jaw, all that good stuff. So if I got that I can imagine on the other side where that's going to be. And there's another one coming off the helix, too, and that goes round to the middle of the jaw, again, separating on the side of the jaw, the front part from the back part. And then we've got the rhythm of the mouth. Basically, it goes from the wings to the nose, So the edges of the mouth intrudes on the rhythm of the chin just a little bit. And then the rhythm of the chin comes out. So they intersect the rhythm of the chin and the rhythm of the mouth. And it shows that barrel like nature of the mouth protruding from the face, cheek coming behind. Okay. So there we've got some dimension, the cheek going behind the barrel in front. You can see that by that little letter Y right there, the Y and the T principle, another letter Y here. And that shows overlap, overlap. Is great Communicates dimension really well. Okay, and then we have another rhythm here that's kind of the nasal labial fold here. And that's also going to help me hold that chin where it connects to the jaw, kind of gives it a place to end. Just comes up and around behind the rhythm of the mouth. Okay. So there we are. I'm just going to draw the plane change of the nose from side to under. I'm not going to draw the nostril just yet, if I can help it. The plane change is enough. It's a better description at this moment. And then we've got the rhythm of the nose. So that's there, too. So now we've got everything really defined pretty well. It's like a road map, you know? Cheek interlocks with that temple on the side. Let's see where that hairline is. Something like that. And then we've got a plane change, right from the frontal eminence here, which is that's got a rhythm of the forehead. That comes out and fits into the brow. Again, we have that glabella, which is really kind of the nose fitting into the forehead. We can define that. It's pretty subtle on this guy, so I won't go super far with it. But if you want your conan like the rock kind of characters, put that globla in there, really define it and you'll get a fierce looking person. Okay. And there's a rhythm that comes down. We have the front plane, side plane, and then true side of the head. So front, step down side, step down again to the actual really turns a corner here and goes into the side of the head. I'm just going to define that. I'm going to describe that Okay. Alright, let's give him a little bit of got to have a neck. He's got to have a connection. It sent to the underside of the chin here. Can't see what's going on here. Cat wrapping around. He got his tie. I don't really care about that too much. It's just a design, right? Where am I gonna finish this off? Maybe a nice triangular shape is good. Make sure where things connect. Make sure they overlap, make sure they fit together well. And that'll be convincing. Okay, so let's just take a step back and look, see how we're doing. We have a nice dimple here in the chin. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and just knock some of this back just a little bit with my needed rubber eraser, such a great tool. Just ghosting it back. Okay. So I got a little sheet off to the side here that I can kind of shape my tools. So I'm gonna squint down and look for my darkest dark and lightest light, and just instead of jumping in, I'm just going to, you know, try to go slow. And I'm using a piece of bristle. Actually, it's a piece of charcoal paper because the vine charcoal works better because it has a tooth, and vine charcoal doesn't work that well on newsprint, so it won't take it. It wipes away too so easily. And so it needs a little bit more of a rougher texture. And I'm just using the side of a little piece of fine charcoal squinting down and just looking for darks and lights, patterns, shapes. Now, he's back lit, too. He's got a rim light off camera left. So that's why the side of his cheek and neck is lit up. And then he's got that key light from screen right. That side burn. Behind his ear, Okay. Again, just squinting, looking for the flat two D shapes, doing my two D analysis. I love the way that fine charcoal goes on. It's just so something about it. So smooth and silky. Gets lost. Right there. I'm trying to be real kind of a bit bold about it. And because it's that fine charcoal, I can very forgiving. I can just wipe it away. Okay. Let's see here. Let's just kind of build this eye socket. Let's go ahead and Don't be afraid to dig in here or it goes into shadow. If I was sculpting, I'd have to remove clay, right? So I'm just thinking the dark shapes that I make the dark marks is like pushing in to the paper and going into shadow. And this is where my rhythms come in really handy. I can just go ahead and be a little bit more confident. You know, I can construct with that confidence the marks that I make because I've got those rhythms in there. Let's just put a tone here to push that side back and get the other eye going on here. Looking for the shape had the upper lip. I mean, the upper lip, the upper the upper eyelid. And then it doesn't have very dark eyebrows. They just almost the color of the skin. And then it's really dark hair in the background. I'm just gonna go ahead and put that in. That dark holes light principle. Leaves a lot of dust this stuff, but it just blows off. All right, so let's squint again and just see the simple shapes. I'm looking for triangle circle squares, really graphic shapes that simplify stuff. I see kind of a semi circle under the nose, where it casts a shadow onto the upper lip. I'm gonna keep it just like a circle. I can put the bumps in later. Let's define that edge. And there's something I'm noticing here about the light as well. And it falls off. Hits on the forehead that's closest to the light, and then it just falls off. There's a gradual gradation that gets just a little bit darker. Under plane of the nose, put it in. So this process that we're doing, analyzing the two D shapes and then turning those two D shapes into three D architecture by introducing rhythms and planes, it's like telling a story because we're describing. You can see elements of story in this process, right? Because I'm going to realize this face. I'm going to describe it to you. I'm telling you a story through my drawing. The drawing itself is a story. And stories everywhere, right? It's like I can somewhat improvise off of this. I can't just leap into improvisation, right, into chaos because then you probably couldn't follow me, and I wouldn't be able to keep it together. So I need a base to come from. It's like the classic hero's journey. The hero leaves home, goes out into chaos, confronts the dragon, slays the dragon and then brings back the information to the people at home so their lives can be better. And so you need that structure, your structure. Home is your structure. It's your identity, your traditions, your culture, your language, your God. And then you launch out into the world, right, and explore, and you try to make order habitable order out of chaos and return home again. That's what happens in music. You know, you improvise office structure. If the jazz quartet just launched off into a huge atonal solo, the audience wouldn't be able to follow him. So you first give him something recognizable. And then you slowly build out from there. That way, when you go back home, it's so much more sweeter to the audience because they recognize it. Recognition is huge. And it brings that feeling of tension and release. You go out and come back, you go out, it's tension, you come back, it's release. Right? You go back to the sources comfort and homey. So, you know, using structure is okay. In fact, it's more than okay, right? It's preferred because then I can take some chances on this thing. And that's the fun of it, right? Because it's that tension. You know, all I could all go wrong, okay? But I'm hoping that it's gonna stay together. All right? And that's why we do this stuff 'cause it's so fun. To be on that journey, right, to see if our skills are there to see where we need work, to see where we can come back victorious with what we have, you know? And that is meaning. Story is meaning. I don't know if you agree with that. What do you think? I'd love to know your thoughts. Now, when we leave home and we go out into that chaos, the chaos of the drawing, right? The chaos of the music, the chaos of life, um Things can go, again, they can go kind of haywire. And that's called The Valley of the suck. And I got that from Ryan Kingslane, great teacher and mentor. And pointed that out that in the middle, things just get looking bad, things get chaotic. And you don't feel like you can make it through. You feel like it's all come apart, and that's going to be the end of you, the end of your drawing, right? It's just that feeling like, Oh, my God, this sucks, and I don't know what to do. If you find yourself in the valley of this suck, right, you've got to make a decision. Do I go home and start again, or do I keep pushing through, right? That's part of that tension. Are you gonna make it through and so most of the time in the middle, it gets sucky looking. And then the question comes up, man, am I an artist? Can I even really do this, right? You feel like an impostor or something. And you'll be challenged. Those questions will come up. You'll be challenged. And, you know, you just got to push through it. As long as you're aware, it's like one of the enemies of the creative process is that that voice, those voices that tell you you suck. You can't do this. And they're real. Who knows where they come from? They might come from old tapes, family upbringing parents, whatever, something somebody said to us. Or it's just that's the nature of reality itself. You know, you go out and do something new and just fear sets in, or the voices come up because they want to be in comfort. They want to be at the comfort zone. Not out here in the chaos where it's risky. And you don't know what's gonna happen. You might meet the dragon. And the dragon's not friendly. We all know that, right? I've got this little edge here of the chin going into the underside of the chin and it gets there's a half tone right there. I think I'm going to put in there. It needs to be pushed a little bit. Gently applying things be hard it's right there. Okay. Let's keep concentrating here. Sometimes my eyes can get a little off and not lined up if I'm not careful. That's one thing that happens to me. That's why the rhythms and planes are so good from side to side, because the head is the same, split down the middle, the rhythms really help balance that out and keep the symmetry. My fingers a cheap cheap paintbrush. Okay, so let's see. I'm gonna go ahead and you know, there's this idea that you have a sphere. The light is coming from top right. So you have a high light and a core shadow. So you just draw the silhouette of the shape. Then you draw the boundary between the light and dark. Then you give the dark side a value. And so that place closest to the light gets the highlight. Then it gets a little bit lighter. Then it has the cast shadow, but that light falls off. The farther the object gets away, falls off quickly. All right, so it's lighter up top and it kind of gets, you know, darker as it goes away. So I'm gonna use that simple idea try to squint my eyes and I see a kind of a gradation here. It's a little bit darker here, lighter here. Go to connect this. Try to unify things as much as I can. Unify the darks, unify the lights. That's good. It's the unified theory of physics, right? Try to find one theory that explains everything if it's possible. Okay, so Again, just squinting at the model, squint at my drawing. Of course, this model is a photo. But the principle applies even so just to squint and compare squint and compare. Plane change of the side of the nose from the front plane of the nose. Glabella steps down, becomes kind of an underplane so it gets a tone. I want you to look at the eyes, then I'll want to put the contrast there. Okay. So let's just take a step back and see what's going on. Just squint down. Just catch the top of the head there, lose the line, and then bring it back. Lost and found. Love that. I think I want something here. So again, I'm drawing on the outside as well, negative space, positive space. You can see that in the background, there's that BOCA, right? So I could put some in. Just to suggest background there. Okay, so now phase two, I'm going to switch over to my pencil. Okay, so the biggest contrast is in the eyes to me. Let's see if we can kind of do that. But I want to have just a little bit of charcoal on the side so I can get these subtleties in here. People say don't finger paint. Put your fingers on the paper, but because the oils will get in there and mix with the pigment, whatever you're using the medium, then it looks dirty and it's hard to clean. But I like finger painting a lot. It's a tool. Why not use it? Okay. Let's define some things. We've been out here. Let's see what we can do. And I see the eyes and the nose have the most amount of contrast. So let's just observe that and then put it in there. Make some decisions here. Make some commitments, sculpt some things out. Eventually, you got to commit, right? So we've been in that kind of block in phase where we're using the vine charcoal. It's easy to amend it, change it. It's very flexible, right, very plastic. And so that's fun. Kind of using that innovating off the structure of the rhythms. And then we got to kind of tighten down before we have too much chaos, right? We need some order, so that's okay. So I cannot see inside that shadow, so maybe I'll just kind of just leave it alone. I got to put maybe where that height line the facial groove right there where the wing of the nose meets the cheek. I know that's going to be like an occlusion shadow. It's going to be dark in there. All right. I'm going to take the rest of this process offline to do the finishing work. And then in the next video, we'll come back and discuss how I finished it with the tools that I used and a bunch of details like that. We'll see you in the next one. O. 16. Charcoal demo 2 construct with confidence part 2 : Alright, now that the drawing is totally finished, I want to tell you a few things about the tools that I use, how I shape the tools and get the marks that I make and specific details about how to finish a drawing. Alright? So let's jump in. In this module, we've been talking about constructing with confidence. And to do that, you need at least two things need to understand your drawing fundamentals, and you need to understand your tools. When you have at least those two things, you can launch off with confidence into your drawing and create something beautiful. So the first thing I want you to look at is in the eyes I saved my darkest darks in the eyes because that's where I want you to look. So as an art director, I want to move your eye around the piece, and so I saved my black accents for there. I didn't overuse them everywhere. I want you to go to the eyes first. Then you can see that I spotted some dark accents around the face. So you go to the eyes first, first read, second read. There's a little black accent here, maybe third read, and then you'll just move around like that. That's art directing the piece. It's something you should be thinking about, and it'll make your pieces a lot more interesting and give your audience something to come back for you're giving them that, variety of contrast and variety is the spice of life, right? Visual variety keeps people coming back and interested. The second thing I wanted to point out is that you can still see the orange Riley rhythm block in that I did initially. I left it in there. I overstated it and left it in there so you could see where we came from, right, and where we ended up and how I used that structure to get into the drawing. And that gave me confidence, right, to keep going. Remember, doing a drawing is a lot like telling a story. And in the story, you start, you leave home, you get to the middle. It's chaotic. There's a conflict. You don't know what's going to happen, and then you resolve it. You come back home. And that tension that tension and release is something the audience enjoys. So you put that in your guitar solo, right? You have the verse chorus, the solo, you take off, you launch off into this beautiful solo, and you come back home. So you need that structure. You need home for the song or the drawing to have any movement, right? It has to have movement. It has to have contrast, big against small, light against dark. And so that's what we're trying to do. And that's why it's so important to know those fundamentals. Alright, now, let me tell you a little bit about the tools. I used vine charcoal, and I'll use a piece of dark gray vine charcoal. That's one of these thin sticks, and I'll use thicker ones, too, but I'll basically break it into about a half inch. And I like it just like this. Sometimes I'll also sharpen it up to a tapered edge so I can get into some really fine points, but it really wears away quickly. So this I don't use a whole lot. It's effective, but this I use this does most of the work for me, just broken like this. Now, one thing I learned from a good friend of mine, great artist Robert Valley, he showed me that he shaped off his hunk of charcoal. Charcoal's really tough if all you have is a hunk of charcoal and it's really black and dirty, you'll get frustrated really quick and you won't like charcoal. But if you know a few things about how to shape the tool, it becomes like a three and one tool, and it's really awesome because the things you can do with charcoal and the expression you can get out of this is worth doing. So what I'll do is I'll just wear away one or two sides. And I'll just use a piece of paper. Rough surface is good. And I'll just wear it away so that I'll get two sides that kind of conspire to get an edge. I don't know if you can see that, but there'll be an edge, and then I can take that edge. And I'll do just basic moves. I'll pull basically along the long axis of the tool. So this long axis here, I can create verticals, horizontals. Diagonals, any which way I want to go, okay? That gives me a chisel fine line. And then I combine that move with this move, right? You're pulling and pulling out, and you get hard edges and soft. So that I need a tool that has a hard edge on one side and a soft edge on the other. And that right there, and even this just turning the wrist you can get so much out of these marks right here. You'll find this in compression folds and skin soft transitions on the cheek, right, in the eyelid, anywhere where there's compression, and there's a dark kind of crevice right in the middle. And then it comes out into tone like that. Okay? And also, I just want to be able to get really soft passages. So I'll wear down either side of this thing on the two outside parts of the tool, and then I'll use that middle part, right? And I can just lay down really nice passages, transitions. Or I can press down a little bit harder and just get a nice squared off piece like that. Okay, so those are my main moves basically with this tool, and it all has to do with how you shape it, right? Let's see how those work on the actual drawing. I'll try to point out where I did that on the drawing. All right. So in tight areas like the cheek against the shirt, right? I'll just come in and I'll do this kind of move, right? It's a little bit different on the tracing paper, but I think you get the idea. So it goes from dark shadow into half tone, just like that, right? Now, there's this part of the cheek of the rhythm of the mouth, right, going into the side of the cheek. I just dig in and pull out, right? The cheek rolling away from the light. So it's in the light rolling away and then dark shadow. You know, I just come in like that, right? And that's it, right? Just get these nice little patterns, and then I can come in and chisel out, you know, corners if I need to. I can use the pencil for that, right? Charcoal pencil or carbithelo to get in if I need to reinforce an edge, especially on cast shadows, right? And then to fix something I'll use this tortilon which is a paper tapered paper, and I'll just come in and maybe clean some things up, right? So then I can kind of just come in, drag that tool, fill in the darks, right. Clean up an edge if I need to with my needed rubber eraser, right? Use that a lot. Or my plastic eraser that I can cut with an exacto into, you know, a chiseled hard edge and then just come in and hit that. So it's just really a nice chiseled edge. In the hair. Okay, let's look at that. Okay? Basically just setting up a tone, right? Like that and then working the edges. You know, I'll have a tone here, highlight in the middle. And then I'll just pull a few edges just like that on one side. And then on the other, I'll just come out into the highlight area and just pull a few strands of hair, right? And that'll get me the really good suggestion of hair, right? And just using kind of like a wave, like a wave All right, so I can do that in here. And one more time, let's show you on this orbit of the eye, right? Just dig in and then dark into a very soft edge. So a firm edge to a soft edge, even here on the supraorbital, into the forehead, just lift off, right? Ike use my finger to clean or soften an edge, right? And so I have confidence because I know the tool, I've shaped the tool, and I know the marks that I'm going to make and how they work. Now, another thing, important thing is that this tool works really well at scale. So at almost life size head, about the size of my hand, I know that this 1 " piece of fine charcoal is going to work well in this area because I can pretty much, you know, its it's like a width of an eye, right? It's like an eye's width. And so it fits a lot of the features that I'll be working with at this scale. Now, if I was working on a 20 foot wide wall, 20 by 20 wall doing a mural, this would just reduce down to just a line. It wouldn't work, right? I couldn't put in mass in any value or, you know, passes, big value passes. It's just too small. So here, though, it's fairly big, and I can sort of start to get these lay in big value passages fields of value pretty quick, right? So this works well with the pencil at this scale, and that's another thing kind of to add to it. So, you know, if I'm working bigger, you know, I might want a bigger hunk of vine charcoal, right, something like that. That's gonna give me a lot. It's like a big paint brush, and I would be working bigger if I used that. One more thing. So we've talked about the structure, the Riley Rhythm lay in, and then how that helps to define the planes and where to put the shadows and then the shadows. And the edges make sense. You put the core shadows, and it reads well. But there's this other stuff around here. They're like, flourishes. They're bold marks, almost like brushstrokes. That's like your guitar solo, right? That's your exciting acrobat on the high wire. I can do this stuff because the setup, the trunk, the home part of the story, the familiar part is well done, and it's there. It's strong. And then I can go and do just these kind of marks that are almost random and they're exciting. They provide movement for the piece, right? Some of them are just scribbles. Some of them are a little bit more hard edged and structured. And then you have the lost and found edge. So you've got a found edge, right? It's very crisp and clear. And then it gets lost up in here, right? And then it's found again and lost and found. And I just play that game. It's a lost and found game that variety visual variety is the spice for your viewer, right? It creates interest. So visual variety creates interest, so you want to bring that into your piece. And use it where you can. And it's just lost and found edges, hard edges, soft edges, lost edges, okay? And that's that. Very simple. So I hope that help. I think that's about it, and we will see you in the next video. 17. Block in with Rhythms: Oh, right. We're going to do a block in of the head using the Riley rhythms. And let me point out on top, from left to right, there's the idea of the box. That's why I drew the box. So the head is a box. It has a front, two sides, a top and a bottom. And we want to remember that because that's going to help us make this thing look solid and believable. And then to the right of that, we have the rhythms of the head. And that's going to help us maintain symmetry from the left and right side of the center line with the muscle bone connections because the head is bilaterally symmetrical. Okay. At the bottom, we have the reference on the left, and in that middle frame, we have the opacity knocked back of that same photo that we're going to draw over, and I'm going to show you this technique, just drawing over the reference so you can get a sense of exactly where these rhythms are on a real face. Alright, so we're just going to box it up real quick. That's the first step. And by the way, that final panel to the right is where you're going to do the exercise yourself free hand and get this thing into your muscle memory into your drawing tool belt. Okay, so again, the head is like a box, and it has a front, two sides, a top and bottom. The most you're ever going to see is three different planes of the head. And we're looking, you know, straight on and slightly down in this reference photo. This helps me tremendously this idea of the box, and it's counterintuitive because when you're confronted with the face, you don't really see it, but it's there. And it's the underlying structure that makes your drawing so powerful. So after the box, just go ahead and draw a circle and a cross, and horizontal line could be on the brow, it could be on the eyes, but, you know, it's just basically a circle and a cross, and that'll kind of get you spaced and placed with the direction of the gaze and the proportion of the head, in general, just getting it on the page. Then we'll add the chin and the chin box or the jaw and the chin. There's three parts to the jaw, the front, the transverse, and then the back half going up to the ear, and then we have a little cut out of the eye socket and the cheek on the far right side. Then I can just slice off a bit of that sphere, kind of like ums does, right? And then you get a sense of that's a flat plane. From there, I can Imagine a rhythm from the top of the ear or the helix of the ear pulling down towards the mouth with an arc and then looping from the terminus of the lips right here over to represent the top border of the top lip. And we have three rhythms that we can pull from the top of the ear. One going from the mouth, one going under the cheeks, under the nose and wrapping around. Make sure you're thinking about wrapping around the forms, that'll make them feel as you draw. It'll make it feel like it's a real form. Okay, and then the third rhythm pulling from the top of the ear divides the front half of the jaw from the back half of the jaw. So now I want to build the eye socket and place the nose. And remember, I want to connect everything so it looks integrated and solid. So there's a rhythm on that far cheek that goes from, you know, the top of the cheek bone down to the edge of the mouth. And then I'm going to fit in the root of the nose bridge of the nose, and then go ahead and give a sense of the bottom plane of the nose. I'm kind of mapping out the front and side planes of the nose there in green. And that pulls up into the lower border of the eye socket containing the eyeball, right? So we have a rhythm pulling from the side plane of the nose up into the eye socket and around the eyeball. And then we have the first rhythm of the nose, going from side to side, going through the root of the nose and down each side plane to the bottom of the nose. You can go either convex or concave with that line that meets the cheek. Everyone's a little different. I remember the first time I saw the rhythm of the nose after someone taught it to me, and someone I was flying on a plane, and the stewardess scrunched up her nose. And when she scrunched it up, I saw the rhythm. The light went on. It was so obvious to me after that. Okay, and then we have the muzzle rhythm going through the root of the nose and down along the cheek and to the chin and back up the other side. And you can see that on animals, it's quite extruded on dogs and bears and cats. But we have a muzzle, but it's a lot a lot flatter and less apparent. You see it a lot more on older people, that particular rhythm. The skin folds make it more obvious. Gravity makes it more obvious, and younger people, you don't see it as much. Like on this reference, you can't see it as much, but it does help account for where the light and shadow falls, describing the structure in this photo. If you know the rhythms, it makes sense as to where the lights and darks are. Okay, then we have the rhythm of the mouth and the rhythm of the chin. And the rhythm of the mouth intersects the alar facial groove or the wing of the nose and comes down lower lip, and the rhythm of the chin intersects the rhythm of the mouth. Putting in an ear there that probably should have put in way at the beginning of the block in. And then we have the blocking of the frontalis area of the skull or the forehead, the split of the lips and the lower lip, put in the eyeballs, and just pointing out the rhythm of the nose on the reference. And you can see there's a little bit of a dark half tone on the right side of the nose, and this rhythm kind of helps you place that either when you're looking at the live model or from a photo reference or from imagination. You can imagine that rhythm and go ahead and put it in there, and that's where you could likely put some of your light or dark tones. So we've got the triangle there is the infraorbital triangle, and you can see a little bit of shadow there. And once you name that, you kind of own it and it explains that anatomy and where exactly you can put some shadows or some highlights. So the red is the nasolabial fold which pulls out from the lower border or the middle of the nose, lower border of the eye socket and down right to the chin. So that's nasolabial fold. I the zygamatic bone cuts through underneath the nasal labial fold, so the nasolabial fold pulls over the zygamatic arch, and this area right here is that corner of the zygoma, okay? And then we have the kind of lower border of this nasal labial fold or the muzzle rhythm, okay? And then how that chin fits in to this rhythm here, right? This covers over the chin and the chin fits into it. And that is You know, it helps create depth. It helps make sense of the form when you know what's overlapping. You know, so this chin box comes out. It has a side plane, and you can see this shadow here, right? That overlaps the chin, so the chin fits in to this nasal labial fold. If you want to make someone look older, just go ahead and really describe this rhythm and the chin and it'll add years to that person. Okay, so that's your basic block in with the Riley rhythms. So now we're going to do it free hand. Start out with a circle and that cross or letter T. And if you have trouble with the proportions, just draw a horizontal line from the top of the head to the right and from the bottom of the chin to the right to your drawing so you can help get the proportion of the height of the head. Try not to do that. Just try to eyeball it and go for that and then measure second. So you can start to trust your hand eye coordination more and get practice with it because it will get better if you just practice with it. Alright, so then we add the jaw onto the circle, and we can go ahead and slice off that side plane of the head, give it a center line. And have it wrap around the head. Remember wrapping around. Pull the neck off with a couple of C curves, and it's basically a cylinder, so we always need to, you know, draw a neck and attach the head to the neck. So it doesn't look like it's floating. That's a little weird, right? So if there's something wrong with your head, just ask yourself, did I put a neck on? Does it look like it's floating? Maybe it needs a neck. All right, so we have the vertical position of the ey eline which is halfway between the top of the head and bottom of the chin. And then we can place the nose, right? So place everything vertically along that center line. That's your first move. And then we'll figure out how wide things are laterally, okay? So each thing step by step, one thing at a time. All right. We've got the ear on the back half of that center line at about an 11 degree angle. Okay? 11 degrees, not straight up and down. It's slightly back drifting back. But that first rhythm, you can go ahead and pull from the top of the ear and to the terminus of the lips and then over to the other side, and then go ahead and indicate on the far side that rhythm. There's a nice little S curve you can pull. You can see from the shadow from the top of the ear straight down to the chin. Okay, we're going to line up the cheek bones from side to side. That rhythm also pulls off of the ear. This is a little complex, and you need to go through it maybe, you know, half a dozen times, if not more, to make sense of it and kind of get it into your muscle memory. It's just repetition. But once you get it, you start to see it on the face. It makes sense of things so clearly that it makes your drawing a lot easier. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and put in that keystone or flabella and then map out the rhythm of the nose, space it and place it. Where is it? You know, in this particular angle. And from there, you could put the front plane of the nose and then the side plane and under plane. That's all you need for right now. We're not drawing the feature. We're just accounting for its place on the head. You can get into details later in the process, but not right now. All right. The muzzle, you know, from side to side, we're getting that going. And that really helps with the anatomy without drawing anatomy, right? It's just much easier to think this way in terms of rhythms and arcs and S curves instead of Latin names, muscle bone connections, right? If we're thinking of, you know, all those biological terms, right? And anatomical terms, it's much harder, much more complex. We got the rhythm of the mouth, rhythm of the chin, just drawing simple circles, placing the eyeballs. Good stuff. Just remembering everything from side to side. Make sure everything you're thinking about wrapping around the form. It just looks it looks weird to me. It's always looks weird. Doesn't look natural, but it's that they call it the hidden portrait, okay? It's the portrait that no one ever sees, but you need to draw it on the paper or have it in your mind before you start. So it's hidden and it's important, but no one's going to see it. All right, now we have the superciliary arch that wraps around from the front of the head, forehead to the side plane of the head. And that's a little more distinct on males than females. Right? And the forehead rolls down from the top into the superciliary arch and then down into the upper border of the eye socket. And then on the reference here, you can just it's not so obvious, but when you know the rhythms, you can make sense of the dark and light values that you're seeing on the form. And then go ahead and use the letter Y to create those overlaps. That helps create depth. And so on the far side, you see the forehead is overlapped by the eye socket and the nasal labial fold overlaps the chin. Okay. Then just to clarify this globella or superciliary arch region on the rhythm chart itself, it overlaps the eye socket. The eye socket really kind of comes out, you know, almost as if it's built, it's designed, comes out from the superciliary arch, and that accounts for the light and darks that you see in that area, it's subtle on females and more pronounced on males. But just putting that in can help your male drawings look more masculine or more tough if you're doing a character like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a very chiseled look. You can add that in if you need that and play it down if you don't for young people and for females. So I just wanted to restate the box idea real quick. That's what you should start with first in your free hand drawing. So do it very lightly and just draw the box. And that'll help you internalize the idea and the habit that the head is a form and it's rather structural, kind of like a box. But remember, it's a modified box, so it's tapered from the cheek bones down to the chin, and then you cut out a section of the back half of the square and then fit the ear, attach the ear to that. Alright, so that's it for the block in demo using the Riley rhythms. When you do your free hand drawing, do it in black. I did it in red here, but I want you to do it in black and do the cube first. Do it very lightly, and then do the rhythms over that all in, you know, black pencil or if you're working digitally in Photoshop, just do it black. Okay. Do the exercise minimum three times, but preferably six times and just do it over the course of a week, okay? Focus on that for just one week and do it from a variety of angles, front, three quarters, side, and that's going to pay off big time, okay? Awesome. 