4/22 Blog #4 New Angles

    Last week, I decided to take a head-on approach and get right into learning the basics of drawing the human face. I learned how to create an outline for where all facial features belong and how to use this outline to place said features in the correct spots. However, I feel that now it is important for me to get a decent grasp on more basics before I delve into more detail. By this, I mean that I plan on learning how to draw the human face from a side view, in addition to the front view I learned last week. Similarly to drawing a face from the front view, things get very technical. Once again, I utilized a video from Dan Beardshaw to learn how to do this. This is the same video I learned to draw a front-view face from. Last week, I only watched the first portion of the video to gain a basic understanding of constructing facial features. Now, I am utilizing the remainder of the video to learn to outline basic facial features on a side view.

    The process of drawing this side view is largely similar to drawing a front view. The process begins by drawing a simple circle. In fact, this can be done by creating lines from the circle of the front-view face to the side of the paper and drawing the circle for the side-view face. (Of course, assuming that there is remaining room on the same piece of paper.) The same series of lines and dots is used to divide up this circle so that there is an outline for where all facial features belong. To begin, I drew two curved lines to form the jaw line. The first was from the far left of the circle and the second was from the bottom of the circle. These curved lines met to the lower left of the circle. I drew an indent and protruding shape on the left side of the face to create the keystone area and nose shape. (The keystone is that indent between the top of the nose and the eyebrows.) Starting from the top of the keystone area, I sketched an eyebrow. From the rightmost edge of this eyebrow, I drew a semicircle to outline the eye socket and drew an eye inside there