18. Block in with Planes: Alright, in the last lesson, we did a block in using the Riley rhythms, and that helps reduce the complexity of the anatomy. We don't use anatomy, but we just line things up along the center line and helps us with the muscle bone connections from side to side and finding parity between the features, and it helps you avoid making critical mistakes of alignment and also proportion. So today, we're going to do a block in and build on top of what we've done here and use the planes of the head to do that. So let's jump in. And I've got my page set up here in Photoshop, and this is the way you should set up your Photoshop file. Just going to find the planes of the head on what's called the Asaro head. The artist John Asaro, a great figurative painter, devised this plaster cast of the head using planes to make it easier for him and his students to analyze the head and find the planes. And so I'm going to go ahead and find the planes on the Asaro head and then find them on the photo reference of an actual face. On one side of the Asaro head, the planes are more complex with secondary forms. And on the far side, which you can't see is just primary forms. So this is a great tool to learn from, and it's basically going to give your drawings very believable solid look. So it's definitely worth doing this exercise and memorizing it basically. So the Aar head is a little bit more complex of the plainer heads that I've seen. And I just went ahead and grabbed a a more clear Asaro head for this exercise and plopped it in there. So now, as we break up the nose, we can see that the nose has broken up into three planes, and it's got the keystone where the root comes out of the globella. Then it has the nasal bone, which is bone, and then it has the ball of the nose, which is cartilage, and just going ahead and finding the plane breakups on the nose, and then we'll go ahead and find it on the model. So now, plane that ball of the nose has three facets to it, and it's also split down the middle. And the root of the nose extend down into the ball of the nose and they fit together kind of like a lock and key. And if you can get things connected, your head's going to look a lot more believable. So now we can find the root of the nose on the inside plane coming out of the orbit of the eye, and again, finding that on the model is critical. So we're just going to go back and forth. So on these areas where it's difficult to see, the plane brakes don't jump out at you. They're not obvious. It's great to have an asso head or a plane head that clearly spells it out, and then you can look for the subtleties on the model and find them and clarify them. If they're not there, you know, you don't need to put in every facet or every plane, especially on female models or children. But if your portrait looks like it's kind of flat and lacking information, or the lighting might be a little blown out or overexposed, causing a loss of detail, you can put things in, right? You can put information there. That needs to be there to make your drawing look better. So it really helps you stay away from copying, right? Because once you analyze the head in this way and internalize it, then you can build it from memory, or you can add detail where there isn't because the photo reference is lacking. So this is very powerful. So we have the nasal labial fold where the alar facial groove, the nose connects to the cheek, basically. Those are some fancy words for that. And then we can see how that front plane turns into kind of a corner plane. On the Asaro head. Then we have that idea of the rhythms again that we can pull from the top of the ear and they can go to the mouth under the mouth between the mouth and the chin and then down to the chin itself. And so going back to the planes, we can clearly see where the infraorbital triangle is, okay? And it's often a tricky area. And it rests right on the front part of the cheek or is like a matic arch right on the corner. And you can see where that shadow is, it describes how the form goes from a top plane to a side plane and then an under plane. So you can render the form with the appropriate tones. Now, I know we're not doing anatomy here, but let's take a quick look at the back half of the jaw and how the muscle bone connection is constellated. You can see from the side view, we have the parotic gland, and that's thick. And then we have the Mceter muscle superficial part underneath that. But as we rotate and show you the underside of the jaw, you can see where those stack up, right? And they have a thickness that protrudes out from the jaw bone. And there's planes there, right? There's a front plane, step down, right? And then front plane of the macea step down to the bone. So just knowing that is going to help you account for the back half of the jaw. And you're going to be able to use planar information to build structure in it. So we can see the parotic gland and the macea muscle kind of stacking up at the back half. And so that has a thickness. You know, it has a front and a side. And it also has a top. So the light rolls away on the cheekbone and then comes out, right? There's a sliver of a top plane there. I looks like a triangle. Then it goes down the side plane of the jaw itself. Right, completing the back half of the jaw up towards the ear and then the area where the macea muscle covers the jaw bone on the back half. And again, showing that on the Asaro head. As you take in this plane information, you're going to gain so much confidence. When you see the model or working from photos, you're going to be able to interpret it faster and translate it to the page. It's just awesome. So moving up to the eye socket, we've got three distinct planes for the eye socket, which is, again, very helpful because the eyes so round. And then we have the upper lid that has three planes, the lower lid that we can reduce down to two planes, along with a top plane for that lower lid, and then the two side planes. Again, the eye is very round looking, and so we don't think of it as planes, but the planes, actually, when we play them up a little bit, it helps our drawing a lot in terms of structure. And then the connection from that lateral part of the eye and eye socket into the cheek and back to the ear. And then we have the forehead and side of the head plane distinction. So that's where the front of the head stops being a front, starts becoming a side. And then the glabella on the model, and then on the photo reference, and those planes just extend them back from the front plane of the forehead to the top of the head. And so we often don't even think about the top of the head. It's often neglected, but it has top and side planes as well. And they're just finishing off the forehead on the far side. And there's three distinct planes up front and a side plane. Oftentimes, on women and children, the forehead plane distinctions are very subtle and round. And on males, it's more distinct, so you can see those planes. And that's a good way to differentiate and make your drawing. Look more masculine is put more planes in your drawing. Put more planes and put more wrinkles, and it'll look more masculine and take them out if you want them to look more feminine or younger. Let's finish off the jaw on the far side, and then Find the planes on the upper lip and lower lip of the mouth. We've got a front plane of the upper lip and then two side planes or wings that extend out to the terminus. The lower lip has three distinct planes or pillows. They look more like pillows than planes, but there you have The lower lip has a top and a front plane. And that's where the shine is that you can kind of see where the highlight of the lip goes, it's right along that corner. And then we have the top part of the chin or top plane of the chin and then front plane of the chin, and how it fits into the front half of the jaw and connects to the under part of the lower lip. And then we've got connection from the underside of the jaw to the neck. And that's often my students an area of confusion for my students because we don't often look at that and see the head from that angle. So it's often just shaded kind of sloppily, and it shows. It's not convincing. So there's a plane under there that's held together by the digastric muscle on it, gathers the muscles like a tie under the chin, under the jaw before they go down into the neck. And it's pretty distinct. There's basically three planes under there. And again, the throat has a front end side plane. Kind of like two triangles, and they fit right up against that digastric muscle. And we can just plainize the ear as well. I would just suggest memorizing the ear is a lot easier than struggling with it every time you go to draw it. Now let's look at that digastric plane, that plane underneath that makes that head neck connection that's often very mysterious. So let's dive into it. So we've got this hyoid muscle, and that's kept in check, so to speak, by the digastric. And then that goes into the throat. So this area in green is that underplane. And there's basically three planes that you can see here as we close in on the model. So the front of the chin, side of the chin, and then the underplane border before the neck starts. So we have the jaw connected to the neck tight, right? And you see those three distinct planes there. It's good stuff. Once you know that, it's no longer going to be a mystery to you. You could draw it quite literally with your eyes closed just about. So again, from the side, we see three distinct planes from the jaw, you know, that connect the jaw to the neck. And we have the throat and the sterno cleitomastoid muscle, which is connecting the head down to the sternal notch. So everything is connected, related and tight and makes your drawing look very believable. No one will question it because people can spot things when they're wrong. You know, they can't necessarily draw it, but we all know when something's wrong. So there's the front plane of the throat, side plane of the throat and the roundness of the sternocletomastoid muscle. It's kind of a rope that pulls down connecting the head to the sternal notch. You can see the fullness there of that muscle. And let's just finish with the planes on the far eye socket, three distinct planes, and then three distinct eyelid planes plus a bottom plane. And then two planes for the lower lid with a top plane for the thickness of the eyelid. Great for information for when you cannot see into the shadows or you have a old photo that's grainy. You can put that information in there once you know it. So again, let's do this on the photo reference here. Three planes of the upper lid. It also has a thickness, and then the lower lid, you can make it two or three planes. And then the corner of that cheek just the corner of the cheek rounded, but still a corner, and that's where the shine is. That's why the shine is there. If you know why something is happening, then you can draw it. But you can't draw it really if you don't know why it's happening, and your light and shading will not describe the form well. It will look messy or kind of dirty instead of descriptive and clear. Okay, let's do the upper lip here on the photo reference. We've got the side plane or wing of the mouth on that upper lip. And then we have the lower lip coming out from or emerging out from the side wings of the upper lip. Knowing these planes help us line things up and also just help us know exactly how to render this thing from imagination or from observation. We have the tubercle that looks like a cupid's bow. And you can see on the side plane, three distinct planes and the side plane of the cupid's bow, that's where you'll put the shading because the wing emerges out from behind the side plane of that cupid's bow. So in blue, I just showed you where the shading would go. Okay. Do it again real quick. That letter Y is like the overlap principle that shows depth. And the same thing as we move up, very similar idea to the globla eye socket connection. The globella overlaps the eye socket, and the eye socket emerges out from underneath the globla. And that's where you would put your shading right where those green marks are. The form of the globella turns under, and then the eye socket emerges out, catches the light. Let's look at it on the skull. If you want your I mean, there's some definite architecture here that once you look into it a little bit, you can make sense of it. It's an area that's often confused and confusing to draw, but it definitely looks like some distinct plane changes. It looks like it's kind of built or designed. And where that globela and superciliary arch overlap right there, overlap the eye socket. So from different angles, you can see it. Like from that top angle, you can see it. And these gamatic arch there, there's a distinct corner from the front plane changing direction rapidly to the side plane going back to the ear. So that's where you would put a shine or shade or shadow. Okay, moving on to the nose, the nasal bone, and next to that, a sliver of plane where the shadow is, and you can see right there a rhythm coming off from the nose. That's the upper boundary of the lower eye socket. And if you know that, you can see that subtle shading. That's often information you just can't see or it's there, but it's just so subtle. But if you, you know, plain arize everything and combine it with rhythms, you can do that and describe that very Very precisely or and very subtly, if need be, or you can pump it up if need be. So you're going to be explaining the form instead of just shading, okay? That's a very big difference. Oftentimes, again, what is that? What's going on there? We see some change in value, but it's just it's just so subtle. So, again, that rhythm coming out and then describing the top and front planes of the eye socket. And again, top and front plane of the eye socket with the rhythm coming through, combine those two pieces of information and you've got it. All right. Now I want you to do a drawing free hand on your own. So I'm going to do it with color, but I want you to do it in just black black pencil or black digital paint if you're working in Photoshop or Procreate. So first, you know, you want to get the angle of the head, the tilt of the head. Number one thing, go from general to specific. So many of my students miss that and get the angle wrong. So just get the angle in, right? We build it step by step, and then we put the idea of the box that's so helpful and so simple. You know, if you can handle the box, you can handle much more complicated forms like the head. So do this in your free hand drawing. Very lightly, do the idea of the box with the right correct tilt of the head. Add the neck and shoulders. Just the gesture of those things is good enough. And then over that, we're going to go with the rhythm block in that we did last time. Circle, center line, a triangle for the jaw is very easy to handle, easy to fix mistakes right away. And then the circle with the center line and letter T, you know, is good for this stage. And then we shave off the side of the head to create a flat, more flat plane. And it shows off the plane change from the front of the head to the side of the head and create a center line for that plane connecting to the jaw. And then the angle of the brow or eyes. Either one is your choice. The brow is just a little bit above that. Connects to the eyeline just short of the side plane of the head. You want to make sure the features line up horizontally. The horizontal lines are parallel between the brow, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. If you get those wrong, your face is going to look wrong as well. So let's add the ear on the back half of the jaw. And pull the first major rhythm from the top of the ear, and then another one dividing the front half of the jaw, from the back half of the jaw. And then we'll build the nose from the eye socket. And just going ahead and showing the corner and plane changes from the brow to the side of the head. And that's going to help line up the placement of the ear and show us that we're looking pretty straight on on this fellow. I just want to kind of clean up that side plane of the head wrap around the drawing to make it look the idea of three D. You can also draw a rhythm from the corner of the jaw up to the corner of the forehead on the boundary of the eye socket. That's also kind of a tight fit that makes it look solid. Then we have the top part of the cheek. And you can put a kidney bean in there to account for the eye socket itself and put in a number two for the nose. And then the rhythm of the nose to account for the nose width, and then continue building the eye socket on the other side. Top plane of the nose, side plane of the nose, and bottom plane of the nose are all now accounted for. Rhythm of the mouth, just an oval, intersects with the alar facial groove and also with the rhythm of the chin. Eyeballs. We built the housing for the eyeballs, now we can put those eyeballs in there, and then readjusting the center line for the forehead and a rhythm for the superciliary arch across the forehead. Again, everything is just adjusted all the way through the drawing, and we have the rhythm of the frontalis or forehead. Split of the lips. And then we're going to knock that opacity down. Remember, you're doing this lightly in pencil in black. And we're going to go over now and find the planes of the head, right? Translate what we did before on the photo reference onto this freehand drawing. You're going to be looking at what we did in red and the photo reference on the model. So you want to keep looking at those two things and using those to guide your drawing here. So side plane of the head, cheek bone on the top plane and side plane designation, infraorbital triangle, sychomatic arch, you know, top of the cheek, right? Muzzle. All the stuff you're gonna become so familiar with that it's gonna be it's confusing now, but it's going to make sense, I guarantee you. Okay. So cheek fitting into the chin. I'm just going to move this over so we have this to look at, as well, the original Asaro model. So we can zoom in a little bit and just look at the photo reference, have the Asaro model there, and then our drawing itself. Our main goal is to get this information into our muscle memory and have it available to us on command. That takes some time. Again, you need to do this in black. I'm just doing it in different colors as we go through this so you can see the different rhythms and planes very clearly. But this would be done as an underdrawing lightly as the blocking is done, and then you go once you get everything in place, you start to render it, add your light and shadow. You can do that at the full value range. So this is, again, the hidden portrait that nobody sees, but it is so crucial. You know about it, I know about it, but the viewer won't know about it. But it'll be the thing that makes them feel like it's such an awesome drawing it looks so solid. Alright, connecting the globella to the brow, kind of facetizing the eye socket into the nose connection. So we've got the keystone root of the nose, globella connecting to the front plane of the forehead. Right. Then that corner panel and then the side plane of the head. And the front part of the forehead has this distinct value that stops somewhere and changes direction to be the top of the head and then kind of bouncing down to the nose area that has three planes on the side, three planes on the front. And there's a distinct muscle cartilage kind of bump there that looks like a triangle. You can see on the assoro head. But and it borders the nasal bone on one side and the ala or wing of the nose on the other side, as you can see that top plane side plane top plane of the wing of the nose, right? It's a side plane, top plane, side, and then wing of the nose. You'll see that on some people on other people, you won't see it at all. And then the wing of the nose is like a torus, right, with a hole in the middle, a very primitive shape there. Let's find the overlap of the tooth cylinder over the top of the cheek and then finding the upper lip. Like the letter or a bird flying with two wings, right? And we've got the tubercle, three distinct planes for the upper lip. Connecting to the nose via the filtrum lower lip, having a front and two sides, three distinct planes and connecting those to the top of the chin side plane of the chin chin overlapping that far cheek, Just those little overlaps give such dimension and expression of volume that if you pay attention to those mind those, your drawing will get that much better. All right. So there's the overlap. Very subtle. And then the underplane of, you know, the top part of the neck, bottom part of the jaw. And the sternocletomastoid muscle is gonna trim up that neck a little bit. Everything's either a rhythm or a plane. The eyeballs, pulling the eyelids over the surface of the ball, both upper and lower eyelids. Okay, that's it for this planar exercise. It was tough, but we got through it. I want to point out one more rhythm that's so crucial to find certain landmarks on the head. They lay along this rhythm. It's the corner of the forehead, where the eyebrow is, the corner of the cheek, and the corner of the back half of the jaw, right? So right there, those three landmarks are all constellated on this rhythm. So if you just find that rhythm and it's so elegant and easy to draw this curve that swoops through, you can find those definitely descriptive bony landmarks. No problem. Alright, so this is your assignment, set up your Photoshop document just like this with the Asaro head, photo reference knocked back, ghosted back so that you can draw over that, and then the photo reference itself, and then a blank panel so that you can do a free hand drawing and building it up with the box, rhythm block in, and then the plain block in. Do this from front, three quarter and even side views and do half a dozen of them, at least three, preferably six, and just take one week, right? So use one week to do the rhythm block in and then another week to do this plane block in, and then you'll have it locked in and sewn up, and it's going to make so much of a difference in your portrait drawing. Okay, I'm so excited. Alright, we'll see in the next one. 19. Head Front Planes - combining planes and rhythms: Today, we're going to talk about drawing the head. Now, a lot of people have trouble drawing the head. Sometimes it's just with the features, spacing and placing the features, the planes of the head, rhythms of the head. There's a lot of things going on. So let's talk about why you'd want to master or begin to draw. The head. Let's take a look at that. One, I think it's one of the most interesting and beautiful things to draw on the planet. I love drawing the face, the head, the features, getting a likeness. To me, it's just a cool thing to do. It's also a good opportunity to solve any drawing problems you could possibly face. So it's excellent practice. You could also get a job down the road as a sculptor. If you know the planes of the face really well and you're a sculpting drawer, you could translate that into sculpture. You could become a portrait artist and paint beautiful portraits in oil or acrylic paint or charcoal, and so on. You could be a concept artist or character designer. That's cool. A storyboard artist, even a caricature artist, or an illustrator. So all those things are possible roads you could go down if you can master drawing the face. So let's get into this and do this. I'm going to turn my flow down to about 9%, and the mixer brush really kind of makes things look like natural media. So what I'm going to do is just really lightly block in kind of an egg. That's your quick start right there from the front is an egg, just kind of kind of kind of space in place in a very general way, the egg, and then I'm going to bisect it vertically down the center, and horizontally, I'm going to find the center from top to bottom. Okay? That's a great start right there. I'm just going to swing out with a little sagging see curve right there, a bit of the neck, just real roughly. Okay. So now that we've got that, we can go from the top of the head eye, halfway just a little bit above the eye is going to be the eyebrow. And then halfway between the eyebrow and the chin is going to be where the nose is at. And then from there, we can go thirds. So what we just did was we went halfway is where the eyes are. And then halfway from the brow, to the bottom of the chin is where the nose is. So that was another half. And then we divided this into thirds. Okay? So the first third is where the mouth is going to be generally. And then the next third is going to be right below the lower lip, it's the top of the chin, and then you get the end of the face right there at the bottom of the chin. Okay, so we're doing good right here. I'm just going to now that we have the eyebrow, I just draw horizontal line all the way out to the side. That's where the top of the ear is going to be, so I'm just going to draw those in real quick. And I'm going to try and keep those real simple. The bottom of the nose is where the end of the ear, the bottom of the ear is going to sit. So somewhere between that middle third is where the ear is going to be. I'm just going to try and get that in kind of quick here. It's kind of like a disc. The top of it has a thickness as it rolls back. Okay, good. So now I'm going to basically place a dot where the eyes I think are going to be. So I just kind of feel that and put a dot right there. And then what I'm going to do is from the middle of the forehead, I'm just going to drop a 45 degree angle. Right like that. And what that's going to do is help me find the tear duct on the inside edge of the eye. And it's also going to help me find the edge of the nose plane where it meets the cheek. So somewhere in here, there's going to be that edge of the nose. And so where that finishes, hits the cheek and becomes the cheek plane, that's important to know. I'm just going to lightly put that in. And then what I'm going to do is kind of just from here, on the right side, not quite all the way to the edge of the face, but just inside a little bit, I'm just going to draw a visor, just like an arc right there. And that's going to be the brow ridge and Then I'm going to go ahead and kind of block in where I think the eye is going to be. And that tear duct is right here, and I'm going to make that eye just right right there. Just a little bit, not touching, but very close to where the tear duct would be. Okay, blocking that in working very lightly, and I'm not going for a clean, exact line at the moment. So then I'm going to drop a plumb line from the center of the eye, each of the eyes straight down. That's going to give me two things that's very important is it's going to give me one, the end of the mouth and where it terminates. And it's also going to give me a where where the chin is and how the chin separates from the jaw. And that's really important. So I've got that. So I'm just going to make a little overlap for the chin, right there. It's going to overlap. The chin ends and the jaw starts. Then right here just a little line at the top of the chin. If I draw horizontal line out there, that's going to tell me where the chin changes direction or the jaw changes direction, starts going up to the ear and defines the side plane of the face a bit more. All right. Excellent. Now what I want to do is just make sure I've got kind of a circle here that cuts in a little bit to the nose to the edge of the end of the mouth and then the top of the chin. That is the tooth cylinder or the muzzle, and I just need a space and a place for that. And then the next thing I'm going to do is define the front plane of the forehead and the side plane. So I'm going to about right right here. On either side, I'm going to swing out a s curve, swing out a sea curve just like that. Okay. And now I've got a nice front plane to side plane. Front plane, step down, side plane. The more I can show off the box, the better. So now I'm going to take that upper part of the cranium, make it a little more of a circle. I'm going to come right down all the way through. It's going to lead me to about the bottom of the nose. Okay. And that's important because that's going to be where the bottom of the cheek is. And so I just want to connect everything and relate everything, one thing to another from the top of the head to the bottom of the head, and that's going to make it look even more realistic if I can do that, if I can connect everything. Okay, so you might see that there's kind of a shape now like this right? That's what I just made. So I find that if I can simplify shapes and find silhouettes, flat two D puzzle pieces that makes sense to me, um, I can put those in there. So I try to draw those sort of comparisons to make things easier to memorize. It's kind of like shape recognition for me. And so having swung out those C curves, now I kind of got that I've separated out, again, the side plane of the forehead from the front plane, okay? And that's looking good. Next thing I want to do is right from there, right from this end of this brow ridge right here, that's going to be the top part of the cheek where the cheek starts, and it divides or delineates the front plane of the face from the side plane of the face. So I'm just going to go straight down to the jaw where that jaw starts or actually, it's the chin, so I'm just going to go straight down to the chin. Okay. And then I'm going to take my flow down a little bit. So there now I've got that side plane differentiated from the front plane of the face. So you can kind of see front plane, step down, side plane, right? Front plane, side plane. That's good stuff. Okay, so that jaw or that cheekbone where it starts and where it goes down, it can go straight down to the chin. It can go right to the edge or the terminus of the mouth right there, or it can go right underneath to the top of the chin. You have three options there where the cheek can go, it depends on the person, the sex, and the ethnicity as well. The next thing I'm going to do is right here at the top of the forehead, I'm going to draw a kind of a Chevron shape or keystone shape. And it's going to look like that. So here's the shape. Again, let me draw it a little bit higher. So it's here like this. It looks kind of like a razor blade. It's kind of a trapezoid shape, and it fits right there. And that's the superciliary arch, they call it or where the glabella is. And once I've got that, I'm going to pull some three dimensionali into it. So I'm going from two D now to three D. Just by pulling, extruding some shapes off the sides. And so now I have a front and two sides and a bottom, okay? Front, two sides and the bottom. And so what that's going to sort of turn out to, I'm going to translate that into my drawing here. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. All right. So here we go. And I'm just going to darken that a little bit so you can you can see it. There, there and there. Okay. Alright, perfect. So that's going to give me the inside of the eye socket, of the upper part of the eye socket. Okay? And that's usually in shadow. So I'm just going to darken it in a little bit. Alright? And then that's going to move us right into the globla which is right here. We don't need to talk about that too much, but I'll just put it in real quick. But it's the start right here of the eyebrow, the eyebrows starts underneath the brow and then comes over the top and wraps around the top of the eyebrow or of the brow. It starts on the bottom and wraps around on top. Just something like that. Just gonna knock that in a little bit. Mm mm. Call it another layer. So it starts on the bottom and wraps around the top. Okay, so there's your eyebrows just right along that brow line right there. So it's kind of like, you know, a piece of paper, and if you twist it. Okay. And you get a kind of a the side that twist away is in shadow, and the stuff facing the light is lighter. So this is on top is light, and here is in shadow. And that's kind of like how this brow is starts on the bottom and then twists over the top. Starts on the bottom, and then twist over the top. So practicing this right here is really important. A piece of paper with a twist in it. Okay. So let's move on to um Now that we have the the eyebrow in place, we can kind of talk about the inside, bottom part of the eye socket. So let's do that. Um, and we can kind of get that by this part of the keystone right here. I'm just going to go ahead. Right there is the bottom part of the keystone, and that just arcs right into and sort of delineates the top or yeah, the top part of the orbit of the eye. I just swings around like that. So we go from here and it just swings around. Like that. Okay. Looking good. The next thing I want to do is darken up these eyebrows a little bit, so you can see them better. Okay. I'm going to go back to my pencil tool. And let's see if we can go ahead and kind of, like, delineate the temporal plane from the frontal plane a little bit more and kind of show off the bottom of the cheek a little bit. So that's going to be important to know where that cheek ends right there. And some people, you can really see that a lot. Some people, you don't see it at all. We're gonna put it in there for demonstration purposes. And let's see. Let's take a look here. I'm gonna combine these layers and just it's looking a little wide, so I'm going to make him a little narrow and keep it going. So next thing I want to do is put in the nose. So the nose is basically a prism. Okay? And so I'm going to keep it real simple for myself. Okay. So basically prism, so prism looks like looks something like this. It's a little bit wider at the bottom than it is on the top. And it's got a front, two sides, a top and a bottom, so I'm going to try and show that off. And I'm just building it out of really simple primitive shapes because it's quite a complex thing, but if I can kind of space it and place it in there with a very simple idea, like a modified rectangle, which is a pyramid. And now I've got a front step down to the side, and I've got a bottom plane right here. Okay. So that's awesome. That's what I want. I'm just going to take this and get a little bit smaller so we have a little bit more room. But I basically want that to hook up. Okay? So I'm gonna hook these up this to this, this to this, right? And then this to this. And that's going to build my nose from the keystone or the glabella. In other words, right into the side plane of the nose. So let's do that. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. Grab a color and see if we can go ahead and put that put my flow up a little bit. Yeah. Okay, so narrow at the top, wide on the bottom. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and put the bottom right there. I just gonna go ahead, give those lines a little bit of flare there, little bit of curve. Let's see if that I think I want to end it in a different spot. You can see how it comes right out of the socket of the eye. Okay. And then there's the bottom of the prism side plane of the wings of the nostrils also called the a Alright, so now I've got a top plane side plane, front plane of the face. Okay. That's what I'm looking for. And from there, we are going to put in the mouth. So let's do that. So from that split of the lips, basically, I'm just going to swing an arc just like that. Then gonna put a little V shape in there. And I'm going to connect that to the filtrum from the nose to those top peaks of the lip, and then I'm going to put the tubercle in which looks like a little heart shape, and then I'm going to swing two little arcs out to the edge. Let me just beef that up a little bit so you can see swing out, swing out, and then come in. And then there's something called the mascular node right there at the end of the terminus of the mouth. We'll just kind of put that in. Okay. And then I'm going to swing an arc. Right there. Okay? And then creating almost a W shape right there. In case we've got an M shape on top. And then we've got an echo of that M shape. We got an M shape on top right here. Can't see that. M shape. Then an echo of that M shape. And then on the bottom, we have a W. Kind of a reverse at the top. Okay. And we put in the tubercle there right there. Such an important thing. And this is the filtrum going into the septum of the nose. But let's wait for that. So we've got our mouth in and we'll turn the corners up just a little bit. And the mouth is going to be top of the mouth is usually in shadow, so I'm going to hit that with some tone, and definitely when it goes back into the end of the mouth into those little nooks and crannies. It's going to get darker. And then the bottom lip is going to be there's a top plane and a front plane. And so I'm going to leave that top plane in light. And then there's that shadow between the bottom of the lip and the top of the chin. So we're just going to put that in, and that kind of swings around kind of like a horseshoe shape right there. Okay. And you can bring that up into almost like the laugh lines or the muzzle. You can kind of see we can connect that stuff a little bit. All right. And then then we've got the chin, the space for the chin right there. Okay. So now let's put in the nose, so the nose can really look like an M shape at the beginning. So it's just kind of an M right there. I think I want to bring this up just a little bit. It's looking a little low to me, so I'm just going to bring it up. Sometimes you have to always be modifying the thing. Okay, so we've got a basic kind of shape for the nose and now we can put the nostrils in. So from that septum of the nose, So why don't we go in and explain a little bit. So I'm going to put in the ball of the nose right there. And then the wings of the nose. And then they kind of come in. So then you have the bottom of the ball, the nose. So what you have is front plane of the nose, step down to the side plane, top plane of the wing of the nose, step down to the side plane of the wing of the nose, right? Step down, top side like that. So we're thinking like a sculpting jar. We're trying to find the planes and show off the corners. The more that we can do that, surprisingly, our head is going to look more real. Okay, so let's break down that nose again. So the ball of the nose just looks like a circle just like that. And then we come down into the septum of the nose here, which looks like Like this into the nostrils. So that ball, the nose goes right into something like this. Okay. So that is it's like a hot air balloon, right? So that's the shape. Kind of like a hot air balloon. Okay? And then we've got darken it up a little bit. Yeah. The wings of the nose look like tiles on a Spanish house, goes right into the wing of the nose right there. That's bottom plane, bottom plane. So we have that I'm going to sculpt that out a little bit more so we can see define it. Okay. Connect the septum to the filtrum into the tubercle. All right. Let's see erase that a little bit. Okay, great. We're making great progress here. Now we're going to put in I think we're going to define the top part of the cheeks a little bit. So let's do that. So from this inside top part of the eye socket, we're just going to swing a little bit bigger. I'm gonna swing an arc out just like that bone. And that's going to be the bottom part of the eye socket. Okay, so from that line, boom, swing an arc out. And that's going to give me the top part. It's kind of the top of the cheek, bottom of the eye socket. Okay? So this is all going to be front plane right here. Front plane of the face. And this stuff is going to be top plane. See that? That's good to know. Because sometimes you want really sculpted cheeks as opposed to really soft cheeks. So you might have more masculine cheeks as opposed to feminine cheeks, you know, depending on the character and what you've got to do. And let's put in the eyes now. So the eyes, let's go down here a little bit. You could kind of think of this as like we draw a circle here, and then we do a dolphin shape or like a porpoise. And then we do another dolphin shape around it. Okay, that's going to give you basic I we'll put the iris in there. And then in the middle will be the pupil. And that top lid is going to overlap the bottom lid, just make that happen. And then what you've got is the stuff goes into shadow, and then the ends of the lids go into shadow. Is going to be dark. And then that top lid is going to cast a shadow onto the iris and the sclera, like that. And the bottom lid, you're just going to hit like that. So right in here is right there, that's that side plane. It's the beginning of the nose and right where that keystone is sits in there, right? And then your eyebrow twists over the top there. So And then we can put really dark right in the center there for the pupil. Let's go back here. And then we're going to darken the side part of that sphere. Okay, so what you have is really top part of the lid goes down over the ball of the eye, and you've got the top part of the lower lid and then going down to the front of the lower lid. Okay. Top part inside. We're trying to sculpt that out a little bit. Okay, so let's go ahead and let's do one more thing about that. From the side, you've got the ball of the eye, you've got the cornea, and you've got the pupil in there, and then you have the top lid, and that top lid is going to come out farther and overlap the bottom lid, so the bottom lid is here. Like that. There's the eye lash there, right? And so you have a cast shadow right there from the upper lid into the eye, and you have a shadow of that lower lid. And so a lot of times students we'll get that messed up, and so you want to have that upper lid overlapping, a lower lid, and there's the pupil, and you have that cat shadow. The other thing you have is the catch light right there right there next to right next to the pupil overlapping it. And that catch light that's like the life light that shows that you have a living being in there, the window of the soul. Okay, so let's do that. Let's put the eyes in So I think I'm going to start with this color. So we've got the tear duct. I think I'm gonna need this digital brush right here. Back off on the flow. Okay, so we have tear duct to tear duct. There's one eye in between tear ducts, one eye length, so I can kind of swing this over the ball of the eye. Okay. I'm gonna swing the lower lid right in there. So I've got that kind of porpoise look, a dolphin look that we talked about. You can kind of see the apex of the upper lid is not right above or symmetrical with the lower lid. They're offset, and that's important. Let's do it on this side. So we've got tear duct. Swing out. We've got the tear duct here. Upper lid overlapping the lower lid. Okay, you can see a little bit of that inside of the upper lid. The tear duct is usually dark. And then we have the lower lid. So let's put in where the eye is going to be Okay. I put that pupil in there real dark. Okay, I'm gonna thicken up that upper lid it's got that shadow, and it's also got eyelashes, but I'm not going to draw lashes that never looks good. Okay. And then there's the top of the lower lid. And then the side plane of lower lid coming out. We got the top of the lower lid. Okay. Okay. Let's check it out. I'm gonna take my need that side point of the nose. So I'm going to add a value here just to show that. And, you know, you can drop it straight down. You can you can kind of create a rhythm right here. You'll see it more bowed out on some people. Either way, it's okay. It depends on the person, so I'm just going to go ahead and kind of put that in. And so there's where the side plated side plane of the nose ends and moves into the cheek is tricky. So that's why the prism helps because it gives you kind of a definite place for that to happen. I'm just going to darken up the bottom of the cheek here. And come in here and where the terminus of the upper lid is, I'm gonna put that into some shadow. And darken this up a little bit on the side plane of the keystone. And that keystone is actually a down plane, so I'm going to go ahead and put that into shadow because that would be facing away from the light. Okay, let's go ahead and put in a cahado upper lid onto the sclera. And then the eye itself, the iris. Maybe I can make that darker. The pupil is gonna be the only place where I go super dark. And in the whites of the eyes, you're not gonna have it's never going to be super white. It's always off white. So I'm not gonna I'm gonna leave the white accent for the highlight. So let me just put that in a little bit. Let's put the pupil in beef that up a little bit, call up a new layer so I can get real black with that. Okay, and then put in that highlight, boom, boom, right? Something like that. Just hit it and let it be This darken up the eyes a little bit here. Something on this side. Sometimes these things are easier to do with, like, chalk or pencil as opposed to photoshop on glass, you know? Alright, so let's start and look better. Gonna beef up this crease right here. Then I just give that lower eyelid, just a touch because that's where you're going to see some hair, but the inner one, I don't beef that one up too much. Then I can define the iris a little bit more. And I'll get into that a little bit more later. Let's beef up the eyebrow. It starts underneath, twists over. Starts underneath. The brow twists over. So it ends up on top of the forehead. Okay. That inside part of the eye socket, a lot of times will swing around like that. Just kind of swings around a little bit. Let's do that again. Okay. Let's I just want to define this these plans a little bit more frontalis, to the temporalis, the side of the head. And then we've got the top of the cheek bone here starting and then coming right down to here, and then we've got the chin box that's going to come in. Define the chin right there. So the chin has a front plane and a top and a side too. So I'm gonna hit this with a little bit. And so let's just kind of define these a little bit more. So when you show up the box, like I said before, you need curves and corners. If you have too many curves, it looks cartoony. And if you have too many corners, it looks lifeless. So curves and corners are the best of both worlds. And we're just gonna try and get this looking less digital and more more life like So like I said, you can have the cheek go right to the corner of the mouth. It can swing in and go right to that space between the lower lip and the top of the chin, or it can go right to the side of the chin right there. So you have three options depending on, you know, who it is. Male or female, and the ethnicity. You can have, you know, cheek bones coming in right there, or not, but it's helpful to know. And then you have the front plane or the front of the face, and then, uh the mouth, the barrel of the mouth, basically. So that's going to protrude out, and then at the edges, it's going to recede away from us. So I'm going to darken that down a little bit. And I'm going to make the edges really right there between the top of the lip and the bottom of the lip. That goes into really dark shadows. I'm just going to go ahead and darken that up. So it takes a little while, but starting to get there. I'm going to try and hit this thing. A little dark right there. I wonder if I can decrease my flow, get a little sense of shadow that top lid that's always good. I'm going to go back to my pastel like brush and hit that lower lid. Casting a shadow. It's a little dark in here. A little dark in there. We're definitely getting there. We want to sculpt out that nose a little bit. So let's do that. I'm going to kind of beef up this front part of the cheek a little. Just right there. So now I have a little more of a sense of it turning away, and then we have a front, and then we have a top. So again, we've got, you know, kind of a top front, and then it goes under top front, under. Okay, so let's get to that nose and sculpt out the front part of it again. So we've got the wing of the nose. Top part. Bottom part of the ball, the nose. Plane change there, nostril. All right. It's looking okay. So that ball, the nose is gonna a lot of times has a split in it. Right there. So we can divide that out. And then we have the top part of the nose where it begins and separates out from the globella. So we've got this shape that looks like a diamond, and that fits right into that ball of the nose. The shape looks like, you know, kind of like a diamond or even, like, a coffin. Okay. So that's that bone part of the nose, and that bone part ends right there. So we've got front plane, side plane, end of the side plane of the nose, beginning of the cheek. That's what we want. Those areas are really tricky, and it's hard to see some of those plane changes. So if we can kind of put them in and overstate them a little bit, then we can back off a little bit when needed. So that front plane of the nose is gonna fit kind of lock and key right into the ball of the nose. And here we go. Right? And this kind of sometimes you see crease here depending on the age, the sex of the person. You can play that up, play that down a little bit, can define. Just give a little bit of an open space right there in the lips. So it looks like the person is if you're going to say something, keep that upper edge of the lip kind of soft. You don't want too many hard lines there. Okay. So let's get the cheeks a little bit. Sort of that the two cylinder or that mouth is sitting on a ball. The lips are sitting on a ball, and I want to kind of make the side of the ball go away and turn under. Just kind of state that a little bit more. And somebody might have, like, a dimple so we can take some stuff out here. I want to put that nose plane into shadow a little bit more. The sides in the shadow just a little bit. So it starts to pop out. That's too much. Gonna put this into shadow for sure. There you go. Okay. There's another possible plane right there you could do. Further delineating the frontalis, the front part of the forehead. You see that sometimes on people. I'm just gonna define the top of this. Then you'll get the hairline somewhere in here. So we could kind of, like, fake in a bit of a hairstyle back off on that. And then we kind of lost the ears in this whole process. So we can just kind of put those in again real quick. And then the side burns would come somewhere in there. So depending on the hairstyle, Get those ears in there real quick. Tricky ears, I tell you. Alright. Those are some big ears. Let's take that just move it in a little bit. Okay. And then I'll just hit them with some tone to push him back 'cause I don't want you looking at this too much. I want him there, but not to attract attention. Let's just define that neck again. All right. Right into pit of the neck right there. I don't really care about that too much right now. Okay. So back to this hairstyle. Depending on the style. Just kind of throw it in to complete this thing. Ace out some of this stuff so you don't see how we did it and then push the neck, kind of want just define that a little bit. Not too much. W's there. You just kind of push it back into space a little bit. Whoa, Photoshop freaking out. And you're always modifying continually. It never never ends. Art never ends. Sometimes you have a deadline, so you have to just finish it. Let's put a little bit of tone on this hair. All right. So there you have it. I just want to try and get those eyes set back a little bit. That was too much. Then I can pull it out again with that super white highlight beef up the pupil. Try to get them to merge out of that shadow as glass glass balls. Alright, that's basically it. 20. SECTION 2: Action & Form: Okay, now that we understand value and it's vocabulary, let's do a few of these value scales. And in order to really understand value, you not only have to understand the definitions, but you've got to put your hands physically put your hands on pencil and paper or charcoal and do a couple. So we have a value scale in five steps, going from the lightest, number one, all the way to the darkest, number five, and we'll be using vine charcoal and charcoal pencil. So on the left, we have Vine charcoal. And it's really important to understand the medium and how it works and how dark it goes. That's really important. So the charcoal pencil goes darker than the vine charcoal. The vine charcoal comes in different grades, and I used an extra soft piece of vine charcoal stick. And for the charcoal pencil, I used an HB, which is right in the middle of the hard and soft grades for the standard range of charcoal pencils. So this is pretty straightforward. Takes a little time and a little patience. You got to be a little bit careful. You want to have even jumps in between each change in value. Okay? So just make sure to watch that. And now we're going to go ahead and put those values onto a sphere, both with vine charcoal and then with charcoal pencil. And so notice the order, which is really quite helpful. It's separating the lights and darks with a value number four and then putting on value two. And then you can see I put on value three and then value five, and then value one. And those are the modeling factors that create realism. Let's do it with charcoal pencil. Again, the charcoal pencil, not as easy to erase and goes on darker than the vinee charcoal, same order. First separate from the lights from the darks, put on value four, right, first, then value two, then the midtone value three, then value five, and then the highlight. It's a very straightforward, methodical approach, very simple. Now, this is the part I want you to focus on and internalize is matching the values from the five value scale onto the actual sphere. And that is going to really help with your portraiture. Because this simple mapping or identifying the values onto a three D object is going to really help when it comes to a real life, human head. It's going to seem much more complicated, and it is, but rest assured this approach is going to make it much simpler and easier for you to handle. So let's go on to the next step, which will be applying value to four primitive shapes, the same shapes you're going to encounter when you encounter drawing the human head. If you can do these, I'm confident you can do anything, right? So let's go. 21. Render primitive forms in 5 values: Alright. In this lesson, we're going to practice what we learned in the previous lesson on four primitive shapes. Again, this stuff is pretty straightforward, but it does need some practice. So you'll encounter these primitive shapes in the human head. Once you can render these and build three D form from them, you can handle the head even better with your values. So we've got to map our shadow shapes, and for that, we need to know the direction of the light. That's going to help us because that will tell us the direction of the shadow, the length of the shadow, and the shape of the shadow. Our light is coming from top left and from the front, three quarter down. Alright, our first order of business is to separate light and shadow. Every part of the process I'll talk about from here on out are called modeling factors. Our brain is pretty lazy. That's why this is important because when light and shadow are confused, the brain is just going to say, I don't know what this is and move on. So you've got to make sense, help your brain make sense of the image by putting down these values in a correct order, so they read right. Next step after value four is value two. All right? It's the lights. It's not the highlight, but it's the local value of the object. And you just lay that in, cover the whole object. So that's basically level one, separating light and shadow. All right? You're going to have your form light on the light side, your terminator that separates the light from the dark, you'll have your form shadow and your cast shadow. So there we are two and four applied step by step, straightforward. And the next step is to lock the shadow shapes. So I'll take an HB charcoal pencil and go over the outline and the interior and just lock the shadow shape. I use an HB charcoal pencil because it's harder to erase. The vine charcoal that went down before is easily erased. So I just want to go ahead and commit basically to the shadow shapes. This stage basically ends up darkening the shadows a little bit and smooths them out because the charcoal passes over the vine charcoal and distributes it more evenly throughout the peaks and valleys of the paper. Next step in the process is applying value number three to the light side of the form. This is where the idea of different value, different plane comes in so handy. Each of the planes are facing the light at different angles. The ones that are facing them more directly get more light, and the ones that are turning away get less light. It's a very simple idea that when applied to flat two D shapes like magic, it starts to transform them into three D objects, and that's what we're looking for. Notice how the form start to pop and begins to appear a little bit more three D. This value number three is the half tone or the mid tone. It's the dark half tone, still in the light, but it's a dark light, if that makes sense. And then we're going to apply value number one or the lightest light to each of the primitive shapes, primitive forms. In the sphere, it's the specular highlight. In the cube and cylinder, the top of that plane that's facing the light the most receives the most light, so it gets the value number one, as do the sides of the cylinder and cone. Next step is to apply value number five, our darkest dark or black accents. Apply it to the form shadow, the part of the object that's not receiving direct light from the main light source, and we'll beef up the cast shadow, which is the terminator projected in the direction of the light onto another surface, such as the table that these objects are sitting on. Darkening these two parts gives us automatically the reflected light, which is indirect light that's hitting the object from nearby surfaces. And that light just bounces into the object and lights it up just a little bit. And that really completes and rounds out our shadow side. Again, the core shadow is in the presence of reflected light, and it's the dark area of the form shadow that remains dark unaffected by reflected light. So there we have it, the introduction of our darkest dark or value number five. Let's move on. Okay, next step is going to be to refine the edges. I call it my edge pass or edge control. And out of all these techniques, if you just do this one thing, assess your edges correctly. It takes your two D objects into the three D realm with no effort at all. It's like magic. And I'm just basically going to soften the core shadow coming out into the mid tone. All right. I want to make sure if it's a round object, I want that edge to be soft from the core shadow to the half tone. If it's a squared off geometric object like the cube, I want that edge to be very crisp. Okay? That's crucial. So soft and hard edges, basically. The sphere has a soft edge. Cube has a hard edge, and both the cylinder and cone have soft edge transitions from dark rolling into the light. Alright, and the next lesson, I'll apply these principles by drawing a human head, and this is going to solve your problem with values. Let's go. 22. Render The Face In 5 Values: Alright, let's apply our five value system for drawing a head. First thing we're going to do is block in using a circle, triangle, a little bit of lumus We're going to find the major plane breaks first the side plane of the head, then build the eye sockets, keeping things very flat, simple shapes, prism for the nose, tooth cylinder. We're going from general to specific, big shapes, medium shapes, and then small shapes. We're pretty much kind of building a shadow map and also a little bit of structure. And now I'm just going to lay in value number four, right? Very flat. I just want to see and separate the lights from the darks. Find the big shadow shapes, then find the smaller and smaller refining facets that make up the shadow pattern. I'm not really drawing features, right? I'm just drawing dark and light two D puzzle pieces in value number four. Very simple. Just finding where everything belongs in the drawing. Next step will be to put in value number two, which is the local value of the light site. It's not pure white, right? It's skin tone, which is around value number two on our five value scale. And I'm going to refine the edges just a little bit using vine charcoal here. It's easy to fix, correct mistakes. Plus, it looks nice on the paper. Main thing I want to do here is keep my values under control. Five steps. That's plenty of complexity. Just laying value four, value two, keeping it really simple. The less complexity, the better. But as I build upon each step, which each step is pretty simple, I get to complexity. Okay? That's the secret. Right now I'm coming in with a HB pencil, and I'm going to lock the shadow shapes. Remember how we did that with the primitive shapes. I'm just going to refine the edges, clarify a little bit more, locking the shadow shapes in and then going over the vine charcoal with the compressed charcoal to smooth it out and distribute the material of the vine charcoal into the paper a little bit more, so it's nice and smooth. The sequence here is four to lock, right? Value four, value two, lock the shadow shapes with HB compressed charcoal pencil. Easy. And one thing that's really going to help this that I need to stress, and you can't forget this is to squint at your reference and squint at your drawing. Do it a lot. Even get up and back away from your drawing a little bit, okay? But just squint and compare. Squint and compare. Your eyes are bouncing back and forth from the reference to your drawing and just asking yourself, is it a light thing or a dark thing? What's this shape? Is it a square? Is it a circle? Is it a triangle or a variation of that? Keep it very simple. And you'll stay out of trouble. You'll be able to control things, spot problems sooner, correct them faster, and that's good. Now I'm just going to smooth things out with the tortilon or paper stump. Now the next step in this simple process is apply value three, the dark half tones, there we go. This is that step where it starts to turn, right? The half tones are in the light just before it turns into the core shadow. And I've gone back to the vine charcoal to do this. The next thing is I'll put in the highlight value number one, the lights lights. These are going to be the corners in the lights where the form is changing direction. And I just use a needed rubber eraser to pull out that vine charcoal to create the highlights, and it's easy to do. Now I'm going to go ahead and put in my value number five with my compressed HB charcoal pencil, which is somewhat hard. It's in the middle between hard and soft and going to go in and create the form shadows and the cast shadows. Refine my edges a little bit, place my dark accents in the eyes because that's where I want you to look. And then I'm going to come in and do an edge pass, and assess my edges. And I'll do that with the tortila or paper stump tool and just kind of soften out the transitions between where the form is turning away from the light. So you can do that with the paper stump. You could do it with HB pencil just very carefully. And now I'm going to again, kind of work the light side and dark side together because now I've increased the value range a little bit. But we've done pretty much all the heavy lifting, and we have our total structure, our value structure in place. And that's not gonna change. If we have to change that, it's huge work, right? We might as well maybe start over. We don't want that. We want step by step, control of the values all the way to the end, right? We want to make it fun and manageable. So something I want to point out about structure, we have linear structure. We do that with line at the block in stage, and we're kind of describing plane changes, right? Planes of the face, rhythms, the Asaro head, you know, the plane head. And then we have tonal structure. And that's building the illusion of depth with value. And that's what we have here. That tonal structure, we built it step by step with five values. That's also structure. So when you hear people talk about the total structure of a piece, that's what they're referring to. And it's very powerful for creating that illusion of three D form along with the linear description of the planes, and it's a 12 punch. It's awesome. So to take this drawing to the next level, I would put in details and textures and refine everything and go through the drawing again. So let me just recap. We're not going to do all that refinement in detail at this stage, right? This was just about controlling and applying value. So to recap, we applied value four, then value two. Then we locked the shadow shapes with HB pencil. Then we went with value three and the dark half tones, then value five for our dark we added our highlight at the very end. All right. I really hope this helped you, and we'll see you in the next one. 23. Edges : the 4 kinds: Alright, so let's get into the four kinds of edges and get really crystal clear about them. I'll do a couple examples of these, and then we'll show talk about where we can use these. Okay, so I'm going to give this just kind of a local value here, and the side most facing away from the light is going to be the darkest. Right? And then the top is going to be the lightest. So I'll just take some off here. And notice when we use the different value, different plane principle, you automatically get a three D looking form, right? Different value, different plane, top, side, back, different plane, different value, makes it look three D. Okay, so the main thing here is that crisp edge right and that says that the object is going very quickly away from the light, right? It's making a quick change just like that, going quickly away from the light. That's why you get that inside edge that tells the story. All right. So where can we find these edges? Usually, okay, the light is going to be the kind of light that's single source. It's going to give you those good cut out shadows like on a sunny day, okay? You can use it for your cast shadows. You can use it for contours. It's gonna be inorganic objects. Right? They're mostly a geometric. Let's put that down here. Geometric kind of man made stuff, right? You won't see anything quite this hard on the human face unless it's a cast shadow, but the idea of that structure is there, and we want to use that to our advantage. Okay, let's move on to the soft edges. Give it a local value. And then work the value changes, work the edge, right, so you can have that core shadow, and into the shadow side, you'll have a little reflected light from the ground plane, and then we'll just come back and give it a highlight on that top plane where the light's hitting it, facing the light, and then it moves away from the light. So it's in this scenario, the objects moving slowly away from the light, and so you get a soft edge. So where can we find those? Where can we use them? Well, they're going to be in round egg like forms, like a cheek. Fatty or fleshy areas or parts. The light will be usually diffuse light. Like on a cloudy day or a foggy day, the light's bouncing all over the place, and there's no clear shadows. Okay. So again, cheeks egg like forms, use the soft edge. It's going slowly away from the light. Okay, let's do the firm Now, this is a bevelled edge, and it's not crisp and hard and it's not soft. It's in between. It's a little bit tighter, right? That core shadow is tighter. It's not so spread out. Maybe something like that. Right? So it's a lot tighter and it comes the form goes more quickly away from the light and not as quickly as, say in the crisp hard, kind of chiseled hard forms of a cube, but still faster than the soft, okay? So that is how that's going to We can we use these? That's going to be your core core shadow. So the firm and the soft will be good for core shadows. You can use them both. Bone and hard muscle. Tendon. Usually, it's on male models a little more than female in general, but it's on all muscular models. So that's both male and female. If they're muscular, you're going to see this kind of firm core shadow. Alright, let's do the lost. Local value and then let's get go really slowly away from the light, this one, the most slow the least defined boundaries between light and dark. So much so the boundaries are so diffuse that you you can't tell where the light starts and ends or the dark starts and ends. So it's like a cloud, right? So let's say we can use these super soft. You can use these in the half tones or the half light in the light side. Soft fabric. You can probably find it in hair, too. The light will be diffuse. It's not going to be sunny in single source. Use it in shadow areas, too, because what makes a shadow look like a shadow is that there's not a lot of detail and you can't make out the edges. So the shadow areas, the recessed areas where not a lot of light is getting into it. Alright, so let's get into the four kinds of edges and get really crystal clear about them. Alright? So here's what they look like. On the left, we have crisp, hard edges. Then we have soft edges, firm, and then lost edges. And I'm going to 24. Edges: Finding Edges On the face: Alright, let's take what we studied about edges and value and apply it to the human face. We're looking for basically four kinds of edges, and you can see right away, we'll go from kind of, like, top to bottom, closest to the light and further away from the light. You've got this nice form shadow. It's describing the form very nicely with that soft edge, right? Kind of soft, kind of firm. Here we've got another one. The firm edge goes into a real soft edge right here, then goes back to firm Same thing in here. All this stuff is form shadow. This says that the object is turning slowly away from the light. Okay? So it's got a soft or firm edge showing cheek, bone, muscle, right? Now, in opposition on opposition to that, you have the cast shadow. And if you really look at it, it's quite hard. Let's get rid of that comparatively. So here we've got soft, and here we've got hard if we really analyze. Now, what's really interesting is that hard and soft edges or form and cast shadow. Follow each other down the figure like twin brothers, or you could say maybe twin brothers and sisters, right? Wherever there's a form shadow, there's going to be a cast shadow. So let's analyze that and look for that. So on this brow ridge right here, it's a form shadow. It's turning slowly away from the light. But right down here on the nose is the cast shadow. On the eye is the cast shadow, right? The cast shadow follows that form shadow. Form shadow, eyelid, cast shadow. Right? Form shadow, all this stuff. Form shadow, cast shadow right there. Cast shadow is made by the object in front of it blocking the light, right? You have form. So you've got all these form shadows cast shadow. Same thing here, form shadow. Look for the cast shadow. Where is it? Here, on the neck. And look at how kind of firm and soft the cast shadow has become. Here it's crisp. Okay, we'll look at that in a second. All right. So there we go, form and cast. Form cast shadow. Anywhere else? I think that's good. Okay, let's look at the cast shadow here, it's really crisp. Let's zoom in a little bit. Really crisp, right by the filtrm of the nose, very close to the object that it's casting the shadow on, right? So it's crisp. Then it gets soft. It's, you know, crisp, gets a little bit of soft. If you play that up, you can squeeze a lot of information out of your shadows just by that hard versus soft edge. Play, play with that. Look for it, play it up. Okay, here, same thing on the neck. Hard right there, close to the chin, and it gets really soft, right? Really soft right in here. And it starts to firm up a little bit. It's everywhere. Okay, let's look at another example real quick. Now, this one is Okay, on the previous one, that's single source light. It describes the form the best, and it's clear showing, you know, the form and showing the different kinds of edges. On this one, it's very soft light. They have a huge 36 inch octa box or beauty light, maybe even bigger than that, 40 something inches. And it's just like she's sitting in front of a window on kind of an overcast day. So there's nothing's hard, right? Nothing's hard. It's all soft. Really soft. There's not even a cast shadow below her nose. There's a lot of form, but even the cast shadows, a lot of form shadows, but the cast shadows are about the same. So we get a slight firm here, but it goes into soft. So this is difficult to do a portrait by. It's very soft, very feminine. You know, it evokes a certain amount of emotion as opposed to, let's say, harsher lighting. So just keep that in mind, this one there's nothing hard in here except the shadows in her lips, the forms in her upper, you know, her eyelid and stuff like that, and just the boundary of her head dress against her hair. Those are hard, but everything else is soft. Let's move on to the next one. This one's got a lot of variety here. So again, we have you know, this form shadow of her upper lid, and then the cast shadow, right? Of the eyelash there. Let's just zoom in a little bit. See that? The cast shadow onto the lower lid of her eyelash, okay? Same thing over here. It's crisp form shadow on that ball of the nose, then that plane is turning away from the light slowly, and it goes into shadow. All this is shadow, right? And then that cast shadow, pretty crisp. So form soft and hard twin brother and sister, right? Form shadow upper lip, and then we get a cast shadow onto the lower lip. Form shadow of the chin, right? And here, cast shadow onto the neck. Like clockwork, okay? You can see a nice soft shadow of the cheek, right? Nice, very soft shadow. Defining that upper plane of the chin and where that jaw turns under. And then you can see, look at that. Let's look at this reflected light in here, right here, right? So we've got high light, half tone, dark, half tone, core shadow. That's the terminator. And then right in here, right, we've got reflected light. Okay, do you see that? You flecked light right in here, and then it goes into the occlusion shadow right there. That's the occlusion shadow. Let's see how tight that is. It's in that crease. You'll find the occlusion shadows in the deep shadows or in the creases right there, where the chin meets the neck, right? Chin goes into the shadow of the hair right in here. I think we got that one. Pretty good. Let's do one more. Right. Okay, this guy's pretty clear what's going on here, right? That's a very firm form shadow, into a soft form shadow, into a soft form shadow, and then a crisp calf shadow. Form, cast, form, cast, right? This is all form. Form, cast. Look at that. Form, cast, form, cast. This is cast form, cast form. Back and forth. It's like a cascade, right, back and forth. Here's a nice soft, warm shadow, form shadow of the brow, cast shadow over the eye, right? Just look for those things, play them up. And, man, you're gonna get a lot out of that. I'm telling you, just do it, analyze your edges. Just do hard and soft. You know, crisp versus soft or firm, and you're going to get all you need pretty much, okay? Alright, we're going to continue studying the form in the next module with simple primitive shapes. I'll see you there. 25. SECTION 3: The Features: Alright, let's do a breakdown of the structures of the eye. The glorious organs that allow photons in and allow us to see the beauty of the world around us. Let's get in here and see what's up. Let's talk a little bit about the anatomy of the eye. You can see that the eye is literally a ball and is about 1 " in diameter, and it fits inside of an eye socket or an orbit, to be technical about it. And that socket protects it. From blows to the eye, from predators, enemies, the eyebrows protected from sweat, the eyelashes protected from dirt, getting into the eye onto the sclera and irritating. Or damaging it. The eyes is like a fingerprint. It has 256 characteristics as opposed to the fingerprint which has 40 unique characteristics. That's why it's used in security scans to identify people. It's a lot more accurate than the fingerprint. The eye is composed of 2 million working parts. That's amazing. So the eye weighs just about 1 ounce, and it's about 1 " across, as I mentioned. So if we look at this here, there is one eye in between. Each eye from tear duct to tear duct. Let's see, tear duct would be about there. All right. So we have one eye in between. And then we have about one eye that'll get you out to the side of the head or even to the edge of the ear, approximately on average. So that's called right there, is called the five eye line. And that's a measurement that you can use once you're familiar with five eyes across. That's the same distance from the tip of the head to the bottom of the nose. And from the bottom of the nose, take that same measurement, you can get right down to the pit of the neck. So it's a very helpful measurement to know. So we've got basically bone protecting the eye. We do have muscles here, here, and here that control the movement of the eye inside the orbit. It also controls the blinking of the the eye lids and so on. We're not going to get into those that much, but we will get into some of this This is called the lacrma bone right here, there's the top of the zygomatic arch, the top top of the zygoma, which is the bottom part of the orbit of the eye. The top part of the orbit of the eye is the foramin that is the basically the what's the technical name for it? Is the supraorbital notch or supraorbital foramin right in here. Okay, so right in there. And the sub orbital foramin is down in here. And here we have something called the globla or the superciliary arch, and that's in here, very important one that we can talk about a little bit later, but I'll note it for now. Okay, so let's go to a three quarter view right here. So now you can kind of see how this globela overlaps the supraorbital notch or the eyebrow bone of the eye socket. So that eyebrow bone fits in. To the globla that globella comes in right there. And so you can see there's the top part of the front plain of the nose, and then it steps down here and hits the lacrma and then goes in to the interior part of the eyeball, and this comes out that way. So there is a kind of, you know, a plane right here. Right? And then this can continue out this way, and there is the nasal labial fold. A lot of times you'll start to see that. So it's muscle, a little bit of fat that covers over the zygomatic arch, which is underneath and covers over the muscles more or less, depending on the person. And so let's move into how we would draw something like this. Let's get a little deeper in describing the eyeball. Okay. Let's look at the shape of the eyebrow itself because we definitely need to know that you can look at this thing and you can draw it likes. Let's call up another layer here. It's kind of like square, tilted a little bit, but it runs this way. It's at an angle. It's not horizontal like that. It's at an angle, and it's got some straights and some curves. You can also think of it as, a pair of aviator sunglasses for the block in the quick iconic eye that you can go ahead and block in like that just to get it spaced and placed. From there, you can draw the rhythm of the nose, and continue on building the eye inside that. Those are the aviator sunglasses or basically the straights and curves, but it's definitely at this angle that slopes down. Okay. Two other helpful quick ways to help you visualize the eye socket is a cup. Imagine this cup and there's a sphere tucked nicely inside of it. If the light is coming from top down, then we have shadow here, in a shadow on that eye ball. That's one way you can think about it. Another way to think about it is like a whistle or some kind of cone cylinder with a piece whittled out of it. It's just a nice cut out piece. Where you can see front plane, then it steps down and goes in another direction and then becomes a top plane again and then a side plane. So front plane, underplane, top plane, the side plane. There'd be just that little eyeball sitting in there protected. That's another way to think about the eye socket and eyeball relationship. Moving on, let's do an eye here. So the eye is literally a ball, okay? So if our light is coming from the top, right, and a little bit in front. Okay? So we use this kind of arrow here to show light direction. Okay. Then We're going to see light being cast onto the ball and then it'll be lighter at the top right and it'll move slowly away to the left will get darker. Then we have the iris inside. The iris is about half the diameter of the eyeball itself. I'm going to just take a quick measurement that Okay. And then just gonna move around a little bit. And then let us paint. In here. So I want to just build that up kind of slowly here. Okay. I'm going to just blur a little bit here. That right there is the iris. The iris is an amazing thing when you look at it so close up, it is so cool. Let's do that right now. Look at that. That iris, that fuzzy, hairy looking stuff is the iris and there are colors. There's different colors. Look at that. That is just otherworldly. Doesn't that look like a sci fi landscape or something like that? Weird black hole. There's pigmentation in the iris. Eyes can be many different colors and um all that pigmentation and kind of hairy stuff prevents photons from passing through there and restricts the passage of light through the pupil, which is that black thing right in the middle. And, uh, On top of that, there is a cornea. Okay, so that is light is passing through that cornea. Some light is reflecting off of it, and some is scattering across the surface. Okay, so getting back to this, we're looking at the iris right here, and now I'm going to go ahead and paint the pupil. So I'm going to grab my Marquee tool. It's select space button to move it around, center. So the pupil is a black hole. It's actually a hole in the iris that allows photons to come in to the back of the retina hit the rods and cones and reveal things to us in the world around us. The white stuff around the ball, the ball of the eye is called the sclera. That's the stuff here. That's the sclera. Okay. Let me get my shape dynamics going. Sclera Iris right here, pupil here. Okay. So you can think of this eyeball as having kind of a dowel stuck in it, and coming out the other side. That can help you kind of keep your orientation of the eyeball horizontally so that it doesn't start, tilt this way or tilt that way and get a little bit weird. Okay? Just think of it as a ball with a dowel going through. On that surface of the cornea, which is the lens covering the iris is the highlight. So you're going to see the highlights, the specular highlights right there. That's the light that's really reflecting right back at you with the most intense and the most intense way. It's the thing that's facing the light. Okay. So what happens is some of that stuff reflects right back to us and some of it passes right through the cornea and it starts to illuminate this side of the iris. We get a little bit of reflected not reflected, but it's refracted. It's going through the cornea and refracting and lighting up this part. Of the iris. Okay. And the part right next to the highlight on the cornea is darker, right? This area here, it's darker right next to the highlight. So around the highlight, darker. And on the opposite side, it's a bit lighter, and you see kind of a gradation here from dark to medium gray. Okay. That is really important. So you're going to see different things as reflections in here. You can see I have a brush that actually is really cool that I created for retouching photography stuff. And you can put a brush right in here. Just like this. You can pop in. Looks like reflecting a flash of a bulb, maybe with a soft box, and down below that, it looks like maybe a reflector right here that's underneath. So you get this dual kind of highlight with this one being brighter and this one being a little less bright. So that's beautiful for photography, portrait photography, and also for just painting your portraits. Not only that, um, you know, you can have you might see something like, you know, a window in there. It's a room, right, that you're in. So that eye is just reflecting back the surroundings. And that's what's pretty pretty cool. So you might see something like that in there. You can see all kinds of stuff. You can see people, you can see buildings, you can see environments, and so on. You might have, like I said, a couple of different ones because the eye ball is always wet. It's always wet. Very reflective. A very amazing organ. We've got the eye lid passing across the top here and then coming down right into tear duct. Then coming this way. You probably won't see the bottom either. You never really see the whole iris unless it's someone's really frightened. The way it makes someone frightened is you put that whole eyeball in there and you see the more whites of the eyes. That little bone right here, it looks like a bone arrow. That's the top of the eyebrow. Then you'll see the top part. The bottom of the eyelid. And this kind of stuff, right? So that's how that is, you'll see that there's an angle here, right? So there's really a straight line straight line. And you can get a straight here and a straight here. It's not an om and it's so equal on top and bottom like that. It's definitely not that. It's more like this kind of angle here. All right. So let's look at it from kind of a three quarter view. So let's take this move it over here. Coman t. So imagine there's that kind of dowel going through it. So you'd see it maybe kind of passing through here. Right there and it'll be coming out the other side over on that far side. Imagine this do passing through. It's helping you Keep the thing oriented. All right. So that's somewhat what it would look like. And I would be thinking about that when I would pull my eyelid over the surface. So I'm thinking of stretching that eyelid over the surface of the ball of the eye. Pulling it over and it has a thickness, right? So I'm going to see the top part of that eyelid, right? Then I'm going to see the under part of the eyelid as it pulls around to the other side. Then this is going to connect in a tapered way. Top part of the eyelid, so you see top and under plane, and then that lower lid is going to come out from the upper lid, and then it's going to pull around. That's also going to have a top plane. It's going to come around. Like that. That's going to have a thickness, so it's going to have a top plane here, side plane here or front plane. And it's going to hit the bottom part of the eye socket and go on to top part of the cheek. Okay, so this is going to be get some shadow here. This is going to get some shadow there. And we'll probably some shadow here as it turns away from the light if it's coming from the top right, we'll have some shadow here. This is an underplane facing away from the light. Then we'll probably have some eyebrow bone in there. That's possibly. At play depending on person. And then we've got a little bit of highlight there. Okay. And we'll also get a shadow on the sclera because that is a ball, remember, it's a ball and it's turning away from the direction of the light. So we'll just get that dark and then soften up the edge. Then the top eyelid will be casting a shadow onto the eyeball as well. That comes into play and that's real important. If you get that in there, it's real good. It gives that depth to the eye. It could be those deep set moody eyes that you're looking into the soul of that person trying to read their character or connect with them. Okay. Then you have your eye lashes, and I basically draw those in groups. I don't draw singular lashes coming off all over the place. I don't do that. I'll just draw the shape and a thickness, and that's about it, for that. And then if you're drawing lower lid lashes, they come in pairs, right? And so you can put little pairs on there like that. And that tends to work pretty good. Or you can also just thicken it up, like it's kind of like eyeliner and you can group them. Like I said, I don't go off on that too much because it tends to look a little weird. But if I just thicken up the line, then it looks pretty to me, good enough. You might have a couple of stray ones there. But otherwise, that's pretty cool. I just quickly wanted to do a thing of the side of the eyeball. Let's see if we can just do that real quick. Okay. So now, I just wanted to draw basically from the side, the idea of the cornea that's there. There will be that highlight. Let's just paint that out and put a highlight on the actual surface right there. You could have a couple of them, right? Depending on what's out there, you can have a few different specular highlights, but one will suffice. That's the cornea there. We've got the cornea. That's it for anatomical analysis of the eye. Next up is charcoal drawing demo. 26. Eyes 2 photoshop demo: Okay. Let's do some charcoal style eyes in Photoshop. When I was a kid, I always wore glasses since I was maybe 6-years-old. And I remember I had a patch, and that was like, you know, totally weird, really humiliating. And that was supposed to help my weak eye because I had a weak eye. And so the fix for that was to wear a patch over the good eye to make the other eye, you know, do some more work. And so that's kind of what it what it did. I guess if you persisted with that, it might have worked because they have those pinhole glasses. You've seen pinhole glasses, right? And like glasses with a bunch of million pinholes. And then uh you just wear that and it makes things clear because it closes down the aperture on a camera. If you close down that aperture, you're going to have a wider depth of field and things are going to be crisper and clearer over a greater distance. So it's like that if you put on those pinhole glasses. It's actually pretty amazing. Things do get clear. Without wearing your glasses, you're just wearing these lenses that have a bunch of pinholes in them. And that's pretty cool. Looks like exercising your eye here if you do that long enough. So we're just doing, John, some eyes. Instead of, you know, we've been sort of analyzing these eyes. But now we got to draw it. Put all that knowledge to use. Otherwise, it's, uh, it's just technical, you know, knowledge. That's, you know, it's okay, but then you've got to make beautiful art out of what you what you know, right? Isn't that the point of it? Is to kind of draw what you know. Trying to get a little shadow going over here. There we go. Then I have that lower lid. It's in there. You need a little tighter line. These pencil tools and Photoshop, they're little clunky. You know, they're not as good, let's say, as precise as a digital round brush in Photoshop. But the digital round is just so digital, right? It just looks like, you know, a technical machine sometimes. It's too clean, but it's really good for tight small lines, whereas it's not so much with the pencil tool in Photoshop. It's, you know, you can't get too small with it. Once you start going small with it, it just goes away. It's not there. So I'm using this blender, a couple of different blenders, you know, so pretty those are pretty cool. They really kind of make it, you know, go the next level. So it looks okay with, you know, the brush looking like a pencil or charcoal. But when I use the blender, it really goes to the next level and actually makes it. Like it's charcoal smudging beautifully onto that charcoal paper, Canson paper or whatever. Now I'm just going to tighten up a little my first pass of the big shapes, spacing, placing the stuff, and I'm going to go for it. With a nice tighter line. We see that upper lid and we see the underside of the upper lid there. Then we've got the iris here. I'm not going to draw a round circle. I'm going to draw an oval because I'm looking up at it, it's going to be ovoid and it's a distorted circle. Then I'm going to put my black highlights right there where I want you to look. I don't want to put them over here on the outside or over here. I want to put it right there in that spot. Because that's where the window of the sole is. Now I'm going to grab that well, let me see. I'm going to bring that shadow over that lid lower lid, and then into the to your duct and continue this just over a little bit. Just cross hatching into this shadow side of the brow bonee. And then I'm going to hit my digital hard brush and pop in that highlight. I may have to go to another layer for that because, you know, I'm using the mixer brush tool, and it's mixing and it's doing some weird stuff. It's like you can't go over it the way you want. I'm going to put the dark part of the pupil right next to that highlight that specular highlight that'll make you look right there pretty much. And I'll go back to that lower layer and just kind of let's just fade out that. Maybe I'll use. I'll fade out that shadow just a little bit. Let's go on to another I So usually, you know, kind of draw something like an eyeball in there, right? Just really loose and light. And then I'll pull the top lid over and then I'll bring it, you know, This is kind of a three quarter eye. I'll just bring it into. There's some getting that nice under plane, and I'm getting the angle of that upper lid. And sense of the eyebrow in there. Let me put the iris pupil, I usually put the pupil in last because it just looks too weird if I put it in. I have to sneak up on it and let it emerge. Otherwise, it looks funky. I'm going to use some straight lines here on that outer edge of the lower lid because it's two parallel curved lines are hard to get. But if you have a curve against some strats, it actually works pretty well to get around a curved surface. At least that's what I kind of think design wise, you know, so I'm going to hit that underside of the upper lid. I'm going to hit a little bit of that determinus where the upper lid kind of converges and tapers. And then we've got maybe a ridge here, soften that up. And then we got a lower lid. So we'll hit that. I usually I'll use a big brush or a big charcoal and then I'll hit it and then go to the next smallest brush or charcoal. Just because I like to let the tool do the work for me. I'm going to get in here and put a shadow there on the eyeball, so it looks like it's three D and turning away from the light. I'm going to give it a soft edge there, give this one a soft edge. And then let's put in the pupil. Let's see if our pencil tool can do that. It's okay. I want to put that iris into, and I'm going to need a tight line for that. And there's the shadow over the eyeball, over the iris. Let's get some of that iris defined here. All right, so it can be a strided thing, darker next to the lid that's casting the shadow and then a gradation that comes out. Then it's lighter on the lower part of the iris. Then I'm going to strengthen up that. Let's go to my digital hard round and just strengthen that up right there. Because that's why I'm going to you looking right in there. And then that goes right into the eyeball or the sclera, and then we'll pull that right into the tear duct and we'll pull the outer part of that upper lid. So we get some thickness. We got front part of the eyelid here, and then we've got under part's front and then it goes under, I'll pull a little bit off here, squeeze out a little more dimension. I've got those tight crevices where the eyelid backs up against part of the bone of the eyebrow. And I can give this just a little hint because that's where the eyelashes would be, right? And a little more shadow into here. So I'm going to go back to my pencil and hit it right in there. Just thicken that up, so it's kind of a, that's where eyelashes would be and so on. That's kind of what I do instead of drawing a bunch of eyelashes. All right. Now we can really go focus in on that pupil. Okay. And here I'm just going to hit right cause that's going to be showing that it's, you know, moving away from us just with a modeling tone, they call it. Let's just hit that again right there, and pop in a nice highlight, you know, those highlights. Just put them in. Especially if you're oil painting, put it in and leave it. Don't mess with it, 'cause when you mess with it, it starts to mess, get messed up. Put it in, leave it. You're good. Trust it. Alright, I'm gonna let the rest of this play out with some music enjoy. 27. Eyes 3 charcoal demo: Okay, drawing the I can seem intimidating and complex, but I'm going to simplify the process for you with five pretty easy steps done one after another, we'll build a nice finished drawing for you. So let's get started. First step is the block in phase. A good rule of thumb is to go from the general to the specific. When I look at this eye, I see a big triangle shape and I'll try to fit everything into that overall big impression. That includes the eyebrow, the eyelids, the eyeball, all together. I'll use basically a very light pencil line to do this. I'm trying to block in the average angles, the overall big impression of whatever it is. And drawing that upper eyelid, I draw the bottom plane of the upper eyelid because it really helps to show architectural three D volume when I do that. I'm going to try and use everything I can to squeeze architecture out of these flat shapes on a piece of paper. A really good reference for you and for me was the bark plates of the eye, they're so clear and they're so well done that I would recommend doing your studies based on those plates. Until you're familiar with the complexities of the e at many different angles. Now you can see the e is an almond shape, but it's asymmetrical. I found that diagonal that shows the peak of the upper lid and the peak of the bottom lid, and it is at an angle. There I'm sculpting out the lower lid, the top plane of the lower lid. I'll use again, really simple shapes like ovals, squares, triangles, just to space and place the elements, get their proportions, going from the biggest shape to the next smallest shape and ever smaller refining facets until the drawing is finished. The next step is value separation. I'm going to separate the family of darks from the family of lights, and I'm going to squint and compare. This is crucial. I'm going to squint down and by doing so, separate out the dark values from the light values and then I'm going to put those in in a posterized way, meaning a very flat simple shape that it's not completely black. It's about a value of four in a five value scheme. Essentially, I'll have black and white puzzle pieces and I'll try to design those shadow shapes or those dark shapes and clarify my drawing but keeping it really simple. This should be very clear step here. The next step is add the dark accents in shadow shapes, which again, every mark that I make should help clarify the overall statement that I'm trying to make. I'm getting in there and really going for the dark stuff in the shadows in the creases where folds of skin meet. You can see I'm pulling that pencil with an overhand grip to allow myself to get a really nice chiseled fine line and I have control over the pencil. Sometimes I'll hold the pencil like I'm writing my name, but that wears out the tip quite quickly. I try to use that overhand grip and drag the pencil. Now I'm just adding one tone in the darks and now I have two values in the darks and I have a five value scheme, so that's keeping it really simple for me. Now I'm going to add the half tone in the next step. The half tone is in the lights, it's closer to the lightest light than it is to any of the darks and it occurs where the form starts turning away from the light and going towards that core shadow. It's just before it turns into the core shadow. It's the place where you're going to see most of the texture, most of the color and detail and so on in that area. It's very effective in making the form turn. Using my finger there. Last step is adjust, refine, and finish. We're almost there. Let's take this thing home. I'm going to clarify, again, work the darks, work the lights. I'll be working both the dark and light areas back and forth, cooking in the kitchen, refining, seasoning to taste, refining, fixing mistakes. There's always adjustments through the whole piece. I often think of drawing as fixing mistakes. Now one simple but crucial thing that people miss here is adjusting the edges. When I adjust my edges between hard and soft and make that distinction, it takes this drawing so far down the road, it's not even funny and it's so simple to do. We'll make sure you look at your edges and adjust them accordingly. Now, the pupil is something that I like to sneak up on and develop very gradually because it's such a dark shape, a definite shape, and I like to work my way up to that the iris just emerges out from the shadow of the upper lid. I'm putting in a gradation there from the upper lid onto the iris and the pupil. That seems to create depth and a moody sense of the personality of the person, let's say, because you're looking into their soul through their eye there. You want to have some depth. Now, the eye lashes, I do maybe one or two, but I tend to group them together. Don't look that good when I do each individual one. You can see that the eyebrow is also just basically shape with some edgework that's characteristic of eyebrow hair on the eyelashes, same thing, I'll have usually a tapered dark shape with just some lashes. Now I'm using the electric eraser to pull out those really bright specular highlights reflecting the room around the eye and just pulling some of those lines that you can find in the iris, fixing the tear duct, refining details. I've sped this thing up, but you can see in just five steps, you can get a pretty realistic, nice result of an I. This is something you can work on. If you follow these steps, you will definitely get better and better. I hope this was helpful for you. I'll see you in the next module. 28. Mouth part 1: Okay. Hey there. Let's do a quick anatomical breakdown of the mouth and it can help us understand it a little bit better. So the head is split right down the middle. It's bilaterally symmetrical, so that means that the eyes are on one side. They're the same on each side, the nose, mouth. And look how it's connected. That's one of the main things that I want to point out is that and I talk about this a lot about connections that it's just connected by all these muscles that go off in a kind of array on both sides, right? So these muscles like the psychomatic major here, connects the mouth to basically the side of the head, okay? It's also connected to the nose that we can look at. Look at this right here. Oops. Look at that, all the way down right to the nose. So this is a muscle that lifts up. And so you can imagine how important that is in expressions. So the nose connected to all the way up to just about the forehead, okay? And that's the levator labii superioris. Okay? So it's a levator muscle that's pulling up. And they have other muscles that are depressors that pull down like the depressor anguli there's a depressor labii inferioris mentalis. And so this mouth is capable of almost an infinite variety of expressions and positions that it can have. Now, this is the orbicularis oris is the technical name. It's the red lipped portion of the mouth. So our lips, the red part, the part that, you know, looks like this. That's part of the muscle, okay? Isn't that interesting? So I think that's really darn interesting myself. So the connections are really important. The sutures of the mouth, I wanted to point out here, something called the scular node. It's like a little kidney bean kind of thing, right? That's there. It's easy to miss, but it's there. There's a place for it. And you can see, again, the muscles radiate out from that place, and it's the only place on the body where muscle is not connected to bone. It's like a free floating there. So that's unique to the human body right there. Notice the positioning of the mouth. As we turn away, right? The lips start to crowd out on that far side, crowd out the far side of the face. And you can see that characteristic shape, S curve on top, C curve on bottom, that curve is going to start to accelerate, so it's going to get more severe as we turn away. So there's a little bit. There's three quarter and then side, we can't see anything. So it's kind of like that. Think of it. You can think of this as a band, a rubber band that's thick, right? And it even can have thickness here. And if you just think about it like that, then it's not that hard to figure out what it might be doing in different positions. Okay, here's the front. It's more of a like this kind of band and even the lower lip, same thing. Just curve around. So it could be a flat band. It could be slightly curved because the lips are slightly curved. Okay? So there's the lip from the side position. And this outer part of the wing, let's say, the wing of the lip overlaps the tubercle, the tubercle is right here. Okay. So as I was saying, as we watch watch this thing turn, you can see the curve start to really accelerate. Okay. And you've got this space right here created. There's a distance between the inside contour of the mouth and the teeth, right? So it's almost like a little triangle in there. So we've got the lip here. That little dark shadow there. If you look deeply enough if you look often enough, you'll see this, right? There's that little shadow so in other words, the teeth are not they're not right up against the lips. Okay? Don't do that, right? It's more like this. Yes. Create that shadow that's in there. Okay? So let's move on to doing some quick drawings of eight different positions of the mouth. I'll give you the step by step setup that works like a charm. Okay, let's start with the mouth straight on. I've got the cross hairs and the circle representing the tooth cylinder. The upper and lower lip are two C curves. The chin rhythm intrudes on the rhythm of the mouth. The nose also intrudes on that tooth cylinder or barrel of the mouth. Putting in the tubercle on the upper lip and swinging out curves for the lower part of the upper lip. And it looks like a cupid's bow. Then I've got to either side the muscular node at the sutures of the mouth and the modified W at the bottom, and the lower lip has two little distinct areas like pillows that kind of billow out, give it its fullness. All the setups on these are exactly the same. So that's the benefit of working this way. So now I've got two medium sized lips at three quarter view. And I've drawn a contour from top to bottom signifying the two cylinder that it is away. It pulls away from the front plane of the fakes, and that's how I can set that up and get the dimension. Again, we've got the nose and the rhythm of the chin intruding on the tooth cylinder, which is also called the laugh lines or the barrel of the mouth. So that's three quarter view. We'll just go through these pretty rapidly. Now I've got a big lip set against a very small lip. So in your character designs, in your stories, in the motivation of the characters, all these things all the parts will conspire to make your character who they are. Now we've got the reverse, a small upper lip against a very big lower lip. And as you observe people around, you'll start to see all this variety, and there's not much you have to do to get all that variety, which is the great thing. Once you study down and drill down just a little bit, this stuff becomes pretty elementary to you. I'm giving a tone to that upper lip and some of the lower lip to show the plane changes that modified W on the bottom. The lip is great. It's full of expression. And when you're doing your expressions, most of that will occur with the mouth and the eyebrows. So the mouth is crucial in conveying emotion. So you'll want to do your studies on that. This is biting the lower lip. So you can see two little front teeth compressing, biting down on that lower lip and really hiding it so you don't see it, you see the compression folds as three separate lines there. And that seems to work for that position. And that's seemingly a tough position, but it's not too bad, actually. Line line just above the upper lip, it's an oval. That's the filtrum and it connects the mouth to the nose and everything needs to be connected. It just looks better, it looks more valid. Looks more real. When the mouth is connected to the nose to the filtrum and the mouth touches the chin rhythm of the chin with the lower lip. I now I've got two big thick lips. And each of the upper lip has three distinct areas, the two sides and the middle tubercle, the bottom lip has the two pillowed areas. Now, this is like a little baby's mouth, a little kids mouth almost. If you look, it's very trapezoidal in shape, and it's really a cute expressive mouth. And I remember looking and looking at people on the subway and trying to figure out what made that kind of cute innocent baby look or cute girl kind of look. And it's that trapezoidal shape and the big upper lip played against the small lower lip. Okay, here we go with the next one. This one is definitely a challenge. Can you guess what it is already? You guessed it. It's a low camera angle looking up. Can you see it? If so, what gives it away? This is not hard. As long as you draw your cross hairs over the sphere of the tooth cylinder, you can convey that pretty easily, and you'll see more upper lip than you'll see lower lip in this position. So you've got a low camera angle looking up. And as long as you overlap the chin overlapping a bit of that lower lip, the lower lip is still inferior to the upper lip and coming out of it, but you can also overlap, take advantage of some overlaps, and then the filtrm connecting to the nose, and you'll see, of course, more of the nasal passages from this position. Okay, so not bad. As long as you just set it up with your cross hairs on the sphere to where. So it conveys that we're looking up. Now we'll be looking down, so we set the cross hairs opposite to how it is if we're looking up. And so this is a high camera angle looking down. You'll see more lower lip, less upper lip. That horizontal cross hair will tend to swing up like a smile, and then the muscular nodes set at the terminus of each side of the mouth. And just getting the rhythm of the chin there and how the chin fits in. Everything fits. If you can get everything to fit, that's also another key component in making things look valid in your construction and looking real and people won't question it. We'll get a sense of the nose in there from this angle, less of the nasal passages and less of the lower plane of the nose. Alright, we've done eight mouth positions. All the setups were exactly the same. So if you get that process, it should be really no problem. And make sure to connect everything, and you'll be in really good shape. So when you're conceiving forms for your character designs, remember you can play the upper lip against the lower lip, and you have all that flexibility with this approach. Okay, we'll see you in the next module. 29. Mouth part 2: We're going to do part two of drawing the mouth. I'm going to be doing it in chalk, digital chalk. And I'm using John Vanderpoel mouth as reference from his book, The Human Figure, an awesome book that I had a small copy of 20 years ago, and the reproductions weren't that great. So I couldn't really see what was going on, and I assumed he was putting on his chalk in a certain way, and I found out differently recently. But basically, I'm starting with the two cylinder, just basic circle. And then I'm building the lips, the chin, and the nose on top of that as I did in the first video. So check that out. Yeah, I have my favorite tools here for drawing and pastel and, like, blender tools. So I have those there so I can get to them pretty easy, and they work pretty well. So the processes start on a gray tone or a wash. You can do this with any medium watercolor, charcoal oil paint, put a wash down a 50% gray or so. Just local value and then put your dark shadow shapes on, then put your light shapes on and blend your edges. That's a standard workflow that works pretty well. That upper lip, talking about a bit of the structure has an overlap. As you can see, the wings of the lips overlap the tubercle from the side. And that tubercle is that triangular shield shape in the front that gives the lips top lip, the shape of a cupid's bow. And then the bottom lip emerges out from under the top lip. Right. So again, starting with a simple circle, constructing the upper lip with a C curve, tubercle, instant lip, and then looks kind of like a bow and arrow, right on the top. The rhythm of the nose and the chin intrudes upon the rhythm of the mouth. And when I connect the lips to the nose via the filtrum and the rhythm of the chin on the lower part of the lips, it has a kind of a connected and authentic look instead of the lips just floating in space by themselves or the nose or the ears just by itself on a page, it looks a little awkward. It never looks right. I find that when I connect it to another feature near it, it looks way better. So, again, I put the dark shadow shapes on. You know, I squint down and compare. I see my dark shadow shapes or dark puzzle pieces. Then I move to the light puzzle pieces, and then I just my edges. The lower lip has a top plane and a front plane, and that catches the light usually if the light is coming from the top. So you'll have light on the top part of the lip, then lip on the top side, that plane turns away, so it's dark, then the lower lip is light, and then under the lower lip between the chin is dark. So you have a light, dark, light, dark, light pattern typical from a light source that's overhead. And when the lights get into the suture part, the tapering part of the upper lip, it gets really dark in there. It's like occlusion shadow. Light is occluded from getting into there and it's just really dark. Then that middle line dividing both upper and lower lip can be dark, but everything else is middle dark. And light. Can even lips can be wet and glossy so they can have really fine highlight or specular highlights on both lower and upper lips. And that red portion of the lips, it's a muscle, and it's got lots of texture to it, too. You can see lots of kind of undulations of that muscle surface, which is very interesting indeed. That upper lip has ridges, very crisp ridge on the top part of the lip. And then as it goes towards the edges, towards the mascular node, that edge can be very lost edge, very blurry, especially on women. And that tends to make the lips like they're emerging off of your painting, just like beautiful rose petals, you know, something to behold. At that phase, I'm using the blender tool to smear the edges and make it all come together. Which adjusting your edges definitely does. So you have a combination of hard and soft edges. And definitely love I'm kind of a tonal person. I'm not too much of a line person, so I love drawing this way, and I love sneaking up on the drawing as if it was being developed in the dark room with film and just watching it. Emerge off and all the values come into play. It's just amazing stuff. It's always a treat. That magic is always special, and there's a rush from that that I still get. So I was mentioning earlier the reproductions I had of John Vanderpool were pretty low in that small book that I had about 20 years ago. And so I found on the Internet some really good reproductions of his stuff showed me what his technique really was and what he was doing was making small cross hatching lines, basically vertical lines with a sharpened pastel or new pastel or even a colored pencil. And they were very meticulous and very pored over and so you could see, you know, you could see everything, but it was the plains very clearly, but it was very delicate. And so I tried to do that here. And I didn't think that was how it was done, but it was. So it's great to be able to see good reproductions of art if not be able to see the original artwork itself because it unlocks so many clues for you. He with the drawing, many times it's a push and pull. It's adjusting the drawing. It's re establishing the drawing. It's going over and refining the drawing. So every thing that you do to the drawing makes your idea more and more clear, more and more realized, more and more realistic, if you will, if that's what you're going for. And so you'll go back and forth, reestablishing the drawing where you lost it, darkening, crisp spinning up edges, darkening lines. And you'll see me doing that back and forth over and over. And that's what it takes to make, you know, a drawing really true really come to life. And it takes some persistence and patience. And but in the end, that illusion of something popping off the page that you created is worth doing. It's pretty special. It's magic. The last part is a little diagram that's pretty helpful. It shows the front plane of the mouth, basically, from the nose to the chin. So what you do is you take straight two diagonal lines drawing one from each nostril. Basically from the septum of the nose, draw straight out at an angle, and it hits the peaks of the upper lips, the peaks of the lower lips, and then it divides the front part of the chin from the side part of the chin, and you can see it there hitting the cupid's bow. So it just shows you what's a true front and front plane of the face or the mouth and then what is not. And this one is just showing the angle of the lips upper lip relative to the lower lip and the chin. That's about it, guys. I really hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, and I will see you in the next video. 30. Nose Anatomy: Okay, we go to talk about the anatomy of the nose. The nose sits right in front of the face. You can't ignore it and it connects. The features on the face, all of them connects the forehead, connects the eyes, it's connected to the cheeks and the mouth. It's pretty important and we have to get our hands and our arms around it to draw a decent one. Let's look at what are the main features of the nose. Basically, it's got bones, cartilage. And some fatty tissue. So it's got the nasal bones here. There's the triangular portions of the cartilage and the wing of the nose, which is called the alla. Okay? Those are cartilage. Now, the bone part or some of that anatomy here that we need to know is this area here. It's the keystone. We call it the glabella. That's the anatomical name for the globella. That's important. Right? You can see how it connects the eyes to the nose and the forehead to the eyes and to the nose. So the globella is pretty important. Then we've got the nasal bone here, right? All this stuff here. And you can see where it cuts off right there, and all this stuff here is cartilage. Okay? So we'll get into that, but we've got the nasal bone. Coming out, extending out from the globella and then we've got these cartilage processes. So the lateral process of cartilage. So lateral just means on the side, right? And you can see these kind of triangular pieces to it. And we've got the all our cartilage here. So you can think of these as certain kinds of shapes and connected to that right here, this next little piece, that's the fatty part of the wing of the nose, right? So that's the wing of the nose, right here, right here. So it's part cartilage and then part fatty. So this is the ball of the nose. Right here, if we're looking underneath is the septum, right? So that's separating the two nostrils. We get that in blue. And you can see that the nose itself, the nose holes are kind of like little kidney bean shapes, right? They kind of come in like this. The way we see them a lot of times, there's a bump here. Depending on the lighting, they can be a little comma. Okay? Or you might see it more heavily shaded on the bottom part than the top. Here it's heavily shaded on the top. So it's thicker here. This one, it's more heavily shaded on the bottom. Okay, so it all depends on the light, but they are little commas. You can think of them like that. This part right here where the nasal bone connects to Well, it's the side of the nose, and this is the hardest part. So we're going to explore this, but it goes into this area here, which is the maxilla, right? And then you have this bump, and that's part of the lower part of the orbicularis oculi. So that's where the eye socket is. And you can see there's this kind of bump here. And then it connects to the side of the nose here. So let's explore that because that oftentimes doesn't jump out at you. It's not real clear. And so let's explore that. Here's how it looks on a regular face, right? You've got these cartilaginous parts here on the lateral side. You have the septum also cartilaginous in the middle separating the two lateral parts of the upper cartilage. So that's called the septum, right? And then it also divides this lower lar cartilage. Right? And so on the ball of the nose, a lot of times you get this kind of division or bifurcation. And you know, a lot of Europeans have this mostly. Asians don't have it so much. And then here you've got the fatty part of the wing of the nose. Let's do that and It. That's the fatty part. Then here you've got the septum here, and then the fatty part on the right side. Okay. Here's the nasal bone, right? And you can see it's divided right down the middle and then it's got you know, that separation right here almost looks like a fracture between the top or the front of the nasal bone, then the side comes a side plane. Then it steps almost kind of to a front again, and then like a little corner piece. And that's the part that's has the most questions in it because it's not clear. Like I said, it's not clear where the front of the nose becomes the side of the nose. And where does it become the front part of the cheek or the front part of the face again? Just where is that? Okay. So let's keep looking here. We're gonna look on some real people. This part here's what we're talking about front part of the nose, front plane, step down side plane, and then there's this right here. That's that inner part of the orbital, eye socket. Here on the far side, we see the nasal passage. So that's accommodating the airflow right into the nose, into the nostrils, and it goes through these passages here, you see that little bump out there. Okay? On this guy, we see it really clear front plane, side plane. And you can see the cast shadow describes it well, right? There's that real clear corner. But here, it's not so much. It's a lot smoother. And so if we know where the rhythm of the nose is, that really helps define, you know, this area for us, right? Because there's front plane, front plane of the cheek, side plane of the nose, front plane of the nose. Okay. Okay. Let's check it out. Here, you can see it on here pretty good. She's got a real kind of bumpy part of that nasalis or the nasal bone going into that maxilla, right? And then you see the eye socket. So there's nasal bone right here. That's one. Then two as this part here. Which is that maxilla and then three is the eye socket. So that's stuff we should get familiar with. Otherwise, our noses just look like they're stuck on or the connection between the eye and the nose, and the globela doesn't look valid or authentic and people start to question it and we question it, right? So we see here the eye socket, right? And then we've got the front plane step down to a side plane, right into there. Nasal passage here held in check by the a wing or that the fatty tissue of the nose. And then here the glabella, the keystone. Once you know that little keystone and how that connects the brow and connects the nose. And this area in here, you've got it figured out, okay? And the mystery is over, problem solved, right? Okay, so let's go over here. We'll just look at it real quick. Again, You can see glabella, which is kind of a down plane downturn plane. And then you've got the front nasal bone. And it's not the whole piece here. It's just this part. All right. Here's the cavity of the nasal bone that's covered by cartilage. Okay? There's that piece of cartilage that fits Oops right in here. It's like a triangular piece of cartilage, that septum, right? That's in there, that thin piece of cartilage. All right. And then that eye socket, it's a tricky part. Let's zoom in here a little bit. Nasal bone? Oops. Nasal bone. Eye socket, right? That's that little bump. Oftentimes, it shows up in shadow. It's like a corner piece, a molding, like connecting the wall to the ceiling. You'll see those old molding right. So there's a bump right here. And then it goes into the eye socket, and of course, the eyeball is here covering a lot of that. But you will see a little bit in here. Okay. And you'll see all this stuff. Another part there's that rhythm of the nose. Let's see. Let's go from bring this out. That rhythm of the nose is so good to know here like this. You can see how the nasal passage is following along here on the far side, right? And then on this side, right adjacent to the nasal bone. Okay. And that's part of the maxilla. So rhythm of the nose from side to side. Good to know. So there's your maxilla, right? It extends all the way down side of the nose, all the way down to the teeth, the upper teeth. Okay? And this is the zygomatic arch right there. Okay, frontalis or the frontal bone. And that's pretty much all we need to know. You can see that that cartilage is going to come out. And then you'll have the fatty tissue of the lar wing going into the cartilaginous part. Under here is the septum of the nose, dividing the two air holes, right? And then here, if we get to front position here is where the filtrm is. The filtrms kind of that teardrop shape. It's got two creases on left and right, and it's nestled in to the upper lip, right? So the red portion of the lip, the So there's the red muscle portion of the lips. And yes, the filtrm is right in there. Alright, so we've connected the forehead, the eyes, right? Forehead, eyes, nose and mouth areas together, right? So they're all connected to each other. And that's going to make for a really good solid drawing. Okay, so let's go ahead and do the nose drawing demo. 31. Nose front charcoal demo: Okay, let's do the nose from the front point of view. So the first step is to block in the planes with vine charcoal. Basically, I'm blocking in and delineating the planes and the basic boundaries between dark and light. So that's what you're seeing here. The vine charcoal is really easy to use because you can erase it with your finger. It's a little tricky to use, but it's really easy in the sense that you can fix mistakes, just wipe them away. So you're not committing yet to anything. Then the second step is to take a like a two B or four B charcoal pencil and then reinforce the planes and boundaries between the dark and light families so that it doesn't just wipe away. We're going to go ahead and commit to what I've laid out here. So I'm just looking for the shapes and proportions. And then this third step is to lay in kind of a flat wash, so to speak. I'm almost thinking about it like we're painting. And I'll do that in vine charcoal, just laid out, maybe a 30 to 50% gray. Okay, and that's kind of a prep for painting because you'll paint out of the gray, which is a recommended technique. Okay. In this fourth step, I'm going ahead and putting in my darks, not completely black, right? I'll save the black accents for the end. But again, with the vine charcoal, just filling in my darks and just seeing my design, designing my shapes, seeing if the proportions are correct, and so on. And so from here on out, the drawing is established. I'm not going to do any major changes. A this step here is putting in a half tone in the light side. And it's just another value in the lights. So I've got three values now, right? I have a value for the darks and two in the lights. And now I'm going to go into the shadow and start to sculpt out the air passageways, the septum, the shadow, and kind of start making things three D. And I'm using my black accents now in the shadows. See how you can use your finger just to wipe away that fine charcoal. And now I'm picking out the highlight just to see how that looks. That's the funneest part. So I try to hold back until the end to do that. Mixing the vine charcoal with the charcoal pencil is really like paint to me. It's close to being paint. So it's fun. If you're a little hesitant about painting, just work this way without really bother, the trouble of color and figuring that out and just work with values and think of your charcoal as paint brushes. Your finger is a cheap paint brush. The eraser is white, and just start sneaking up on painting or the idea of painting if you're interested in that. So you can see I'm going back and forth. I'm always establishing something. It gets wiped away, so I have to re establish it, especially the planes, the boundaries between the planes. I'll have to darken those up numerous times as the drawing builds up. And then I'll use that charcoal pencil to cross hatch and refine some of these shapes now or some of these forms, actually, refine the forms, the subtle changes. And definitely in the darks and in the half tones and the lights, I'll try to really start to work the subtleties so that it looks like a nose. You can see I did the root of the nose comes out of the globella. I also hinted at the eye sockets. It's connected. Connection is your friend. Connection is what we're all looking for, I life, in science, in art and music. It's the connection that really gives it meaning. You can see there's that side plane that connects the nose to the cheek, where the air passages are. That's very subtle and tricky, so I kind of have to look at it a lot and wait during the course of the painting, just kind of wait until I feel like estate really bringing that part home, making it clear. It's the hardest thing to do because it's not very clear in general, on a human face or in photos. You can see that just the needed rubber eraser is great for picking out highlights, kind of reforming shapes. And getting the ball of the nose, so it starts to turn more. That half tone is crucial for that, and the core shadow is crucial for that as well. Like I said, the nose connects everything. It's right in the middle of the face it connects the forehead, eyes, cheeks, and mouth together. You'll have all kinds of different shapes and sizes of noses, different nostrils, straights, curves, broken noses, crooked noses, noses that tilt up kind of like a cute little girl kind of nose. Then you can have the wicked witch nose that we all know what that is. The Italian nose, I'm using the tortilon too. That's that paper wrap to a tapered end that looks kind of looks like a pencil that has no lead, but it's paper, you can smear around the charcoal really good with that, get some subtle effects like I'm doing there. And then cross hatching the usually a hard charcoal pencil like a B. HB is a little bit too hard, but a B is really good. Yes. And then there's some bounce light in the shadow because it was a little too flat and a little too dark and flat. So it just looked a little dead in there. Okay, here's my three D form analysis. Again, we sculpted out the boundary between the darks and the lights and the plane changes. And then you've got the wings of the nose, which would just reduce down to circles and the ball of the nose, again, which is a circle, and the septum extends off of that. Alright, let's move on to a three quarter nose view. 32. Nose three quarter charcoal demo : Alright, let's do the nose in three quarter. Again, I'm going to start with the vine charcoal, which is really soft and really easy to erase. I'm just going to go ahead thinking like a sculpting drawer. I'm going to plan out my plane changes and the boundaries between light and dark. As I mentioned, in the anatomy tutorial, the nose is two parts cartilage and fatty tissue and one part bone. Now, this method really emphasizes the structure because the structure is really the hardest thing to maintain throughout the drawing. So I'm stating it clearly at the very beginning. And that way, I'll be able most likely to keep that clear, simple statement all the way through the drawing. If I go ahead and put the foundation in now. It's like putting the foundation of a house in, then putting the plumbing, right? And then putting, you know, all that structure in there that makes the house stand up. And if you didn't put it in, the house would blow over in any gust of wind All right, then I just established re established those marks that I made with a charcoal pencil so that they won't just be wiped away. And now I'm going to give it a tone that I could sort of draw out of or paint out of so that my nose emerges off the page from the fog. And then I go ahead and fill in my darks just to see if my design looks good. And to separate out the family of darks from the family of lights. I'm still keeping things flat and two D, right? Keep it flat. Don't go all the way black. Save that for your Black accents, and then just check it out and see if the proportions are good. And then I'm going back to my vine charcoal to fill in those blacks. Again, it's easy to erase out of those with the vine charcoal. And then I'll use my finger to smudge things to get edge control between hard and soft edges. And then I'll go back and forth between a charcoal pencil and fine charcoal. And the vine charcoal with the charcoal compressed is an awesome combination. So now I'm just going ahead and getting that side plane of the nose that's there. It's in the lights, really. So I'm in the lights, I'm putting another tone down a half tone just before it goes into a core shadow. And so now I have three values, light, middle, and dark, right? So I kept my shadow shapes very flat. And then starting to turn the form in the lights, just putting that half tone, the modeling tone and getting this thing to turn a little bit. And with the charcoal pencil, I can cross hatch and just again, keep the structural ideas going. Otherwise, it's too easy for it to turn into smudging and smudging turns into smearing, and then smearing looks like dirt and mud, and the drawing overall looks messy and dirty. So if I've got my structure there, I'll know where to shade and where to smudge, and it just holds up much better. There's that root of the nose where the bone is kind of a bony landmark for the nose. And then you've got the ball of the nose or the dome of the nose that's often divided in the Caucasian nose. I put a little hint of that. And that charcoal pencil sharpened up allows me for real subtle transitions through cross hatching very lightly and building it up. Then I'll use the tortilon to flatten out any areas that look a little noisy and a little too much contrast with light and dark just to flatten things out in the light side. You can take charcoal off with an eraser, but also the tortilon can remove loose charcoal and create nice subtle effects and a lot less destructive than an eraser. Okay, in the darks, now I'm introducing a one step darker tone. And that starts to define for me the reflected light in the dark shadow side, right? So I've got the nose hole the shadow under the septum, and you can see now the bounce light and reflected light emerge. You don't need a lot going on in there, right? It's the shadows. So keep it subtle. Don't confuse your values by letting the stuff in the darks get too light and the stuff in the lights get too dark, because then you'll get mud again. That's a value thing. If you know your values and can control them, you know, likely you're going to have a good outcome. And that's why I develop the drawing the way I do step by step because it allows me to control each stage, and that is what I need control. Okay, tortilon to get some real subtle subtle teas in there, plus my cheap eraser or paint brush, which is my finger. And then just lightening up the area next to the ball, the nose so that it pops out a little bit. And then going for the creme de la creme, the highlight. That's the icing on the cake. That's the funest part, and it really starts to complete the drawing. The illusion starts to emerge, and all that hard work is Not for not. It's for something. And that's good. Get a smaller eraser just to refine the highlight. And now I'm just gonna work around and look for edges, hard and soft, refine the forms. Try to bring this thing home. Noses aren't too easy, you know? They're kind of they're not the funneest thing to do, so I suppose, people don't study the nose or gravitate to the nose first, but it's definitely important. As I mentioned. So the process is sculped out, the planes, fill in and design your dark shadow shapes, put half tones in the light, and then put a step darker in the shadows. So at first, everything's flat and two D, and then you start to sculpt it out with introducing the half tone in the lights and the darker darks in the shadows. And then that's four values. And if you add a highlight, that's five values. So now we got our kind of three D analysis here, and Basically, that is what I kind of already recapped there, but you can see me doing that. There's the rhythm of the nose, that subtle one. If you know that, man, you can really connect the nose to the cheek and it'll look really spot on. So the ball, the nose, a circle, the wing of the nose, are the circles. And that is it. We got a good nose and three quarter view. Alright. 33. Ears digital drawing painting demo: All right, let's get into this. So the ear is quite a little complex organ on the body. And so what I found worked for me was that I just memorized the parts finely because I had to correct a lot of the ears throughout the years and draw a lot of ears. And so it just became obvious to me that I should commit this to memory, and so that might help you too. If we break down the ear, you can think of it as something like the letter C, with a Y inside. Letter Y. Or you can think of it as a letter C with another letter C in it, and then a little bump right there. Those are the major moves in the anatomy of the ear. This one is a little bit more cartoony. Okay, so you could use it like that. So, it could be you could think of it as a letter E and then a letter C or something like that, or the letter C with a Y inside. That's a little bit more realistic with a bump right there. So you've got letter C, you've got the letter Y, and then you have a little bump. Okay. That's called the tragus right there, this thing. So let us kind of move on here and draw the ear from, you know, the side, the front and the back. Okay? So you can chunk in the ear like this. The first time I did it, I use smooth curves, you're going to have this first third is the helix and anti helix. The middle third is going to be where the concha of the ear is. That's the opening. Then the last third is going to be just the cartilage right here in the ear lobe right there. So that idea of the letter Y, okay? I would just take this Y and come out, hit the bump of the rags, antitragus, and that's it. Okay, so let's do that again. I'm going to take these lines out of here. Bring up another layer. Okay, so we've got this letter C with a letter Y inside, kind of like that. There's a bump here, and then there's a bump there. And then here is where the actual ear hole is. And the bowl of the ear contains the ear hole. Okay? And this helix and anti helix. This has a thickness here around the outer edge of the ear, that helix. And there's a little dip Di do right there. Where's my Okay. So this right here, it's usually there's little depression right there. Okay. And there is a dark depression here, dark value where the folds of the tragus and antitragus kind of interlock there. And this tapers in, okay? And then there's that basically the ear hole there. And, of course, ears come in all different shapes and sizes, right? Some are going to be long and thin. Some are going to be a lot more circular. So some will be, you know, a lot longer and thinner. Some will be a lot more round. So with the letter Y inside. Some will have a big ear lobe. So are going to have no ear lobe at all and just taper right into the into the jaw, basically. Okay. So let's see. What else can we do here? I'm just going to give this a sense of shadow being cast right here. Let's assume that light's coming from above. So we've got a shadow of the tragus trying to get it to go a little thinner to paint. So let's just make it a little bit lighter. Okay. And in here is going to be dark as well. Just want to go a little bit lighter than that. Okay. We've got the edge of the ear lobe. It's kind of like a tube, so I'm going to just put a modeling tone on it so it turns away from us or appears to turn away from us. And this is going to go inside. And then we've got a little shadow down here. And then we can just lighten this stuff up a little bit. Let's see if we can do that. That's true light. Okay, right there. So I just put a little kind of a highlight in certain areas just to kind of get this thing to turn a little bit more. This can be. So once you memorize some of these basic moves, the ear is not going to be a problem for you anymore. And that's going to be a relief, let me tell you, because ears if you're struggling with them, you don't have to. That's the good news here. And so the ear sits basically its orientation. It sits behind the jaw. So the jaw is here in front and the ear sits behind the jaw, okay? If it didn't if it was in front of the jaw, your ears would be flapping every time you talked, right? So you don't want that. There's the jaw. Okay. And the ear is kind of like a little you can think of it as maybe a slice off of a tube, maybe. Think of this as like a tube. If you sliced off the end here, that's supposed to be a slice, and you would get you know you could get something like an ear out of that. So it has a thickness here, right? So it's thick. And that brings up, well, how do you draw the ear from the top or the bottom? Basically, simply, I just think of the ear. If I'm drawing from the top, I draw like that kind of slice there. Turns in. I make this part thicker than this part. So this part's a lot thicker, and it kind of sells the illusion of looking you're looking down On the ear. Okay? And if you're looking up, then I just do the exact opposite. So I draw my kind of C or even a letter D. And I just make this part, the bottom part a lot thicker than the top part. And that gets me started, gets me kind of in the ballpark. And so this I could probably even do it even more. And it might even have a bottom plane that you'd see more of. This is if you're looking up on this thing. Okay. So kind of I could help with that. All right, so let's take the ear from the another angle. Let's take it take it from the front. All right. Let's see if we can handle that. Um, I tell him what is my tool here, so I'm just going to put on some value here. No, let's not do that. Let's see here. Okay, so from the front, you've got the angle of the head right in there, the ear is going to come off that at an angle at about the same angle. Okay, so it's going to just come out like that. Little simple, like a disc. Almost like a letter D, italicized, letter D right there. Okay. And then it's going to connect right to the side of the head. So I'm going to have the tragus right there. Okay? And it's thick and it's going to turn under. That's going to be in the first third, the upper third of the ear. Oops. Got reset that. Okay. Then that's going to tend to really kind of be overlapped by the antitragus. We got tragus antitragus. A lot of times this can pop out right there. You're going to see it overlap the back part of the ear. It's overlapping then coming back in. Then we go to the helix anti helix, which makes up the cartilage of the ear. Then you're going to get this in here to complete y Okay. Let's do that again. Maybe that wasn't super clear. But this is going to overlap, and then come into the ear lobe. The other part of that letter Y or antitragus is going to come in like this and then do the helix. I think this is the helix up here. Anyway, lots of complicated names. And so we've got this tapering into the ear, and we've got the ear hole right in here. And this area is the conch of the ear. It's like the bowl of the ear. So that'll tend to be darker. It's going to be darker. Too dark. Okay. So then we're gonna have that little shape right in there, and we're going to have the shadow creating kind of that ridge or that rim of the ear on top. This is also going to get some shadow in here. Definitely going to be dark in there. And this stuff's going to kind of come out. It's going to be a little bit lighter so we can sell that illusion. But this is coming in front by the overlaps and also by the value. Okay. We'll put some little more value in here, start sculpting this thing out. Okay. So far so good? Where's that little I want to get that bump in there. Right there. Tragus antitragus relationship. And then let's go turn the ears, the ear lobes moving away from us, going away from us. A lot of times what I look for in the ear is just that what's really cool is when you see the ear that's back lit, and the light is doing kind of a subsurface scatter thing, it's entering into the tissue, the cartilage of the ear and just lighting it up. Sometimes it looks like fire. I'm sure you've noticed that. If you haven't look for it, it's really cool. You just see almost pure orange or pure pink depending on the light source behind it. That's really cool. I love that. Let's put a little highlight here. It highlight right there along the ridge showing you where the corner is. I got one here on the antitragus. I hope that's what it is. In here. Let's form that bowl of the concha. Coming along here. Dear. Get that a little lighter. Okay. Then we've got that really dark hold ear. I want to clarify that shape right there. Okay. It's looking good. It's looking right. Come on. Okay. Try to use this palette knife. Okay. So hair. Right there. A little shadow underneath. Et's go really dark there and bring that a hole out. So it's real obvious this stuff. Et's give this thing some color. Oh. I don't know about that, but I like that pink kind of, let's make it a little darker. But from the front, it's definitely this part sticking out, right? Overlapping. Okay. Let's do the ear from the back. But Okay. Ear from the back. I think we're going to draw this more. You can kind of think of the ear from the back as almost like an infinity, right? Comes around and goes this way. So roughly it's like an infinity. Okay. And it has a thickness, right? And in here is the bowl of the ear, right? Connects to the head. That's just like a disc or a cylinder. This is dark in here, right? And something like that. I can think of it like that. That's how I like to think of it. You've got this thickness here all along the edge of the ear. Thicken up at the bottom. Then there's the bowl of the ear or the conchas right there connecting to the side of the head. Okay. And let's make room for that bowl. That bowl is right in here. And then we've got the top of the bowl, the ear connecting to the head. And sometimes you can see little folds of skin there. Okay? So hair here. Let's get stuff. Okay? And then sometimes you can see little parts of the anatomy and stuff, just like a little V shape right there. You might see it. This is going to come back. All right. We're painting and drawing at the same time. Sometimes that's not easy. See if I can pull it off. Sometimes you got to mess things up and then bring it back again. All right, so it's going to be in light. It's going to move away from the light. Mm. Paints not mixing. Why is it not mixing? Cat's mixing a little bit better. Got to try to bang this thing into shape here. Try to get this thing to blend. Not like that. Not like that. No. A little bit more like that. Hmm. Remember, the way everything fits in, like, the way the ear fits in to the side of the head, if you can get it to fit in convincingly, your drawing will be that much more convincing to others. Okay? The way the connections happen, the way things fit together. If you can sell that idea, your drawing will be, yeah, in a much stronger kind of position to convince people of what it is. I can that is a fact. The little bump right back here called the achromim process. That's where the sternocltomastoid connects in to the skull. Little bump right there, called the mastoid process. Okay. Just to find the front of this ear. We don't often see the back of the ear, so it's kind of a little tricky to draw, right? You got to kind of get used to it somehow. And by drawing it over and over, that's the only way. Repetition, my friend, is the best way to go. Trying to get this back of his ear kind of in place. That looks kind of good. I can see that a little bit better if I light in the background a little bit, we can see the silhouette of the ear. This part is going to continue so we can see the top of the ear. It down with a little highlight again. But let's see if we can make this kind of come out or we would see maybe part of the back there. He coming out a little bit. We might see something like that, depending upon the angle, person, anatomy, and so on. Another thing to study. We can just hint at it, right? Or it might even just be the side of the head and something like that. It's like you see the back part of a disc, and so it's a bit thicker. Or maybe you don't even see you see the opposite way where this part of the disc and then connects to the head this way. As this line here. Okay, something like that. That's from the back. The back. Okay. A Okay, so you're going to see all kinds of different types of ears. Some are going to be long, narrow, lots of ear lobe. Something like that, right? So if you memorize it, it's a lot quicker to draw some of this stuff. Some are going to be really wide out like that, right? With no ear lobe right there, okay? And that's fun. I mean, so you can use this method to draw realistic ears or cartoony ears. Less information you put in there will be cartoony. I'll tend to be more realistic. And you might even get into some fantasy, you know, kind of pointee years too. Okay, so that helix anti helix, the helix contains the antihelix. Antihelix goes in underneath. Then the tragus here and the antitragus there contains the ear hole. Once you kind of begin to identify that stuff, it's going to just be like water. For sure. And then the ear just will not bother you anymore. So I think it's one of those things just commit it to memory, and it will come under your control. It will tame the ear and it will yield to you every time. So that's about it. We really covered a lot. We did the ear from the side and from the front. From the back. All right, so I hope you enjoyed that. You guys hope that was helpful to you. We'll see you in the next video. 34. 3 Sided Head part 1: Okay, the three sided head. Remember in the introduction, we talked about the face and how it's a broadcast screen, and it's a broadcast screen for people's stories. And if the figure is a song and I want to draw my figures like I'm writing, composing or orchestrating that song, then the head is the first verse, or if I'm writing a book, the head is the first chapter. And that's going to be exactly how it is for your paintings. We tend to look at things that are like us, no matter what kind of painting you make, if there's a figure in it, your audience is going to look for that figure and if they can see the face, they will focus on that face. So that's the mechanics of painting and that's the importance of the face the draw it really in a picture. So with the head, everything has a gesture and the head is the first gesture of the body. So the head flows with or against the other gestures of the figure. If you don't deal with the head as a gesture, it will tend to get stuck on. You can do a nice gesture of the figure. But if you put the head on last, it'll just get thrown out like a circle like that. Maybe it'll be too small or maybe it'll be just too big. And so you need to be conscious of that of starting with the head and that it is a gesture that relates to the rest of the body. So, the head has three gestures, okay? It's the gesture of the skull, the top of the head, the front of the face, and there's a gesture in the back of the cranium all the way to the chin. So there's three gestures there. The hardest part for people starting drawing is basically the beginning. It's that reticence of making a mark on the page that can be pretty intimidating. And so let's start there. Sometimes that can just stop people right away. So we need a really simple shape that can help with this problem. And you know, we could start with the head with a simple shape, maybe like this, right? That's basic, but maybe it's too simple, and it doesn't really look like the head we want. It's not very satisfying. Okay? So maybe we can start with two ovals. That's okay. That's not bad. We could start with an oval and a triangle. Okay, that's good. How about this? This is a great shape. It's a great shape because it's designed. It's designed to catch wind and pull that ship across the surface of the water. That's an amazing thing, and a well designed sail can do that, and it has power. So we want to use a shape that has power because our drawings need power. They need gravitas, really, on the page to draw our audience in. So let's use that shape. Um we're gonna start with that shape. And it'll be like a sailboat shape, kind of, you know, like this. That's a bulging triangle. We flipped the sail a little bit, 90 degrees. This shape has three gestures, one, two, and three, and it's got curves, and it's got corners. The curves and the corners give it life. The curves give it life, the corners give it structure. That's what's so great about this shape. It has a balance of both. If we take the head, basically starting in any kind profile, okay? We'll make this easy for ourself. The head in profile fits basically in a box. Okay? So that's without the nose and without the hairstyle, right? Because the nose breaks out of the box and the hairstyle can break out of the box as well. And so the back of the head is a little bit higher than the front of the head, so the back is a little bit higher than the front. And that jaw comes out a little bit more than the forehead. It kind of juts out just a little bit. Okay. So this will give us, you know, any kind of a profile, we'll be seeing a lot of the skull or quite a bit of the skull and quite a bit of the back of the head can work. So it's three quarter front to three quarter back. Um, so let's divide that up into that square. If I divide that horizontally, the eyes are basically in the center. The eyebrows are just a little bit above that. And halfway is the nose. So just from here to here is dividing this into thirds. And we're going to place the ear because when we place the ear, that's going to really do a lot for us. The ear basically sits in that middle third right here. So I'm going to line that up. It sits in the middle third and at an angle, maybe a 35 degree angle, something like that. And it sits right there. So what does that do for us? Well, basically, placing the ear helps us check for errors. So it's a good checking mechanism, checking for proportion and so on, at the beginning stage. And it also separates the two shapes. So we've got the mask of the face and the back part of the face. And it's also going to be helpful to place the head in the second and third dimensions. Okay? So that's what it's really helpful for. When I'm choosing my simple shapes for anything I'm trying to draw, I'm trying to design a simple basic shape. It has to meet two criteria. It has to be basic and it has to be distinctive of what it is I'm trying to draw. So if it's basic, basically, I can get it down quick. I can draw it quickly. Now, drawing quickly is making good, simple, thoughtful decisions. It's not scribbling, drawing really fast or speed paintings and all that sort of stuff. And if I can get it down quick and I can get it down clear, then I can capture my audience's attention. I can get the attention of the audience and that's what I want. I want their attention. So that's key. If I can make a good clear statement like I hate school. That's a good clear statement, and it might capture the audience attention. Then I can go on and write a song about it. I can write 52 chapters in a book and make a movie, a sequel, and so on. So based on that, um, based on that good clear beginning, I put myself in a good spot to keep the audience's attention. And our mind is kind of made to find meaning around us, and it's going to call all of that data, but a lot of the data it sees, it's going to edit out, and it's going to look for commonalities, connections to make that meaning for us so we can navigate our way through the world or that moment so it's going to do its best to bring things together and make relationships and meaning between those things. Sometimes the things around are desperate and isolated. If you're an artist, your job is to bring things together, isolated things, unrelated things, and bring them together in a new way for people. So the song isn't just a bunch of notes. It's notes put together in a song. It's not just dance steps. It's the chacha, the Samba, the Ramba. You put them together and you make some meaning out of it. Okay. So if my shape, my well designed shape that's basic, what can I do? I can I can animate it. Okay? So Pac Man is just that simple shape, I can do this all day long. I can do thousands of drawings of Pacman, a lot of footage and get him to do everything I want to do, and I don't have to think about any of the anatomy of the face, no muscles, no bones. Nothing. And that's really what I want. I want to simplify my workflow, totally. So, but maybe, you know, you're not an animator. You're a painter. Well, I can animate my poses. I can animate my figures in my paintings or in my storyboards by pushing the pose, like Michelangelo would do or RubenzFrazeta would do that. He's a great one. And he's just got these great, you know, positions, contorted figures that maybe they just look so heroic and like they're about to do something or doing something. The action is awesome, and you do that with, you know, gesture. You do that with exaggerating the pose and that's kind of comes from animation. So if I can make my shape basic enough, then I can design and redesign. So if you want to work for films and movie and TV and visual development concept art, then you're going to have to when you're designing characters, then you're going to have to design and redesign, that's your job. So it's going to help you be able to do it faster, make changes quicker. And it's going to help you be versatile because everything that you can draw is made up of probably three or four basic forms, and we'll get to that later. But if you can learn those forms, then you can innovate. You can add forms and stretch them out. You can divide the forms, and just start playing with the basic forms and come up with an infinite amount of ideas and characters. Only does our shape have to be basic, but it has to be distinctive of what we see if I have to stop, art director pulls me off the job and says, Hey, Chris, I want you to do this, and I have to hand that work off to someone, then I at least my idea is clear, right? It's a good, clear idea that communicates something and I can give it to someone, and they're going to be able to execute that idea and build on it and keep going. So that's really valuable because if you have to leave the job, you have a break, something comes up. When you come back to what you were drawing, you'll have that simple idea there and it'll be clear and you'll remember what your thought process was and then be able to continue building on that. If it's distinctive, it's going to have excellent connections, right? So the head is connected to the rib cage by the neck, right? Those connections, the structures are connected by the gestures. Those are really important because they're the connection from one thing to another. If your joints don't look good, your audience will know it. If something's wrong with your drawing, your audience sees that right away. The joints are important for animation, and if they don't look like they can move, the audience will figure that out, see that. Same thing for three D modeling, those joints are where the action takes place and they won't move correctly. They won't work right for animation. So they have to be rigged correctly for the animator to be able to animate it. And if they're not, that's going to it's going to have to be redone. So if your connections are off, your drawing is going to be off. So if my head is connected by my neck to the rib cage, but that connection right there is off, right? Then I don't take care to fix it, then the next connection is off. The next thing is off, and the whole things just a total disaster. Okay? So connections are super important. So let me get that down. The connections. That is super important. If you have to stop, you can pass that idea on to someone else that person can take it cantinue working on it or you can stop and then pick it back up because your idea is there and then continue on and finish. Okay, let's do a set of two minute drawings to practice what we've learned so far, feel free to draw along with me. 54, three, two, one. Five, four, three, two, one. Five, four, three, two, one. Five, four, three, two, one. Five, four, three, two, one. Five, four, three, two, one. 35. 3 sided head part 2: Okay, so getting back to our sailboat, bulging triangle ahead for a good, basic but characteristic shape. It's got the curves and the corners. And the structure, if you're going to draw structure, you can it doesn't have to be stiff, right? You can bring some life into it by gesture, right? You can bend those lines. Right? You can take those corners, you can round them off and make that block of ice become a character, a moving character, just by the gesture. A lot of people make a mistake when they place that ear in the middle third, right? And it's sitting there at the halfway point, a little bit behind the halfway point. A big mistake that people make is they don't fit it inside a box. So the head is like this and it's too thin, because they don't take account of the cranium there. Okay. And so the ear is basically the only feature on the side of the head, so that's good. So on the front of the head are all the features, eyes, nose, mouth, and the side of the head is the ear only. So that's good because it creates like a corner for us. If we line up the eyes with the ear, the two planes come together to form a corner, an inside edge, right? And so that's going to be able to tell me when I'm looking up at something or down at something, right? So if I have a box like this, right? That lining up that corner can help me really quickly establish this thing. I can tell you it's direction and space. It's looking down. This is looking up, right? By just that inside corner and establishing that. So that's what this does for us. So let's take that So if I take that bulging triangle, and let's say I place the ear here. Well, where are we? Let's take a look at what placing the ear can really do for us on this model. The ear has a way of really telling us where the head is in space. We can get a lot out of this just by way we put the ears. If you look at the model and the model starts to tilt, where does the ear go? It crowds out the top of the skull. That's how you can tell we're looking up. If we go the other way, the ear starts to crowd out the bottom jaw line. If we go this way, the ear starts to crowd out the front of the face and so on. The opposite way, the ear will start to crowd out the back of the cranium. So where we put that ear is crucial. Okay, let's come back and finish this idea here. So we had the mistake. Common mistake is that the head is just too thin, okay? And doesn't look right, okay? So we've got the ear here, and it's just floating there. And I don't want my features to float. I don't want anything to float there and be unconnected. So I want things to connect and touch, right? Because when they touch, then you can see the relationships and they look more believable. So I'm going to try to touch that. I'm going to touch that ear to the mask of the face. So I'm gonna bring a line from the forehead over to the ear down through the jaw and back up to the front. That's the mask of the face. Okay, I'm going to place the nose the tooth cylinder. And I've got myself a pretty good face right there, okay? Highbrow. For the mask, the hairline, could be just a simple shape like that, but I might break it up into a more characteristic kind of note there. And that kind of helps me to break up that space from, let's say, the forehead back to that ear or to the front of the ear. It's a pretty big distance. So I can break it up into smaller distances and that helps me a lot. So right from the forehead to that outer part of the eyebrow to the side burn to the ear, I can get there. Okay. The back of the neck starts around the eyeline, and it can go this way and that way. Okay, so it's kind of like a nice hourglass shape. It's wider at the top than it is on the bottom. And I can bring for, let's say, a woman, it can go this way and have this nice hourglass shape, but a guy would tend to go the other way. So let me draw that real quick. Right, so here's Here's a guy's head, and his neck can go this way. Right? And so that kind of looks a little bit more how a guy's neck looks. And there's kind of like that characteristic sway, right? It doesn't just sit. And here's another mistake people make. They put oval on top of a stick, right? Or even just that kind of triangle shape and then make the neck straight up and down. That looks stiff and pretty unconvincing. You want to put that gesture in there and give that piece of structure some life by bending the sides, bending the lines, and that works much better. So I've got my neck coming down here, and then I can basically put in part of the neck muscle right there and touch the ear with that. Now I've got some really good connections happening because I've connected the ear to the mask of the face, to the jaw, and down to the pit of the neck. I'm well connected and it looks better. To the back of the head, there's roughly one ear that'll get me back there, so keep that in mind. If we do this again, Oh. Now watch what happens when I place the ear, a little bit this way. Now we're a little more three quarter back because the ear tends to crowd out the front of the face as you turn away. You can see my ear is crowding out the front of my face, and so that's what's happening here. I'm going to touch it to the mask of the face, bring that jaw line, touch it to the eyebrow. And there it is. Okay, so that's pretty, you know, pretty quick to be able to do that. And then to get to where the back of the head is, right? I can find one ear's distance and that'll get me right to where that inside corner is, and then I can make that kind of change and establish the box and turn this thing into a more convincing head. And the eyeline here is where the head connects and the neck starts. So I can bring the neck muscle down into the shoulder muscle. And I've got that good strong connection from that neck muscle from the ear right down to the pit of the neck. That's the sternocleto mastoid and that's there. And how that fits, right? That can be a front of the neck like this. It can be even a back like that. See that? There's the C seven right there, and then onto the thoracic part of the vertebrae. And so we've got this now situated where we're actually three quarterback, and we're looking at the back of the neck now, whereas before we were looking at the front. Now, that's really cool. That's really cool. That's powerful. So let's do it one more time, and draw that same shape. We're not changing anything. See how much we can get just out of that simple, well designed distinctive shape. And I'm going to put the ear out here and I'm going to draw The ear a little bit thicker. Here we get that thicker edge. If you think of the ear as kind a slice of salami, right? I just cut this part and I end up with this kind of shape like that. That's like an ear. That's what I'm doing. I'm thickening up this top part. On the bottom, if you're looking up, you can thicken up the bottom part of the ear. I just gives it that little extra sense to the viewer where they're at. So if I find this inside corner, now and the ear is down crowding the jaw, I'm up above looking down three quarter front. That's amazing amazing stuff. So you want to think about your shapes, design them, make them simple, make them, you know, distinctive of what it is. And then you'll be able to start designing your own stuff. You'll be able to draw faster. If you're doing storyboards, you need to knock out. Lots of frames per day. And I did lots of this on storyboards, and I used this exact idea to, you know, speed the workflow a time, you know, is money. So, hey, I hope that this really helped you because it really helped me. And I got this from Steve Houston. He's a great teacher, and he teaches it so beautifully, and I just wanted to share it with you today. Alright, let's do another set. This time, it'll be three, five minute head drawings, and feel free to draw along with me. He No. Five, four, three, two, one. Five, four, three, two, one. 36. Head three quarter view 1: In portraiture, you basically have front side, and three quarter views to work with. I'm going to talk about the three quarter view now. But before I do that, we've already looked at the front view planes of the face, but I'm just going to recap real quick. So from the front, you have a silhouette that's basically an egg shape, and it's an oval with some variation from the ears and the hairstyle. So it doesn't have much variety in terms of the silhouette. It's pretty straight on, a little bit boring from a design perspective. But it's bilaterally symmetrical. That means from top to bottom, the features on the right and left sides are exactly the same all the way down. They're equal and equally represented on either side of the vertical line. The big problem is to keep the features lined up correctly, from side to side, from left to right, and so that they're the same size and that they're on the same horizontal position, and we don't want them sliding down the face like that because then they're not symmetrical anymore. So that's the big challenge is to kind of keep everything lined up straight and not sliding down the face, unequal position of the eyes, and even unequal sizing of both the eyes. So the front view is pretty straight on. And so from a psychological perspective, it's really in your face. It's domineering. There's nowhere to go to escape the gaze of this person in the picture. So you may want to use this angle to portray a person with a powerful personality who is to be reckoned with in some way. It's also someone who's not afraid and very confident, especially if the eyes have life in them. If you're creating a character, it could be the hero or villain, or it could even be a monster. So you could use it for a hero, villain. Monster because it's very confident and it's in your face, so to speak. There's no way to get away from it. All right. So let's go to the three quarter view now. And when we go to three quarter View, you can really see when I start to turn it that this position is a lot more in perspective than the front view, and we can really see the structural nature of it because come over here. You can start to see how there's that little notch from the brow to the cheek and down. Then there's the cut in from the chin to the neck. You start to see an interesting silhouette design wise. And from a structural point of view, every head has a front, two sides, a top and a bottom. So it has a front, a side here, side on the other side, a top and a bottom plane under here, right? So it's got a front, two sides, top and bottom. So we start to see that structural architectural nature of the head. And it's because the front plane and the side plane intersect to form an inside corner. So you can kind of see this corner if we just box it up, right? Well, let's draw a box. If we draw a box in perspective, there's my box. We have this plane on the right side, and then we have a plane on the left side. And right there is that corner. It's that inside corner that gives us the ability, the power of the box is that it can describe the form, not only describe it, but show its orientation in space, show its direction in space. There's no question that this box, if we call this the front, it's facing this way. You can't really get that out of a tube. You know, a tube, we can describe the form, but we can't really show. There's no inside corner to show which way it's facing. We don't know if it's facing this way or if it's facing that way. Okay, so the box is the real star primitive shape that we're going to use because the box is simple and it's distinctive. Of the head. And it allows us some advantages. We can get it down quick, right? And that's huge. So its main attribute. We can get it down quick and it can show the head's direction in space, right? So it can show where that person is looking without a doubt. It's the best shape for that. So the box had that inside corner, and so we're going to have that same kind of opportunity for an inside corner, right? It's not strictly a box. It's not exactly like a box, but there's where that shadow is that core shadow that runs down the side here, that shows that there's a plane change. Definitely, there's a front and a side and a top, right? So the more we can show off the boxy nature of the head the stronger our drawing is going to look in the end, it's going to look more believable. It's going to look more solid and three D on the page. It's something that you can overstate in the beginning. I would suggest doing that. Then you can back off of it later in the drawing. You draw really lightly. As kind of a workflow. You draw lightly first, and that way you can erase it out later or draw over it later and finess it so that it looks more like a human face or human head. So from a psychological point of view, the three quarter heads less confrontive. That's confrontational. To the viewer, okay? So the gaze is not straight on. It's off to the side. So there's some psychological distance there, and so it's basically less tension for the viewer than the previous straight on gaze. There's more room for nuance. It can basically be contemplative. Moody, right? It can show someone's character, even. It convey, like, maybe a noble character. Um it can even signify or be used for a friendly invitation. So from a psychological point of view, there's a lot more room, a lot less stress and tension for the viewer, and you can use it in all these different ways. If I just do a box like structure over the face, we're going to see we're going to make some observations here. All right, we're going to see, obviously, it's not a true box, but it's box like. The chin is narrower than the forehead. So it's a tapered box from top to bottom. It's thick here, thin here. Then the back we have a cutout from the neck to the jaw line. So this part of the box is cut out. Other than that, it's very boxy, and then of course, we can round it out at the top. Okay. And cut the notch out of the orbit of the eye. You can start to see that we need to line up the features along a perspective grid that go out to the vanishing point out here somewhere. But basically, we're not going to overdo that, but we should keep that in mind that these features will line up. The eyes will line up with a vanishing point and the ear, the solo feature on the side of the head will go to another vanishing point over on the right side, right vanishing point. So it's a box and space. You don't have to know a lot of perspective for that. But that's the general idea. You can quickly bang this thing into shape to look more characteristic of a human head. Within the three quarter view, you'll have a soft three quarter, a three quarter, a true three quarter, and then a hard three quarter that's in between three quarter and, let's say, a strict profile. That's where the nose, you can see breaks that breaks that plane right there. The nose comes. Okay? That's a hard three quarter. So those positions are good to know in case you want to communicate to someone on your team what your vision is and have them do it, and so on. Okay, we'll see you in the next video. 37. Head three quarter view 2: Alright, let me note a few important things on the three quarter view before I go and draw one. And the first thing is the division of the front plane to the side plane in the face, and there's an S curve there. You could simplify it to its most basic like that from the front plane, going to the side plane. So front to the side, like that. And you could lay it in almost, you could say, like a letter S. You can also see sometimes I'll just say, I can do this move in a certain amount of moves, one, two, three, four, five, six, right? So that's the chin, top plane, side plane, right? So you have forehead, the front plane, underplane to the eyebrow, then top shelf on the lower part of the orbit of the eye then down the front side of the cheek, all the way to the chin box, like that. So that's one, two, three, four, five, six moves. You could even do it maybe in less than that, but I'd say six is pretty good. So just memorize that and get those series of sequence of moves down, and it just helps your workflow a lot more. The other thing is here you can see on the left side, the eye to the nose is like a number two, with a little triangle at the bottom for the bottom plane. So you can see here a number two with a triangle at the bottom. All right. You can also lay it in like a prism, so the nose can be thought of as a simple prism, thinner at the top at the root of the nose than at the ball of the nose. Right. But like that. Okay? A simple prism. Make sure your nose is I'm just going to put a tone for the side plane and underplane so you can see it better. Make sure that it is emerging out from the surface of the face. So a big problem that I run into with my students is that they have a nose, right, and it's too flat. It goes straight down so it doesn't look like it doesn't look three D. It doesn't look like it's coming off of the nose. So make sure that when you do that, it's sticking out at an angle. Okay? Maybe it's better to overstate it a little bit so you get the idea of it. Okay, so it's sticking out, right? It's sticking out this way. So this one, don't do it. This one is okay. All right. One final thing is when you're dealing with foreshortening, if I have a tube and you're looking at its side and it has stripes on it, right? Things become more curved when they're foreshortened. So if I lift this tube up this way towards us, this end here coming toward us, right, then those stripes become curved, much more curved, okay? So on the model, the eyes, for instance, from that straight on view, you have the lids are like that. They're curved, right? But when you turn the model away foreshortening, that far eye for sure, watch what happens with the curve. It starts to really become curved, much more than this top one here, right? It's a lot more curve. The curve is accelerated, so to speak, okay? So you've got something like like that. So this is the top part of the lid. This is the inside. So you've got the top part over here and then the inside right there. So it's kind of something like like that, that's the inside inside, top. So the peak of that curve has moved from here to here. Okay, right there. Same thing with this other eyelid closest to us. It's still the peak moves from somewhere in here to now here. The farther eye is much smaller in width. So not only does the curve get more curvy, it gets smaller, the more foreshortened it is. Okay. So you might want to practice something like this, right? It's like a piece of paper folded over, and you find this in eyelids, even the mouth or even ribs as they turn around. Right? They kind of go away from you. This side's closest. This side's far, and it's turning away. It's that kind of twisted piece of paper, right? And just practice that move. Even works for teeth. This could be teeth right here. Okay? All right, so let's move on to drawing the demo of the three quarter View. 38. Charcoal demo 3 Head in 3:4 view: Alright, when drawing the head in three quarter, the two things we need to focus in on the most are the structure and the proportion of it. So I'm going to start with the head straight on and then get it to turn, and I'll show you how to do that. So I'll start with an oval that's three units high to two units wide. Bisect it down the middle vertically and horizontally. Then I'm going to take an arc and get its gaze to turn to the left. And then this little space right here, that distance, I'm going to add almost that distance to the back. And then swing an arc this way and connect it to where the nose would be, and that's going to get us back part of the cranial mass. And you can see if I just bringing a little notch right here, how that's going to kind of work out. Put in the idea of a cheek. And now I think you can probably see it. Okay, let's divide the front half the face from the side plane. I'll just swing the simple S curve and put a tone in so you can see. So we have front plane, side plane, and the forehead curve. So we'll just bring it around this way, almost in a contrary motion to that. Okay. Now the visor will swing an arc here from one side to the other and bring it into shadow here. Protecting the eyes. I will swing That's part of the globla in here, but it's an awning that protects windows, right? Okay, then the nose can be a number two with a triangle at the bottom, or it can be a prism. So let's go with the idea of the prism, so I'm going to bring out a keystone here. And then pull the root of the nose. And where it ends will be from the top of the brow to the bottom of the chin halfway will be the bottom of the nose. All right? So let's get that in. And that prism shape is very effective. It's so simple and so clear. Once we get it in, let's bring in the side plane. Bottom plane. Okay. And now we're going to bring in the muzzle of the mouth or the barrel or the two cylinder, and I'll literally just draw a barrel here. On one side and the other. You can probably see here, I'm going to point out that the front plane of the face is this straight line here. But the arc of that barrel, the plane of that barrel is this curve line here. You don't want to draw it flat because then too soon, the tooth won't look like a form that's projecting away from the front plane of the face. I'm just going to put this in tone here. These sides go back and I put tone at the bottom. Then we have the chin. We'll state that a box to make it clear. You want to overstate the box at the beginning and then you can pull it back later. Start with this boxy shape and then we can finesse it into something more like a human face later. Cheekbone from the brow and swinging around. And make sure we get that symmetry on both sides and the enigmatic arch back to the ear. That's there. Okay, now we can start to put in the eyes now that we've built housing for the eyes. So the eye is almond shape, and the tear duct you can find will not intrude any further in than the wing of the nose. I'm just going to make sure it doesn't do that and start my tear duct here. If it is goes further in, it looks cross eyed. So here's my tear duct. I swing a curve here out on the inside because I'm jowing something like this and practicing drawing these kinds of curves just like that. Outside inside. Inside and shadow outside is here. Then I'll draw the lower lid here. I'll give that lower lid a nice thickening because the ball of the eye is mostly resides under the lower lid, not the upper lid. Little tone here. Okay. This part, you'll see the bone of the orbit the eye socket really tight against the eye and then this part will be in deep shadow here usually. Let's put the iris in sense of where that's going to be. I'll just give that a tone. I sure it's spaced and placed in the right place. Okay. Once we've got that in We can go ahead and put the other eye and on the other side, so I'm just going to make sure they're lined up along this line so the eyes don't sag. We'll find that tear duct and then make that curve a lot more exaggerated on the foreshortened side. So anything that goes into foreshortening is more round. Get the top part of that orbital bone here, put this in some shadow here, let's build out the lower lid. And show its thickening here. Iris put more of an oval because it's in perspective against the eye that's closer to us. I'll be more of an oval shape. Let's just clarify this a little bit. Okay. All right. Let's work on that nose. First third of the nose is bone, the nasal bone, second and two thirds of the nose is cartilage. There's the ball, the nose and one third. There's that middle third in cartilage, and then the top third is in bone. We'll just go ahead and put this in. Now that lower part is in a shape like a trapezoidal shape coming in and interlocking with that first trapezoidal shape up here. Then we have the wing of the nose. Then it's like a disc with a thickness. And then the other side we see it barely see it depends on the person. Let's put a shadow on top of the barrel of the mouth. Okay. And then the nasal passages, there's a rhythm here from one side to the other side. And I remember the first time I saw this I was on a plane, and the stewardess leaned over and said, Would you like something to drink? And when I looked up, she crinkled her nose, and I saw this rhythm, just like that. And my teacher had been had taught me the rhythms and the Riley rhythms, and there it was. I saw it, and it was mine forever. I couldn't unsee it. That's the funny thing about once you learn something, it's hard to unlearn it. Right. Sometimes that's a good thing. It's just a continual refining of each part, each phase that we do, getting it closer and closer to reality, hopefully. Now that ball of the nose is separated a lot of times into two spheroid shapes. I can go ahead and put that in. Okay. Tighten up that shadow there. All right, so let's do the mouth. So now that we've got the pupils in, we can drop straight line down on one side, and that's going to give us the ends of the mouth and the width of the jaw. So that relationship is there between pupil straight line down. You can catch the side of the mouth or the terminus of the lips and the width of the jaw. Now, if you're not aware of that and you don't take that into account, then the jaw can become crooked easily, right? So this is the way to check your drawing and make sure that that doesn't happen. Okay, so bottom of the nose, bottom of the chin, in the middle is roughly where the split of the lips is going to be. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and swing an arc out. I go this way. Take a little bit from there, so I've got a like an M shape. I'm going to echo that M shape. And bird wings. I'll give that top lip a tone here because it's usually in shadow facing plane facing away from the light. Then let's go ahead and put in the lower lip. Upper lip is superior to the lower lip. The lower lip comes out from the upper lip. And it's quite pillowed here in two distinct forms. Remember this is a blueprint. It's a schematic. It's an analysis. It's not a pretty picture, really. Don't worry if it, it looks a little robotic. It it's supposed to look that way. Under the lower lip is usually in shadow, and I'm going to make a W shape right here. Then that meets the top plane of the chin and front plane of the chin. Now we can round out that chin to make it more characteristic of human face here. Right? So we start out very low resolution, very blocky, and then we round things out as we go. Now, at the terminus of the lips, that's very tight right there, so I can put a shadow in here. A slight upturn. See how that lower lip comes out from the upper lip and I'll put a tone here indicating the plane change as it goes away from the front of the face. We have the front lip and then side plane of the lip inside as it goes back. Also, there's a plane change here too, just as the lip comes out and then goes down, it comes out and then down with that. Okay, so with the sutures of the lip, we have the mascular node. I'm going to put that in. And that's real subtle. If your lips just end, sometimes it looks a little weird. But if you can indicate just a little bit of this mascular node, sometimes that does the trick. And it's very subtle. But if you look for it, it's there many times. I'm going to go ahead and finish off that far side of the cheek. The cheek will go no lower than the bottom of the nose. Let's bring that into focus here. There's an interlocking here. Sometimes it can go back up into here and lock in with the temple or the side plane, depending on the lighting. Let's just strengthen this up a little bit here. Let's see how that brow fits in to the cranium here. I'll clarify that tone to push it back a little bit in space. You don't need to draw pupils and eyelashes and stuff, get the shapes and the values right and it'll read for you. Okay. Now we can go ahead and I think we're ready to put the ear in. We can just clarify things a little. Let's bring this plane change here a little bit more into focus. Okay. Little sense of where the neck might be. There we go. Put looking at the ear a little bit here. Here is going to be at an angle about 11 degrees this way from the middle of the head and back. We swing guideline out from the brow and bottom of the nose, go ahead and just swing the C curve right here. There it is C curve with a letter Y inside. The top third is the curve. The middle part is the bowl and then the lower third is the lobe it connects in back of the jaw just bring that out and some shadow in the bowl. There we have our ear emerging. Let's bring in the master here, separating the front of the jaw from the back of the jaw. That's your chewing muscle. Okay. And then let's let's put in the eyebrow so how I can do that is an angle from that top lid onto the forehead and back down to the other side. All right. It's like a little triangle that sits up there and the brow starts underneath. The eyebrow starts underneath and swings over to the top on the front of the face, right on the front of the forehead. It starts underneath, goes up and over, kind of like a bird wing. And the younger the person, the thicker the eyebrow. Remember that. The older the person, the thinner the eyebrow. Then let's complete the front part of the orbit of the eye. We've got top part of the orbit of the eye just swings here and goes this way. It goes this way. I'll this. It's somewhere in the middle of the nose. That's where the top part, it's actually the lower part of the orbital bone comes down and then it completes itself here like this, completes itself here like this. If you want to draw someone looking old, you can add bags right there, bags to the eyes and more wrinkles. I'll make sense because you know where to do it. Then there's that front part of the cheek there. But really now you can see some distinct plane changes there that you have let's say that the front part of the cheek or the top part of the eye socket, which will get light, and then the front part of the cheek, which will get less light, and then it turns under top front turns under. So long we're describing things, we're giving good descriptions, then we're doing okay. We're doing real okay. Okay, it's time for the hair. So we can come down to about a third of the way down the forehead, let's say, and then a lot of different hairstyle, but basically come back like that. Then we come down to sideburn. Then over. All right. So you can have all kinds of different hairstyles. Could be geled up, right? Could be crop short, could be long. But if you treat it like a toe that also has plane changes, then don't worry about drawing strands everywhere. Just get the shapes and the values in The more corners you have, the more boxy it's going to look, the more masculine it'll look, the more curves you have, the more feminine it's going to look. All right. So as it goes away from the light, it'll get a toe, as it goes towards the light, it'll get lighter. No. All right, so there we go. We have ourselves a head and three quarters here. Clean that up a little bit. It's a little plane change that happens here. It goes from forehead, step down, and then it goes to the side plane. So as long as you're describing the plane changes, right? Stepping out, going under, right? Top lid, under front of the sclera, top plane side plane, and then we go to the front and down. See, it's a real stair steppyk thing. It's just going out, down over out. It's kind of like that. All right. Like stairs almost. As long as you're getting those kind of descriptions in, you're definitely going to drawings are going to be better than so many other drawings out there and better than your past drawings. Don't compare yourself to others because just compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And if you're making progress, that's good enough. Absolutely good enough. That's realistic to measure progress like that. Okay. So there we have it, the head in three quarter. We'll see you in the next video. 39. Section 5: Designing VS Drawing: And Alright, I'm going to teach you a couple of principles and a workflow that's going to massively speed up your work process and lessen the amount of work you have to do. I call it the shape value graphic workflow. And this is going to free you from the constraints of copying and being limited to photos that you find on Google and Pinterst, all those references, they'll be very valuable, but they'll be even more valuable because you'll be able to create your own imagery and use that stuff as source files. So let me show you what I mean. You're going to need basically two tools to make a drawing or painting work. There shape and value. So you're going to be thinking in terms of silhouettes. The shape contains the value, and the value informs the shape. So the information that you put inside of a silhouette is going to tell us what it is. Now, the simple but characteristic silhouettes of what you see is what you're really shooting for. So in the very simple example in the top, you can see the left silhouette is characteristic but simple shape of a sphere, and how we come back in and mass in the value and create a tonal structure says that even more that this is a sphere, and it turns away from the light slowly so there's no hard edges, et cetera. Basically massing in the shapes of value and color and then coming back in and imposing the drawing on it. Just think in terms of broad masses that start out flat and graphic and then start to become forms as you introduce tonal variation within. Got it? Good. So this really has more to do with design than drawing. And this is a separate issue that people don't think about. The design is just as much a part of it as the drawing is. And if you can design and draw or do your designing upfront and then do your detail finishing, texture work afterwards, you get a much better result, in my opinion, and a much smoother workflow as a result. So we think in terms of a three value graphic system, keeping it very simple. Dark, middle, and light. And they're all kept very flat at the beginning. So you've got basically four options when you're considering a portrait or a figure drawing. You've got a figure against a wall. We could start there. That's our most simplest statement. Or we could have a light figure on a dark background. Or the figure is dark and the background is light or the background is middle And the figure is full value. Or the figure is middle. And the background is light and dark or full value, in other words. All right, so those are your four options. Light figure on a dark background. So you've got light on dark. You've got dark figure on a light background. You've got a full value figure on a middle background. That's middle value. So full value middle value. And then you've got a middle value figure on a full value background. So I'm just using MV for middle value and FV for full value. Now, before you start rendering anything, you can do two more graphic steps to fine tune your image, and let's go over those. The first one is gradations, and the second one is edges. Let's look at the first one gradations. Let's start with a middle value figure just breaking away from the white background. All right. What if I took a gradation and gradated it from middle dark to light from the bottom? What happens? You start to notice the head first. So I'm starting to direct your attention here. And that's because the gradation at the bottom is similar to value that the body is. And so you don't notice it at first, whereas the contrast is there in the head. And what if I took a gradation and gradated from the head down to the body, from dark to middle. Now what? You see the head even more powerfully than before because the eye goes to the area of greatest contrast, contrast of value, contrast of edge, and so that head comes out, so I'm fine tuning it. You still have a figure breaking away from the background, but now you notice the head first. What if I took it and gradated it from bottom right to top left? Then what happens? You start to notice the left side of the head even more than the right side of the head. So just by adding these gradations, I'm fine tuning the image and directing your attention. I where I want. So I'm wanting to use these things. Now, you want to use these things to advance your story. So use them in service to the narrative that you're trying to tell. Maybe that character has something they want us to see, or maybe there's a clue that we need to understand the story or advance in the game if you're playing games. Okay, so what did we have at first? We had a character middle value breaking away from the background. And then we gradated that character from bottom to top. So we still had the character breaking away from the background, but we noticed the head before we noticed the body. And then we took the character. Then we gradated from the top of the character's head down into the body, and then we noticed the head even more powerfully than before, right? And then we just gradated from bottom right to top left. And then we got you to look at the left shoulder or the left part of the head before you saw the right part of the head. So if there was a window in the background, that might start to compete because they have similar value contrast and edge contrast. The head is coming forward a little bit more than that window. But let's say I wanted to just quiet that window down a little bit. I could just gradate and soften it up. So now we just pushed it back into the background just a little bit. So there's so many possibilities you can gradate from left to right, top to bottom. And before you've rendered anything, and I'd really recommend doing this because it's so powerful. And if you have reference that doesn't look like this, you can go ahead and start to orchestrate your own original tonal structure into it. So did you notice how we used the power of the silhouette and three values with no detail, no rendering, just flat massing in of the value to do all that work for us? We got that sense of a figure emerging. They're sitting in space. There's depth in the picture plane. And yet that silhouette tells us it's a person. So it's so powerful. It's so exciting. I love it. Okay, let's move on to the edges. I'm going to make this one a middle value background and a full value figure. I want to make it a design problem before I make it a rendering problem, because if you can control the silhouette given you and the gradations, make it a silhouette that separates out instead of a detailed rendering that makes it separate. The rendering is optional. You can do it, but you don't have to do. If I want you to notice something one area more than another area, I'll increase the contrast. And if you render everything and show it all at once, you do run the risk of someone getting bored or overwhelmed. Whereas, if you reveal things over time, you can keep someone there longer. Plus, if everything is in high detail and revealed all at once, then people don't know where to look because everything is loud, so to speak, and competing for your attention. For example, do you hear the air blower? If it gets louder and louder, you won't be able to concentrate on what I'm saying because it'll be pulling you away. And you'll be distracted from what I'm saying. But if it would just shut up, then I could talk in your art, what has the starkest separation will be heard first, and the attention will go there. In other words, you can pace your storytelling. Give them the big impact and then give them the layers of revelation over time, and that really draws people in. So once you have your graphic design and your gradations, you have a choice. You can start to render everything or you can deal with edges. This is what Rembrandt and Rubens were total masters of. If you work the edges, things will not only go faster with your workflow, but you'll get the feeling that things are rendered without being rendered and without having to do all that work that rendering requires of you. So up to this point in this figure, I put the head and legs into shadow with some gradations into the lit area of the mid back. So you might see the mid back first. But if I want to knock down the contrast where you don't notice that head so much, I can beef up the background value so that the head value is close to or the same as the background value. I've introduced some full value elements into that light area underneath the arm and part where the lower arm touches the hip. And then I'm starting to add the edge work now. So near the shoulder, right? I've beefed up the contrast and the contrast of edge, so it's a crisp edge and your eye goes there. And you can just play these games over and over. The possibilities are infinite, really. If I want to soften up a transition or soften up an edge, I can just take your attention away from an area by softening the contrast of the edge, or I can beef up areas of contrast or tone them down depending on where I want you to look. So I'm making these changes on the fly as I go kind of still designing and really beefing up the edge, making it really crisp down in that lower right area where the arm wraps around the hips, and that's where you go first. And then you've got maybe a secondary area where the head is against the background. I want it to break away from the background a little bit. So now if I add that highlight right there, that's going to make that really establish that as the first read near that mid back and hips. Because of the contrast value and the contrast of edges that really crisp edge. And then you'll go to the head where there's kind of descending order of contrasts. The head against the background is not as much value contrast, and the edge isn't as crisp. So here's a simple rule. If I don't want you to see it, I make it the same or similar value to what's around it. If I do want you to see it, I make it a distinctly different value relative to what's around it. And then if I give you that highlight, that's a telltale sign that that's the area I want you to look at. It's the most important thing, and everything else will be secondary in importance to that. Now you can go ahead and render to your heart's content if you want to. But those subtle movements from dark to light, warm to cool, graphic shapes to realistic ones, hard to soft edges. Those things add the subtleties to your posterized design, and that pulls people in. Now, if you render, just remember that if it's a dark area overall, don't let your rendering and your details drag out of it information that doesn't make it fit in the design anymore. In other words, if I just rendered every strand of hair and put highlights on there, then it would become more important than the lower half of the drawing where the hip where the arm is attached to the hip and there's that crisp edge. That's where I wanted you to look. Just make sure you're rendering in the light area, if it's overall light, make it stay light. If it's middle, put detail in there, but keep it middle value. And if it's dark, overall, make it be dark and you'll be good. So to sum up, speed up your workflow and makes solve things on a design level with composition, silhouette, value and proportion. And let those things do a lot of work for you. And then you can put your beautiful painting on top, your technical rendering, your finishing, your detail, your texture. And you're going to find that you're going to have to work a lot less hard because you're working smarter and your images will have more impact. I'll draw people in, and that's what you want, okay? Alright. I hope this video was clear and that it helped you, and we'll see you in the next video. 40. Objective 1: Art direction secret - Find your WHY: Alright. Today we're going to start talking about objective, and we're going to move from drawing techniques per se to content. And if you're drawing your portraits, you're a storyteller, whether you know it or not. So you're communicating by visual means. And if you want your portraits to really start standing out, you know, as much fun as it is to just jump in and start drawing with all that excitement. And as good as that is, it's important to do that. It's also important to start becoming a little more thoughtful upfront and do some planning, and that takes a little bit of discipline, and the learning never stops, okay? So let me just tell you that. There's always more. So let's dive into this. And basically, what we want is people to look at our work. You know, we want to engage the audience and draw them into our work with storytelling, camera work and composition, drawing techniques. Let those things start to do the work for you. And this drawing below here is when I was 10-years-old. And you can go from something like this to something like this, which is a little more recent. Now what's the problem? Basically, the problem is we need eyes on our work on social media, in the gallery or in publication. And so we're trying to draw or paint something that we and others really want to look at, right? That's the big thing, or another way to say it, we can't get or keep our viewers attention. So this is a problem, and how are we going to solve that? Well, we're going to find ways to engage viewers and keep them looking and coming back by creating empathy with our characters, with our portraits, with our drawings, somehow engaging the audience. So we need a procedure for that. And I call this orchestrating your portraits. So imagine that you're a conductor or imagine what a conductor does. They stand in the front and they conduct each section of the orchestra and telling each section when to play, when to stop playing, how loud to play, how soft to play. And they're doing this all by auditory means. And you're going to do the same thing only using visual means. You're the art director. That's the corollary to the conductor in the symphony. You're the art director, and that's your job. So there's four main ways I'd like to suggest to draw the audience in. So if you imagine your portrait in the center here, represented by these puzzle pieces, each puzzle piece making up that silhouette of a head is one of these four ways that we're going to look at. The first one is to know your why. And you could say, maybe that's 40% of what you need to consider. It varies, but we'll just go with 40%. Number two, it's art direction, and where are you going to use camera angle and composition techniques to do the work for you? Then there's drawing techniques. Maybe that's 20%. And the final one is posing. Maybe 10%. It's using body language to convey your message is essentially what that is. All right, so let's dive into these a little more deeply. Okay, number one, finding your why to set things up for you. You're going to start asking questions to yourself at the beginning. Like, what's my objective? What's my reason for doing this? What do I want to say? What's my message? Is it just pure enjoyment? You're sitting down, just drawing, loving it, okay? That's fine. That's valid? Is it study? You're taking something like color, anatomy or composition and focusing on that on this particular drawing. That's also fine and valid and necessary. Is it a professional commission? Is it work, right? Is it something you need to do for someone else in exchange for money, also needed and essential? Is it a portrait for a loved one, right? It's a gift. It's a card. It's something that is close to your heart, closer than, let's say, a professional commission piece. Could be just pure creative exploration. All these things are really important and something to consider and each one has a different objective. And depending on what that is, you'll be able to achieve that objective a little bit better. Okay, so if we're visual storytellers, we have to tackle this question. What story am I trying to tell? The first thing you got to do is create a backstory and narrative. You've probably heard of some of these words, maybe, like, backstory. It doesn't have to be anything big, like writing a novel, but it's just some things that you can use for yourself to springboard off of to start creating and being creative with your portraits. So asking where, when and why or just who is this character. What what is this character like? What's their personality, right? And where are they? What are they wearing? What's the environment that they're in because your portrait will have some kind of background, and you can give a hint of that. And mind you, a lot of these things, they're for creative artists as well, like concept artists doing character design. So this can be good for just straight up traditional portraiture or something like concept art. You can add accessories and props. So, for example, you know, you might have your traditional painting there or something that looks very traditional, and you add a sci fi helmet to it and give it a twist and give it some interest. So something like a helmet, a gun, an earring, a scarf, a scar, just adding props can start to engage the audience in a meaningful way, hopefully. Okay, art direction. What do I mean by this? Well, your painting is not an animation or a movie, but if you start using things that movie directors use, animation directors use, like camera angle, composition, lighting, focal point, it's like a hierarchy of reads, adding accessories and props like we just went over. These things will do the work for you. It's not about detail. And overloading the viewer with detail. It's more about being smart with some of these kind of design basics. Coming at it from an art direction point of view is really powerful so that you're not just copying from a photo and saying, Well, how can I make this better? Well, I just have to do more photorealistic details, hyperreal. There's other options. So, for example, let's look at the first one camera angles. If I use a high camera angle or bird's eye view, right? If we look at this shot from Citizen Kane, you get the feeling that the character, as we're looking down on her, she's vulnerable, right? She looks small. So you start to use camera angle to manipulate emotion. Low camera angle, that's a worm's eye view looking up, it kind of tends to make the character look heroic or even evil, right? They look powerful. They look foreboding, and you get that just by changing the angle of the camera. Just neutral camera angle, right? I just every day, that's how we view people 99% of the time or 90 90% of the time in our daily life. So you're just looking at someone straight on. And that's probably you'll do this camera angle for your portraits most of the time. But in case you want to inject some creativity there, if there's a story, a narrative, then you can start messing around with the camera angles. Alright, let's look at the elements of composition, which is another great and powerful tool to help you. Unity. Do all the parts feel as if they belong together? So all these things are the principles of design. I'll just go over in real quick balances the symmetrical arrangement that adds a sense of calm while asymmetry in the composition creates a sense of unease. You've got movement, rhythm and flow, and those techniques serve to move the viewer's eye around the canvas, right? You've got contrast, contrast of light and dark, big and small, warm and cool. You can use edges and proportion in your compositions to again, create dynamic eye movement. Focus and emphasis, right? There's got to be a payoff in all of this. Otherwise, everything is equally represented in your picture and no one knows where to look. And your job is to really lead the eye, direct the viewer's eye through your piece, leading them to what you want to see first. So that focal point is kind of where the eye will land first, usually, and it's the main actor on the stage, so to speak, it will have visual appeal and be interesting or compelling in content, right? So those are the elements of composition. And now we're going to go to the rules of composition. So there's no rules, just tools, okay? So basically, if you divide up your canvas with four lines, two vertical, two horizontal, and it divides the piece up into nine basically squares. And wherever those horizontal and vertical lines cross, you basically put your centers of interest there, okay, where those lines intersect. You don't want to put it in the middle because that's dead center, right? It's dead in the middle because it's equal the negative space is equal all the way around, and so it's just too balanced. So generally, you want to position your focal point along a rule of thirds line, like one of these green or yellow lines. Ideally, you place the most interesting or important feature near one of the four intersections created by those rule of thirds lines. So basically, here's how a viewers attention looks. Now, this is for Western people, generally. I don't know how it is for Eastern because they read traditionally, they've read from right to left and up and down, and we read left to right and side to side. But the upper left quadrant there, 41% of users focus here first, where the longest. Something to know. This is interesting data. And then if we drop down to the bottom left, 25% of attention goes there, and then upper right 20 and then descending from there, lower right, 14%. So takeaway here is, if you want to catch someone's attention, put something in that upper left quadrant, somebody will usually see that first in the West. Of course, you can break this rule, but it's just a guide. This is how the rules of thirds will look. You'll put someone's space right there where the lines intersect, and it's along one of the vertical lines. Perfect. Okay? Here's another one. Guy's face is there on the intersection and his hand is there on another intersection. Great. So you'll look there, and then you'll look at the background and you'll look at the hay and all that other stuff. Okay, the golden section, also known as the divine proportion or the golden means. And that was a number found when ratios of distances and simple geometric figures such as the Pentagon, pentagram, and decagon were studied and observed in nature. And so they planned buildings, especially the Greeks did, around this sort of divine proportion or ratio. And you can see it in some famous artwork like Michelangelo's creation in the Cistine Chapel Ceiling. So other places in nature, you can see it in the way a rose petal unfolds or a conch on the left there, that shell. It's amazing. It's so mathematical. There's so many patterns in nature. And then Hokusai, the Japanese woodcut wave there seems to be planned along this proportion, as well. So you can see there's that nice line, that gestural line swooping through the golden mean. Here's some more examples where you place someone right along the vertical, put their face just right in that focal point and put the eye there. And these are just some of the ways you can set it up. You can use it vertical, you can use it horizontal, and you can use it diagonal anyway that you want. And it's really helpful to see this to know how to organize your composition and where to put your center of interest, where to put your figure, and all that stuff. Alright, triangles, they're derived from the golden section. Interesting. So on the left, we have three triangles derived from the golden section. So it's the same proportion as the golden section, and we've just divided it from corner to corner and then drew a perpendicular to that line, coming up with three triangles, and then you can continue to subdivide and come up with these other triangles. Here's some great ways that we can call out how people like Rembrandt used the triangles to organize composition. So you've got kind of a semicircle surrounding that triangle. It's a great organizational tool so you can take groups of people and organize them around this triangle idea or these triangles. Okay, some classical paintings here. So you'll have to forgive me. I don't know the name of some of these paintings, but we'll do keep going. Okay. Another great way of organizing a group of three people, putting each person at one of the corners of this equilateral triangle. And there we have it even in Star Wars movie poster, they're using this to organize the complexity of all the characters and the action and so on. And finally, even just in your photography or in posing for your drawing, look at all these triangles from the orange to the yellow to the light yellow. But you can find all these triangles inside the human figure and inside a group of figures. It's really very helpful I found to look for triangles, simple geometric shapes, especially triangles, but you can look for circles and squares. You can use these to measure and check your drawing just by finding angles, right, and corners. So just be aware of this stuff and start using it because these organizing principles, the way that these tools work, they have a way of simplifying things, and then it makes your drawing statement much more clear and much more powerful on the page. And that's what you want to go for, okay? Okay. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will talk about creating a focal point. It's so powerful, you won't want to miss it. See you there. 41. Objective 2: Art directions secrets: Alright, this is art direction part, too. And we just talked about the problem of getting people to look at your piece and staying there and coming back to it. And how did we do that? And we came up with this idea that you're the conductor, you're orchestrating your piece like a conductor in a symphony. Only you're the art director. And you have total control over what you put down on paper. And the idea that it's not so much rendering a bunch of detail, but it's using camera work and composition and storytelling to do that work for you to engage the viewer and keep them coming back. Now, you don't need a bunch of animation and actors and movement to do this. And this is the second part of Art Direction part two. So we want to create a focal point. And we'll talk about the mechanics of eye movement. This is really important. So in this painting Unexpected visitors done in the 1800s, watch what happens here. Back in the 1960s and 70s, some scientists were able to come up with some ways to measure eye movement. And look at this. This is what they found when they tracked the eye movement. Of someone looking at this picture. And you can kind of see their centers of areas of detail where the eye spends most of the time looking, but it's tracing, it's jumping. It's going all over the place. What's happening here? Well, if we go back to the original painting, if you think of it like a photo, a lot of times a photo will just present all the information to us in high clarity from front to back, left to right. And our eyes don't really see like that, and they don't really take in information like that, but we tend to think that's how it is. So we just draw the picture. Everything's in detail. All over the place. Everything's clear. Let's dig into that a little bit more because there are some mysteries here that we can take advantage of. So let's look at this. This is what maybe a camera sees. Like I said, everything's clear from front to back, left to right. But this is how we actually see. We'll focus on, let's say, the man coming in in the trench coat, and then our eye will jump to the lady in the foreground. And you can see how there's this cone of vision. It's 60 degrees. And right in the middle of that, everything's crystal clear and our central vision is very powerful. But everything outside the cone of 60 degrees starts to get blurry, right? The kids on the right, the chair and the foreground. That's how we actually see. We don't see everything as in the first one all presented to us at once. So look at how this goes down here. Our eyes are kind of really trying to create a narrative. It's assessing the painting. It's jumping from here to there and everywhere. And we're visually constructing a story in our mind as our eye is jumping around. So it's layer by layer building meaning. That's what our brain is trying to get us to do one way or another is to find meaning in something. And so it might first look at the people's faces and give information and put that layer down, then it might look at their clothes, might look at the room, the lighting, and start to put the pieces together. So our interpretations might feel somewhat instantaneous. I mean, they do feel instantaneous. You see something. All this happens so fast. It's as if it's all presented at one time. But even though it may feel instantaneous, actually, it's composed of smaller units that make up a hole that our brains put together to construct the narrative. So it's a lot like a storyboard or experiencing a scene in a movie. Basically, we're painting and editing the painting in our mind. So instead of thinking as a painting or a photo as a static image, what if we thought of it as a series of sequential images? Now, that process would be more like how a film director approaches storytelling. The best artists, really good artists, understand how the eyes process visual information, and they leverage that behavior in their own work. In essence, we're recreating what the brain does. That's what we're going to do. We're going to recreate what the brain does on the canvas or paper in our portrait. Now, if you think of it, this happens, too, when you're painting a model. The model will pose for you for 20 minutes, and then they'll get up and take a break and you'll have something down on the canvas or the paper. And then they'll come back. You'll work again adding another layer of information. They'll get up and take a break, and so on, it goes until you've built up this rich piece with all these layers, and it's a composite of someone. It's not that person all at once. So it's the same idea. That layer by layer, you're putting down your interpretation of what it is you see in front of you over time. So it's sequential, it's dynamic, it's rich. And photographs cannot often capture that kind of richness, like a drawing or painting can. Again, we're going to leverage this information to create a focal point using the fact that our eyes see with the 60 degree cone of vision. So let's do this. Let's look at how we can use contrast as a tool to create a focal point. We can use contrast values, edges, detail, and color. Let's see how it works. In this charcoal portrait piece that I did, I put the values in a certain place. Now, it's maybe 30% of the piece. The other 70% is not where the details and the values are sort of pumped up, so to speak. So the darkest and lightest values are right there where that right eye and nose are in the center of his face. Okay? And then you have less contrast of values in the ear, the mouth, side of the head, everywhere else kind of falls down in the hierarchy. And then finally, you have the least amount of value contrast out by the top of the head and the shoulder and elsewhere. The edges, the most crisp, clear edges are right there on the nose where that shadow of the orbit of the eye is cast and the upper eyelid itself, the lower eyelid, all that stuff is very crisp, chisel hard cast shadows. And then we have some little bit softer edges on the eyebrow itself the cheek. And you can see this sort of diminishing contrast from crisp edges to firm edges to then completely lost or soft edges, amount of detail. Again, in between the square here is where I've concentrated all the detail in its eyes, nose, basically. So we've got wrinkles, skin, edge contrast, value contrast, eyelashes, and all that sort of stuff. And nowhere in the piece outside of this rectangle will be that much detail. Pretty simple. Then we've got colors. So we've got Joo Ming Wu here, awesome drawer painter that I love so much. And you can see, he's got the most saturated color there in the nose and in the cheek on the left, and then a little less saturated under the eye and the muzzle of the mouth, and then finally in the background. So we've got the most intense color. It's probably 20% of the piece. The rest of it starts to become less saturated and then even muted green. In the background. So we've got that warm, cool contrast. Maybe most of it's cool and dark and less of it is warm and light. So it's not equal 50 50, and that creates visual variety, and that creates interest for viewers. Alright, next up, we're going to talk about drawing techniques, line quality. And there's essentially four different lines I want to talk about that'll help describe your character's personality and capture him on the paper. I'll see you in the next video. 42. Objective 3 Art direction secret -Line quality: Okay, as we navigate this question of objective, trying to find it and trying to clarify it using questions like, what's my why? What's the reason that I'm doing this, using art direction to help us? Well, line quality is one of those drawing techniques that is so easy, but it's so impactful because at least graphically, it can make something pop off the page. But as far as character emotion or character personality, it can also be something very effective to make a statement or to make the statement you want to make about a character. So let's get into that. Now, I want to talk about a couple of different kinds of lines, basically, the straight line. C curve and the S curve. Now, these lines are bold. They're the same width from top to middle to bottom. So that's what I want you to notice about these. And how can you use them? Well, in the top two drawings, you've got one of the Ramones on the right, and then a character drawing one of my friends on the left. You can see the line is pretty bold that outlines the contour. Also, J Martin Studio, great artist on Instagram. He's doing that with a white line. So you can do it with a black line. You can do it with a white line. And you can see these drawings are at scale, right? So they're not as thick as the lines I laid down on the left. But nevertheless, you can see that nice thick line that makes the character break away from the background. So you have this foreground figure ground relationship. And so we're breaking the figure away from the ground that background is the ground, this stuff here, and this part, right? Obviously, that's the figure. So a thick, even line around a character can suggest that the character is very approachable. It can break, again, the character off the page in a very graphic and strong way. So it contains something. It can be a good container. It's solid, let's say. And here the famous hello kitty character looks like a cute, approachable, sweet character with that solid black line around it containing it. Let's look at tapered dynamic lines. So what do I mean by tapered you've got tapered from thin to thick to thin. So it's tapered at the edges, thick in the middle, tapered at the edges, thick in the middle. Or we've got thick to thin, where it's thick to thin or thin to thick, whatever. Those are the two kinds of lines that we're going to look. They tend to be dynamic, and let's take a look at some examples. Right in the middle is Alphonse Mucha. In the late 19th century, this guy was a master, drawer, draftsman, painter. He did huge murals. He did beautiful portraits. The line quality is so sensitive, and it's so thick and thin and it's so varied. You can see this nice delicate linework here. And then he does what we did that first line that we looked at that bold, even line that contains a figure so beautifully and then makes it pop off the page. And then we have some nice tapered lines just, like, tapered and dynamic, like we're looking at now in the hands, right? And that wrist to that forearm and even in here. So he's got a lot of line variation here happening, and it all constellates into just a beautiful thing to look at, in my opinion. Then moving right top, we have Patrick Nagel, and his stuff was still popular in the 80s. His stuff was all over. He'd be in college dorms and be in friends' apartments. He just saturated the market. And what's really sad is he died in his early 30s with a heart attack. And he's got that tapered kind of line that he did so well in the eyes in the hair. We get the eyes. We get the hair. And he's even got kind of that even line that he uses to contain things and separate out the face from this ground of sort of mauve, purple and muted blue green right there. So he's breaking things away and playing the organic shape of the head against the geometric shapes that are part of the background and foreground. He's got the thick to thin here, right? He's got everything going. Great stuff. And then here's a little character design I did down here, and I've got a very thick to thin, but overall thick line breaking the character away from the ground, right? Creating a nice silhouette. That's one of the design things that I'm concerned about and then inside, it's a lot of thick to thin lines in the hair and parts of the anatomy in how I model the cheekbone, forehead, neck, and all that stuff. So I'm using, you know, two or three kinds of lines in certain places that hopefully pop it off the page and make it look interesting. But it's combined with silhouette as well as a design element. The next lines are broken lines. Let's check out some broken lines. That's basically this, what it sounds like a broken line. What's that good for? Well, check out Egon Shiel, again, late 19th century, and Gustav ClimpT masters that I love. I don't know if you're familiar with their work, but Egan Sheila or Shile don't know how to pronounce his name, but his figures were awesome. They're very designy and distorted. But just the point here is that broken kind of scratchy line that can make someone look uneasy and erratic. So if you want a character and you have one that you want to convey that they're erratic, they're scattered, right? You can probably think of movie characters like that. You want that broken, kind of broken up line, okay? Their mind is jumping around. It's broken. It's not smooth, logical, and consistent. Here with Gustav Klimt on the right, he's got kind of, you know, a wavy kind of broken line. It's a lot more gentle. But still it's a little bit there's lines together. It's not just one line, so it's a little nervous. Maybe it's transitory. Maybe they're mercurial in their personality. Their mind changes a lot, and it's showing up in that line quality of really kind of they're there, and then they're not there. They keep moving. Is that line quality? Can show a character like that. Okay, let's keep on moving here. So let's say you have one line. I want to talk to you about atmospheric perspective because you can take that one line and just do a couple of things with it. One, you can make it a little bit thinner and smaller and you can make it lighter so you can step the value range. As you do that, look what happens. That big thick black line looks like it's advancing. The middle gray line looks like it's behind the big line on the left. It's just a little bit behind it. And then that thin light line looks like it's way in the distance. By line weight, the line weight. And the value contrast the value contrast and gives that sense of atmosphere. So they call it atmospheric perspective. It's one of the easiest ways to perspective. One of the easiest ways to convey depth in space, and depth is one of the elements of design. The other way to do it is linear perspective, and that's kind of mathematical and harder to do. So the atmospheric, this one, they also call The laws of diminishing contrasts. So contrast comes into play, and you can have your value contrast diminish. So if you go from dark to middle to light. And that atmosphere that's in between you and let's say this furthest one, there's a lot of atmosphere. You're looking through a lot of particles, dust, and so on, and it just loses contrast. It also loses or the diminishing contrast is edge quality, edge crispness. So you could lose contrast in your edges. And you'll go from a crisp, hard edge to, let's say, you know, a soft or lost edge. And that can make something appear to be further away. It creates depth. Another one is color contrast. You lose Color colors get less saturated as they go away from you. The closer they are, the more saturated and the farther away, the more gray they get. Okay? So let's keep moving here and show you an example of toolkit on Instagram. I think tool kit, you may have heard of this person. I think they're in Singapore. They're on Instagram. And it's really nice how they've done this with some of that sort of diminishing contrast and creating the depth. So you've got the dark and thicker lines in the front of the face, and you've got the thin wispy broken lighter value lines. And of course, we look here first because that's where all the contrast is. So the contrast of value is high on the left side of the face, and the contrast value is low on the right side of the face. And so we notice on the left before we notice the right side of the head. Pretty simple but pretty effective, right? Okay, a couple more quick examples. Casey Bag, one of my favorite portrait artist. Again, that nose is the closest thing to us, so that has the crispest lines, the greatest value contrast near that left nostril. Then the things the eye sockets, a little bit less crispness of line of edge, a little bit less, little bit less value contrast. And then it goes back even more. And you can see that atmosphere, that sense of atmosphere that he's playing around with, creating drama, mood, and depth. And then we've got J Martin Studio again, and he's got on the right side, all the contrast of value, contrast of line, thick and thin, and contrast of detail. All on that right side of the figure, especially in the face. So that's what you see first. And you see the left side of the figure second. So these are all toolkit, Casey Bag, J Martin Studio using the laws of diminishing contrast, but I wanted to focus in on that line quality of thick and thin and dark medium light and the edges of hard, firm, and sop and how just those simple tools, they're like the dog rey me on a scale. If you can put those together, you can form chords and make music. Well, if you put a few of these tools together with just line quality, you can do amazing things. Alright, that's it for line quality, and I'll see you in the next video. 43. Setting Goals: All right, let's get in and talk about goals. We got to have an objective as artists. It helps if we have a destination, right? So let me ask you a question. Other than your life, what is the most important commodity that you have? Well, you might say love, but you can lose love and get it back. How about money? You can lose money and make it back. You can lose a car and make it back. You can lose weight and gain it back. Okay? But time Time is something that never comes back. Once it's gone, it's gone. I like to say that time is our most valuable commodity, so we don't want to waste it, especially as artists. Our time is limited, so we want to make it count. Now, setting goals, this is something that I'm not a list maker, and so setting goals is difficult for me. You know, I'm an artist. I'm a free spirit. I don't want to make lists. I don't want to set goals out there and then put time limits on them. But I've had to learn to do that. And you might be like me, so I want to kind of teach you how to do that. Now, Michael Hyatt, who is a goal setting master guru out there, he said, there's two kinds of lives. There's the drifting life. Right? It just drifts, never goes anywhere. And there's the driven life. And that person is just type A, right? And they're just going, going, going, never stop doing, never stop achieving. And either of these positions here are really not desirable. You don't want to drift and you don't want to be driven because this can lead to health problems, right? It can break up your relationships. It can strain them, right? Break them up. And so we want to find something that works that we can avoid drifting or being driven. So let's first look at the benefits of setting goals. You know, after doing this, you probably have a better sense of your direction. In life, in your career, et cetera, that's good stuff. You probably have a feeling of excitement. You need that. That's fuel for moving forward. Excitement for your future. You probably feel like being an artist is possible and not impossible. That's a good thing. These are all good things. You'll probably be more optimistic. Because of that. And you'll be more receptive and ready to go to the next level. So those are some of the benefits of setting goals. Well, let's look at why goals fail. What are the top reasons that goals fail? Well, again, Michael Hyatt, the guru of goal setting, says there's four main reasons, and number one is lack of what clarity. Number two, lack of motivation. Just not motivated to do it, right? Lack of activation. You don't engage, right? If you're not motivated, you won't activate. And then there's the lack of visibility, that's number four. If you don't see your goals, if you don't have them in front of you as some kind of list, a place where you can see them, you probably won't achieve the goals. They'll just disappear. You'll forget about them. But I'm going to add two more reasons. Let me get rid of this for now. I'm going to add two more reasons for goal failure. And number five is unrealistic. Expectations. I think that's a big one for many people. It's a big one for me because if you don't know how to set goals, you may go in the wrong direction, you know, thinking, I got a dream big, and so you just have these huge leaps of unrealistic expectations. That's one reason for goal failure. And number six is there's no strategy. Right? You might have this destination, a huge expectation. But you have no way of getting there, right? You need a plan to execute and get to the goal, right? Does that make sense? Totally makes sense. Okay. We've looked at the benefits. We've looked at why goals fail. Most often. We need kind of a strategy. So let's look at this thing called smarter goals. You've probably heard of this. It's out there. It's an acronym. Smarter stands for something. You've probably heard of SMART goals. So smarter goals are specific. They're measurable. Actionable. Now, if you've never heard of this, it's probably start to make sense, right? We're breaking this thing down from big huge problem into smaller bite size problems. They've got to be a little bit risky. They have to be outside your comfort zone. Time keyed or time bound. It's got to be an end date, right? A due date. They have to be exciting, right? They got to be something you want to do that gets you supercharged. And then they have to be relevant. Right? If they're not relevant, they're really not worth doing, right? So this is kind of an evaluation. We're saying this thing A is better than this thing B or C or even D. So we're kind of creating a value with A on the top. That's the thing we're shooting for, right? Everything else is kind of below that, but we want to get to this place here. Okay? Good. So those are your smarter goals. If you haven't heard of that, it's definitely a powerful thing. So let's keep moving here. So how do we walk out those smarter goals? How do we really just do this? Because I've told you a bunch of definitions and a bunch of reasons why it's good, why it isn't good, what gets in the way and causing failure. So look, let's just focus. Let's get our focus going. For this lesson. We're just going to focus on one main goal. One main goal for the year, let's say. You're probably going to have some other sub goals, right? But let's just keep it to one right now and see how this works. Once you focus on that goal and you have it clearly what it is, you want to get really clear on something else, and that is the why question. You got to get clear on this. You need clarity. Because if you can get clear on this, it's often said if any man has a why, he can bear anyhow. Let me say that again. If someone has a good why, they can bear any how. In other words, they can get through any hardship because they have a reason, a why. What's making them tick? What's motivating them? Right? Because everybody has kind of a polaris star, right? They have like a north star that guides them, right? Ships In the olden days, they used to use the North star to navigate. And so people are always optimizing themselves for something. There's something motivating every action, right? Just about you go to work. Why? You need money. Okay? Need love. So you reach out. You start talking to people. You start going out on dates. You know, the reason is that you need intimacy in your life. So you're trying to build something and you're trying to use good behaviors to make that possible, to make it happen in the future. So the motivation, the why is super important. You know, because your y provides that a connection to the goal. I'd say this is really important. The y provides connection to the goal. Right. You need that connection. Because if you don't have the connection, the first obstacle that comes along is just going to derail you, right? You're going to stop. You're going to fail. You're going to fold. So you've got to have a really good clear why because it's the connection. It's the glue, really, to keep you in relationship connected to your goal. So let's get real clear on the why. Okay, I got that. Let's go to the next thing here. So I'd say the first step after you get your Y is one. Find your main goal. And your Y. The Y again could be, I want to make money, right? I'm bored, so I want to have an active life. I want to do something interesting. I want to make a difference in other people's lives. Okay? I think you get the picture. The number two, you're going to kind of set micro goals or divide that up that major goal into micro goals. I'll explain that. And then you'll create a specific deadline. You'll set that out in the future. It's important you do that and set it into the future. You got to put it on your calendar. Okay. So let's look at the micro goals. Okay, so that's taking that steep ascent to your goal up here, and it's really giving you platforms, small enough, enough to actually make it up the slope because it can be pretty steep. It can be setting a goal is pretty hard. It's not an easy thing. We need these incremental steps. That's our micro goals. That's what basically we set us up for. We're going to get specific about this in a few minutes. But after you set those microgals, the four thing you want to do is you want to think about your resources. That's fuel that you need to get you there. So it could be money, right? You need money for, let's say, marketing yourself on social media, Facebook ads, Google ads, business cards, and so on. You need money for equipment. Tools, right? You need paper, you need paint. You need computer programs, all that kind of stuff. You need time, right? That's a resource. So you might think about getting some apps that help you track time. I have some apps that help me do that. One is called D and that puts something on a schedule, a task and I can set it for a specific time and day and then my phone will remind me. It's a little reminder. There's another one called Sloth. That's a timer and there is a third one. It's called focus keeper. The idea with that one is that you set a certain block of time, let's say 20, 25 minutes where you're very focused, and then it'll switch to a five minute break. You have 25 minutes, intense focus, and then you have a five minute break. I just keeps you on track instead of focusing and suddenly it's an hour 2 hours later and then you haven't had a break. You start to feel hungry and tired. This breaks it up and keeps a kind of keeps it moving in a more healthy way. So those are things like resources. You know, you need your health. That's a resource. So you probably want to do some exercise, right, and just keep you healthy, take breaks, like I just mentioned. What else? There could be relationships. Those are resources. So all the things, just think about all the things you need to get you to your goal, right? You might need a car. Okay, you might need a job while you're working on that goal. Okay, so whatever it is, get specific about those things. Okay, let's go to number five. Et's go here to number five. Let me see. Okay, the number five thing. You're going to track your progress. This is the hard part, I think. Maybe you all of it's hard, but tracking your progress. So you'll have some system, some way where you can take a look at where you are in the process. You'll need something that says, Yep, finished it, or something that says, you know, in progress, still in the queue, unfinished, and something that says, you know, Oops know, not done, ran into some problems or whatever. Right? So you have these three states of yes, no, and, you know, working. Just real simple, just so you can it's like, you know, when a teacher grades you and gives you a grade, it's not a personal evaluation. It's just giving you realistic data on where you're at. And then if you can track that, you can, you know, find the problems, keep on it, and mark it off when you've done it. And that's really important. So what are some of the obstacles to all this? We talked about some things, but you get a little bit more specific. How about I don't have a precious resource called time. My precious resource, time is all used up. I don't have money to do this, right? Yeah, I can sympathize with that. I understand. It's an obstacle, and we have to find solutions for these things. How about perfectionism? That's a big one would get in my way. It would cause anxiety and stress because if I couldn't do it perfect, I just wouldn't do it. That's not good. That's like one option. Here's the option A. And if I can't do that A, I got no other options. I got blank, right? But if I have the ability to see, maybe there's two options A and D, and a few possibilities in between, there's even B and C, or maybe there's just A and B. How about A and B? So I'm opening it up to possibilities, right? Because perfection is a closed circuit. How about limiting beliefs beliefs? I can't do it. Not good enough. I'm too old, right? Too young. One more. Let's say, maybe there's no one to show me me how. And then there's fears, right? Like, afraid to fail or even bizarrely afraid to succeed. Whatever. I'm afraid I'll waste my time. I'm afraid I'll lose my money. I'm afraid I'll look stupid. That's a big one, embarrassed by stupid and embarrassed in front of people. Well, yep, you will. You know, you don't want to, but you kind of will, but it means that you're making progress. If you're feeling stupid and embarrassed, you're probably moving. That's a good thing. You're not in your comfort zone, okay? Perfect. You don't want to be in your comfort zone. If you are, you're not moving. You're not going anywhere, most likely. Alright, so I've made a little table, kind of a worksheet. I'm going to provide this for you. I'm going to give this to you, but you can write this down in a book. I mean, you can do it any way you want. But let's look at it. This kind of condenses everything. Now, in column one, you've got your main goal. And that could be I want to be a better artist isn't what we're looking for. That's not specific enough, right? It's too it's too wide. It's too big of a goal. It's too ambitious. It's not clear. So maybe you want to say something like, you know, I want to go to the San Diego comic con. San Diego C. This year. Okay? All right. Why? That's a good goal. Why? Well, it's going to give me exposure. Maybe it'll help me make some money. I can sell some books, some art. Maybe I can meet lots of people, and I can network. Maybe I can help others. So these are all really good. It's fuel. It's your Y. It's your connection to this main goal. And then you've got your microgals. Let's zoom in here. Your microgals, how are you going to break that down? You're going to need to create create art. You're gonna need lots of stuff. So you need time to do that. Number two, you're going to get your business cards. Right? You need to exchange information, let people know you're out there, who you are. They're never going to remember you if you don't give them a business card. Okay, what else? You know, you're going to call you're going to go to the website and reserve you know, a spot. Buy a ticket. And then you're going to print your stuff. You're going to frame your stuff. And just get ready, right, because it's going to come. It's some months away, but it's going to come quick. And that when could be, well, it's sometime in July is the con. Okay. So you know when. And then you can track your progress. And you can put this stuff in your sketchbook. Just have it somewhere where you can see it. You have to be able to see it because that's one of the major reasons the goals fail, right, it's not visible. So you've got to see it you can do it in a word document. You can do it in your sketchbook. You can just draw this table out. You can do it in Excel and then track your progress. Then, maybe or not yet. This is good stuff. Maybe we can take another example. Maybe you want to learn how to draw figures. Why? Because you love it. Because it gives you energy because you want to be a professional painter or character designer. Or you want to be a fine artist or whatever the case is, right? You want to teach, you want to be a teacher, and you want to teach it. So that's your why. Maybe, again, you want to make money. You want to help others. You want to be relevant. Okay, then your micro goals. How are we gonna break it down? How are we gonna get here? Well, I'm gonna have to learn about gesture to give it life. I'm gonna have to learn about construction. How to put it down on the page convincingly. I'm going to have to learn about anatomy, muscle, bone, right? I'm going to have to learn about some techniques. What kind of medium am I going to use? Pen, pencil, charcoal, paint, oil paint. Right? When am I going to do this? Okay. So let's set something. Let's break it down a little bit. Let's say we want to have a goal you know, in six months. So in the first, let's say, you know, two weeks, one to two weeks. I'm going to study gesture. Then one to two weeks. I'm going to study construction. Then let's say four weeks. I'm going to study anatomy. And then I'm going to give myself another four weeks or more for techniques. I'm going to explore different techniques. Maybe it's six weeks. Maybe it's longer. Maybe maybe this is one year, right? Or you'll do it for six months, evaluate it, and then set another goal for another six months. And so this is going to help you with that first principles idea breaking something big down into some smaller constituent parts that you can handle. And that definitely helps you succeed, right? And it gives you energy because as you succeed, you get more excited and you see it's possible, and then you track your progress. Okay. So hopefully, those are some good kind of examples there that help you out. One of the other things that we want to do is make a commitment to ourselves to this. So what's that going to kind of look like? Okay, so you want to write, like a personal Declaration. Okay, we're going to get a little bit psychological here because this is psychological. So it's got to be meaningful. It's gonna be something that states that, you know, what your goals are. These are my goals. Right? Get it down on paper. These are my aspirations. Something about getting it down on paper. These are your intentions, right? Intentions. It gets it moving. It gets it out there. It gets it more real. And we can see if they're actually realistic, right? It's kind of, you know, what you want to keep and what you want to throw away. Then you start your day You kind of focus on this. You meditate on this, focus and meditate on this personal declaration. And that's gonna help you start to believe it. Because believe me, when you set a goal in motion, there's all these things that are going to come against it. It's just the way it is. It's going to start a little pressure. So like a little war that says, I'm going to stand up against you here because you want to do this. I don't know why, but that's the way it is. So you need to start to believe it. You got to get rid of the limiting beliefs and start to believe you can do this. And then your actions we'll start to reflect that. They'll start to follow your beliefs, right? And then it'll be like a feedback loop. Your actions will influence your beliefs, beliefs will influence your emotions and actions like that. And you'll be basically this whole thing you'll be transforming yourself. Because each time you take a new step up, right, you're going to need a new version of you, right? This one was down here. It wasn't enough to get to here yet. And then you sort of bring all this stuff into play and it brings a new you that helps you get here. And then to get to that next place that's higher, you're going to need another, you know, new version of yourself, a new New version, let's say, new version of self, envious, envious. Okay? And so on like that because you're here and it's adequate for here, but it's not yet adequate for there. So you're going to keep transforming yourself. And so you need to believe it, you need to take action. And, you know, basically you need power. You need resources for that. You need to basically kind of support this process. Both physically and mentally. In this personal declaration, there's a few kind of steps to this. So let's say step one is the self affirmation. Remember, this is stuff that you're going to meditate on in the morning and start to make this happen, begin to believe it. And so you're going to speak you're going to speak in the present. In other words, I am statements. Zoom on this a little bit. I am action words like doing. I am believing. They're definitely statements in the now because we're leaving the past behind and we're moving forward. Start to think about what it would be like if the struggles that are holding you back are gone, the limiting beliefs. Think about the potential. You know, what would it be like if I actually attain these goals, how's my life gonna change, right? Am I going to have more money, more time, more energy, better lifestyle? Will I have more respect? Will I just have better work? Will I just be more pleased with myself and happy? So speak to the struggles in a positive attitude and shift the struggles into actions. You want to transform the struggles by speaking them, transform them into actions that start to affect change. Delta is change, the Greek symbol for change. Here's another big thing is practicing self compassion in this process or self empathy, right? Have some empathy. Or yourself. Think of yourself as someone that you're responsible for. How would you treat someone that you love and you're responsible for? So this compassion and empathy, give it to yourself, extend it to yourself. Take care of your health, your mental health, your physical health, and your spiritual health. Really nourish those things because you're going to need those things as platforms, as foundations to help keep you up and keep you moving. So you want to have another piece of this. We talked about that self affirmation in step one and then really having this compassion for yourself because you're going to fall, right? You're going to make mistakes. But by transforming these struggles, right? By speaking to those struggles, you know they're there transforming them into actions that are going to affect change. Well, okay, how do we do that? Let's look at failure just a little bit. So again, failures gonna happen, but failure really kind of says that you're moving, and it's part of the process. Failure is part of the process. Okay, let's go over here. Failure. Let's look how to look at this, welcome it, frame it. So you want to have a growth mindset. Failure is not a growth mindset. It's a stuck mindset. This is kind of can be a stuck mindset. You want to have a growth mindset and cultivate that. So one, you can embrace your imperfections. You're not perfect. No one is. No one is. You know, I didn't realize that for a long time. Being a perfectionist, I thought it was just me that was imperfect and everybody else had it together, but everyone is imperfect, man. And that took a long time to figure that out. I don't know why. But I was stuck. So you can reframe the failure as an opportunity. I think there's that Chinese philosophy that says that chaos in chaos is opportunity. And there's a symbol for that. I can't recall what it is. So reframe, right? Failure as an opportunity, reframe failure as, you know, a step in the process. It means you're moving that means you're moving. That's huge. Okay? Five. You know, develop your self talk so that it's encouraging. Encouraging self talk. Instead of saying, God, I fail all the time, say, Yeah, I sometimes fail, reframe it, right? Just move the frame a little bit, reframe. So you have a new way of looking at it. That reframe is a positive take on it, not negative reframe. Have an always learning mentality. Have an always learning mindset. What I have. I can't stop learning. I love learning. Maybe there's an element of insecurity in that, but it's good. Not all insecurity is bad because it keeps you moving. Not all perfectionism isn't totally bad because it keeps you striving to get better. So it's sort of taking imperfection, taking the failures and harnessing them and taking those struggles, right, and changing them, reframing them into actions that affect change, you know, positive change. And that's how you transform those things and, you know, succeed and deal with all the junk that comes up with all the obstacles and inside and out that try to keep you down. And just one more thing. We want to make this a habit, right? Habit. And that way we can build some consistency into our lives. And we can do that in three steps. So if it doesn't become a habit and it just drops off, then our goals won't get done and we'll fail and our goals, we'll forget about them, and we'll have that goal failure feeling. And, you know, we're going to feel frustrated, let down like a failure and all that sort of stuff. So habit building. Step one, start small. Number two, plan it. That's the hardest part, right? Plan it into your day and write it down have it somewhere or it can be seen. Because if it's not seen, you'll forget about it. Put it on, you know, your sketchbook, your calendar in one note somewhere in your computer using notes. And then step three. This is big. This is part of your commitment, I think, and the compassion and empathy is to reward yourself. That's like super big, right? Reward yourself. Got to give yourself that. Reward. It's going to give you that positive feeling that you need to keep moving forward. Reward yourself. For example, you know, after I complete this, I'm going to, you know, buy myself that special thing that you want. You know, maybe it's take yourself out to dinner to that special kind of food and place that you like. Maybe you'll buy yourself some kind of treat maybe it's some equipment that you want. Maybe you'll go on a trip, right? Could be small, could be big, some incentive, you know, and you could say, you know, I will do this, you know, in one week. By one week or in one week after I finish my goal, I'll do this. All right? After I achieve A, my goal, I'll do B and B will happen in one week, okay? It could be, you know, after two weeks after two weeks of doing this, of, you know, keeping these setting these goals and keeping it a habit, right? You need to reward yourself consistently. So after two weeks, I will dot, dot, dot, you name it, right? Maybe I will go somewhere. The first one was, you know, I'll buy myself something. Then I'll go somewhere. Maybe it's a little bit bigger incentive, right? A little bit bigger reward. And then after one month, I will do something. You know, maybe I'll go somewhere, maybe I'll do something. Maybe I'll take a class with a famous teacher whose work that I like, you know, maybe I'll go somewhere with my boyfriend or girlfriend. Maybe I'll just sleep. Just be good to myself. All this stuff is just to be good for yourself, good to yourself. And it's a feedback loop because the more you feel good and do good, then you're going to want to work. Right? You'll work. You'll do more work. You'll have the fuel. You'll have the want to, and you need that want to. So that's pretty much it for goals. I'm going to leave this goal template setting for you. It's like a thing that I developed, and I'll put it there for you if it can help you, do all this stuff and just keep it simple, right? Just do one main goal like we talked about. Over here, just get one main goal. And get your micro goals, set a date, track your progress, right? And if you can write out some of that commitment stuff and those affirmation things, it's all going to help. It takes time, but just right? We're trying not to waste time. This is good time taken. It's not wasted time. Okay? It's beneficial. So good luck with that, and we'll see you in the next objective. Alright. 44. Draw the head from above looking down: Time we talked about drawing the head from a low camera angle looking up from a worm's eye view, and we basically learned a little bit about perspective. We found vanishing points. We found the horizon line, and then we used the idea of a box to construct our head. And just wanted to review that quickly. And so I'm letting this play in the background. Before we get to the head from a high camera angle looking down. But you can see how pretty quickly an effective drawing the head like this can be using the planes, finding the planes, finding the corners, the front sides, tops and bottoms, and the box works really well for that. And when you're looking up, one thing I wanted to point out looking up at the head from an extreme point of view, you see more of the lower part of the face and less of the forehead. And it's something like a 60 40 split. You see 40% of the forehead and 60% of the lower head. And so that's important to keep in mind because it's flipped when we look at the head from a high camera angle looking down. Okay, now, let's do the head from a high camera angle looking down, which is basically a bird's eye view. It's a high camera angle looking down. And so I'm going to find my horizon line, my vanishing points. My horizon line is usually on the vanishing points, always. And so when we're looking down, the horizon line is up high on the page or on the canvas or on the composition. So I'm going to use that idea again of the box, finding the top, front, two sides because every head has a front, two sides, and a top and the bottom. And the more that I can show off the box, the better. And of course, there are modifications to the box, and you'll kind of get a feel for that as you do your own, and you'll have to do half a dozen of them to get it to kind of where it becomes second nature. So So I've got the nose in. I built the eye sockets, cheek bones, and now the two cylinder with a little bit of hint of the lips here. And then the chin box. And everything. I tried to be careful that there's some overlaps because overlaps really sells the idea of depth or distance, just that one tool. And you can use this for any kind of caricature or cartoon, or you can use it for realistic portraits concept anything you want, it works pretty well. And then after a while, you won't really need to draw the box. It'll become second nature. And I'm just rounding out the corners here so that my simple box shape becomes more characteristic. So the box is simple and characteristic, but it needs some finesse. It doesn't need those hard corners there. We don't want to see that. We want to see the beautiful finished portrait painting. And so as soon as I can, I round out those corners and make it look more human, more like a skull, and I'll erase those construction lines later. And then all I have to do is really just kind of think my way through, you know, finding the centers. I found the center of the face, where the nose is and the mouth. And once I find the center of the box, then I can go ahead and find the halfway vertically. That's the point where the eyes are. And if I can find where the eyes are, then I can find a little bit above that is the eyebrow, and then I can find the nose, mouth, et cetera. I can place the ears. And using the box, there's no doubt where this head is in space. It describes the form and its direction in space with specificity and clarity that a sphere really can't do for you and a tube can do it, but it can't do it like a box. A tube has no hard corners, really. It has hard edges, but not hard corners like a box has. And so, you'll notice that in contrast to the last head I did where we're looking up, we're going to see more forehead and less lower parts of the face. Than we did when we were looking up. So it's going to be a 60 40 split the other way, 60%. We're going to see forehead and maybe 40% of the lower features of the face or the head. And that's helpful just to kind of handle the complexity of it. I know I'm just going to see more forehead. So if I'm not seeing that, it means my drawing is wrong. Maybe that's why it looks wrong, and so I can correct it simply by asking myself, am I seeing more of the forehead when I'm looking down like I should? If not, I'll make the adjustment. And then I can put the hair on and kind of treat that like it has a top and sides as well and overlaps and the hairstyle, you know, just kind of whatever you want it to be and so this is a quick one. Just wanting to get this kind of done and out the door, I think it's somewhat self explanatory, and you can see the process. Pretty fun, and it takes a complex thing like a head and makes it doable from any angle. So now you know how to draw it from an extreme camera angle looking up or a worm's eye view and an extreme camera angle looking down or a bird's eye view. Once you get a handle of this, like I said, it'll go pretty fast and you won't think about it, and you may not need to even draw the box at all. So the box it's kind of like training whales. It gives you freedom eventually, you know, but it definitely helps place the head in space and then place the features and build the whole thing so it looks like a sculpture. The idea is to become a sculpting drawer so that your drawings, your portraits have a veracity and kind of, you know, a truth to them. It's just the fundamentals, always practicing the fundamentals and just getting better at them, refining them, so on, just like the guitar. It's the same stuff over and over, and then you get better and better over time. And it's incremental, so you may not notice it right away, but if you look back in two or three months, you'll see that you've improved if you consistently practice every day. So there's an idea here. I'm going to draw a series of stair steps here, and this would be a head and profile. You'll see the forehead meet the nose, and then the nose where it meets the upper lip, lower lip comes out, and then the chin. And now, if you're looking up, you can see that the stairsteps start to overlap in a way where if you play with it, you can make the head. You can extrude noses and lips and chins out of that. And conversely, if we look down on the head, you see a series of Ls, right? And you can see forehead, nose, lips, chin because the overlaps are so strong, and it just happens to work like stair steps like that. So I'm just pointing that out right there. If you make the overlaps right and you use the letter L or the number seven, you'll be able to kind of quickly get a head down on paper just as a note for maybe a storyboard or just a thought that you had or just to place it on the page and you can come back later and flesh it out, but at least you know what you're thinking about. 45. Creative Posing Guide: Okay, so up to now, we've been talking about all the technical things you need to do to make great portraits like line, form, shape, value, shape language. And now we're getting into a little bit more of the backstory, the storytelling piece, and we're going to talk about posing and posing in combination with all the other things. Really is there to help bring your portraits and bring them to life, basically. So we're going to explore some posing scenarios and a little bit more for the creative side, as if you're sitting in front of a blank piece of paper and you don't know what to do, and you're thinking, I just got to pull something out of thin air. It's nice to have some kind of visual library to pull from. And so we're going to just explore some very simple posing ideas to get you started, right? So let's dive in. Alright, posing your models and characters. Now, we're going to use the visual language to do this, obviously, but we're going to use body language because that body language is going to convey the inner feelings, the emotions, the state of mind or being that that character or model is in. So it's all really important. And I'm going to introduce you to four basic approaches that you can sort of put into your visual memory file and you can pull out whenever you need it so that you can be creative. You can draw on command. And it's just good to have a source file in your mind. So we'll keep it simple, and then you can build from there more complexity into it. So let's look at the first one. The first one is just a straight. So I think all of these four that I'm going to show you in terms of animation and just very simple visual ideas, the straight line, okay? And that has to do with straights and curves and gesture drawing and figure drawing. And a lot of this just kind of comes from animation, but it'll be pretty obvious to you. The second one is the diagonal. The third one is the C curve, and the fourth one is the S curve. All right? Okay, the straight, pretty obvious straight up and down, facing the camera. So we need kind of a standard and a basic thing to start from, and then we'll build from there. So the model is just facing the camera. Their face is looking straight into the camera. Pretty simple, pretty boring, but, you know, it's used in a lot of photography, and it could be used for a certain visual effect or for whatever you're trying to put across, something like this could work. So the second is the head tilted. Body is straightforward, head is tilted. The head tilt gives that sense of playfulness, that sense of inquisitiveness, and it's definitely communicating something. A little less direct than just the face looking straight on. Just some examples of that are the subtle head tilt and the more exaggerated head tilt. These are just some real life examples that can kind of help you get an idea how they're used in everyday photography or portraiture. Okay, let's move on to the next one. At the head looking up. Now, this is the person is unaware really that they're being watched. And the first two, they see you, you see them. There's a certain psychology to that. There's a certain maybe connection to that with the viewer and the subject. Now, the subject is just looking up, preoccupied with something else. There's maybe a spiritual aspect to this because they're looking and you're looking at them. So you're a little bit of a voyeur in this one, they may or may not know you're there. But they're also directing your gaze up. So you don't just look directly in their eyes like the first two, where's that connection in the eyes. This one, their eyes are looking up, and they're drawing your gaze up, as well. The next one is the head looking down. So for whatever reason, you might want the person's head in this position. They might be contemplating something. They might be actually looking somewhere. Maybe this would advance the storyline somehow. If you want the audience to notice something, you have the character look there first, and then you show what it is in the camera, what that character is looking at. But it gives the the viewer, you, the audience a clue, okay? But it could be somebody just looking down. They're in a contemplative state of mind. If this is a portrait, you might want to use this position or this pose for that. Okay, building on the front facing straight line pose is just the character looking to left, camera left or camera right, in this case, looking camera right, shoulder slightly tilted, so we have a little bit of variation. And that works well for portraits and any number of things. Profile look basically. Again, this character may not know that they're being watched, so there's a certain psychology to that to be aware of, but it is a very useful angle to show off the beauty of the model or to advance the narrative that you're trying to put forward. Alright, let's look at pose number two, the diagonal. It's basically the character cutting into the frame in a very dynamic way, just like this diagonal line. We're building that character off a diagonal line, cutting into the frame. It's very dynamic, right? So you could have the Remember, the head is a gesture that flows with or breaks away from the body. So in this one, the body gesture is going this way and the head gesture is going another way. Or you could have it where, you know, the body is going this way and the head is really kind of going with it. You know, they're looking up. So they're not really in opposition So we'll just put a neck on there so you can see it, right? And this one they're looking down. So you've got this way and this way. This one, you've got pretty much just a gesture of the body, gesture the head. They're both going in the same direction. So let's look at some examples of this. This one it's a very strong and striking pose. But here we go. It's really helpful to connect these to real life kind of photo situations, whether in fashion or in movies or storyboards. Right? And they're all kind of cutting into frame. So they've got this, you know, way where they're off balance. And here's the final one. And you can put the arms in any place. Notice in this last one, the arms are really out there going this way. So arms can go, they can come down to the waist, right? They can come up so that's just kind of secondary. The main thing is, you know, what's the body doing and the head, and then you can build the limbs from there. And there's just that classic gesture, S curve and the head in opposition. Here we go. Just like that. That's a classic, beautiful pose. This one goes this way, the head goes that way. So they're in opposition. You could kind of say they're counterbalanced, right, one against the other, one against the other. Okay, really good stuff and very simple. So that's one that's clear that you can, I think, grab ahold of. Okay, the next one is the C curve number three. Simple curve. Let's look at it. Come out a little bit there. Okay. So here is the first one. So see if you can find the C curve in these that I'm going to show you. Maybe I'll show them to you first, and then we can discuss finding that simple C curve. And one more. There it is. There they are. Simple C curve. I animation, it's the gesture. So you have the C curve and the S curve and the straight line. And, again, that comes from animation. It comes from figure drawing, and it comes from being able to distill everything down to its most basic building blocks. For figure drawing, it's the gesture, and it's meant to capture the action and the attitude of the character or the model. So, here it is. I'm looking at this. The head is always a little bit something that you add on. The limbs are added on, but the basic body curve is going like this, right? The head is, again, in opposition to it. This one is just a nice curve all the way through. Say that. Beautiful, simple. You don't get caught up or I don't try not to get caught up in the anatomy. You can see it there. I put it kind of in there, but the main thing I want you to see in pink is that Scurve. Here's another one, Securve The head is a gesture that's going with the body in this case. In this case, the head is a gesture breaking away from the body, flowing in a different direction, right? And then the limbs are added on later. They could be again, going in any direction. You depending on what you want to say, what message you want to get across, what activity the model is doing, and this one, a nice C curve. There it is. So you've got the different positions you've got the side or profile. Again, this is kind of like a three quarter side, three quarter view. Again, another side view just opened up a little bit more. This might be like a soft three quarter. And then this one's a back. So you have side, three quarter and back views all with the curve, S curve, S curve Sea curve. So if you're planning, that's why this is so good because you can just say, Alright, what do I need to draw here? Well, you know, I'll try the straight line. Well, that's a little bit boring. So let's, you know, let's try the diagonal. Do I like that? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. Let's, you know, let's try the S curve in here somewhere. Anywhere, put it down. That doesn't work, you know, try it this way. And that might be the thing that works. This just helps you get the figure down on the page quick without wasting time to play around with a lot of ideas to get where you want to go faster. And then build from there. Play. You see how easy it was for me to come up with these drawings and throw them away. They're not even drawings. They're just these hieroglyphs. You can put them down, erase them. You know, they're thumbnails. They're partial. They're not even hardly thumbnails. But they're just going one way, the other way, they're showing the weight, balance, and proportion, the attitude, maybe reflecting what the model is thinking, and you're just going from there, kind of going from the gut, but you're using a simple sort of scaffold to build something on, okay? All right let's look at the next one. Number four is the S curve, so let's check it out. All right, let's analyze the S curve for a second. The S curve is a compound curve. The C curve is a simple curve. The S curve is two C curves combined. And usually in figure drawing, that involves a twist or it's contrapostal. All right, that means opposing positions. So that means the rib cage is in opposing position than the torso, right? So there's the rib cage. It's going one direction, the torso going another direction. So they're opposing each other. And I think you're probably familiar with that, right? So that's contraposto. The head could be going in again, altogether different direction. So you've got this flowing into this, flowing into that. That's contrapostal, and it's movement like a river, and that really is the essence of g your drawing. You want to put that into your portraits or your characters whenever you can. So you've got the contraposto or you've got a twist. So let me show you what I mean. So here's kind of the twist. And I don't know if you're going to be able to see this. This isn't going to be the best example. But let's see. If I have the s curves going like this, I can build a rib cage using really simple shapes, right? There's my rib cage, and it's going in this direction, especially if I draw a cross contour, you can see that where it intersects this line, describing the form, right, it gives it a front and it's looking in that direction. When I attach the hips, you know, I can get them looking in another direction, say, this way, right? And so I've got this twist. And it's a little hard to explain here. But that's a pose you can use, right? It's a twist the head. And it's built off the S curve. We've got that S curve in here. Well, we can go the other way. We can go this way and that way. Simple S curve. It's that simple idea. And this is confusing too, you know, where the overlaps going it's something that takes practice. But if you can get those overlaps happening in the right place, you could turn these two spheres into a human figure that's twisting. So you've got this overlap right here. This overlap here is going to say there's a twist. Let's do it again. Real. This overlap here And that overlap on the other side. Can you see how that says a twist or an S curve? It's really two opposing stretches. This is stretching this way, that's stretching off that way. It's a twist. If you do it with some clay or kneaded rubber eraser, you'll really see those overlaps there. It's like a letter, let me see, like a letter Y. You know, we've got a letter Y here, and we've got another letter Y there kind of upside down. I don't know if you can see that one. All right. Letter y and letter Y. Those things tell the story of the twist, right? Letter Y. Letter y. Anyway, something to practice with, and that is really what's making up this. And you have to practice that to feel that. So that's one position the other one is, again, contrapostal, simple opposing positions. Shoulders go one way, the hips go another way, the head opposing the shoulders. So we've got the structures opposing each other. But the essence of it before you get to the structure is the gesture. So let's just take the gesture and show you. There's the S curve. This way, this way. It's really, you know, an S or two C curves. And that will give you the life, right? The attitude I'll give you some idea of, you know, what the person is thinking, maybe, or it infuses the drawing with a sense of, like, action, right? Maybe it's the person is about to call the about to pose, about to. I feel like they're going to be moving. They're going somewhere, and you can capture all this in just, you know, one frame. And that's the beauty of this kind of your drawing and understanding, capturing the action. And you can do that, you know, just with a portrait, a simple portrait. You can build it around a straight line, a diagonal, a C curve or an S curve. And really, that's it. You just want to keep it simple and use these things, of course, there's so many more. So you want to keep it simple. Something you can do from memory that gets your idea across really quickly. And then you can build from there. And you can discard things that don't work because they're thumbnails and you haven't wasted a lot of time. So you can explore different ideas very quickly. And, of course, this isn't exhaustive. There are tons more poses, but at a certain point you reach a peak, and there are only a certain amount of poses that you can pull off in a box. Okay. So I hope this is helpful and give you some ammunition to try and start drawing from imagination. Or if you're working with a model, you've got to know how to art direct them. And when that model comes in the studio and you're suddenly like, What do I do? If you know some of these basic poses, you can start with these, and then you'll get inspiration as the model sits down, you turn the light on, and then you'll see something that you really like and say, Oh, that's it. You'll be inspired to have them move in different directions, move the body, tilt the head, and it'll kind of all come together. But that beginning can be a little bit intimidating. But if you have a little direction in mind like this stuff, just a little art direction to help you. Then it'll help you with the model, and the model will feel comfortable because it says you know what you're doing, or maybe you know what you want, even though you don't. And then the whole situation, the whole model shoot goes well, or the whole posing part of the drawing experience will be smoother, okay? So that's it. All right, we'll see you in the next video.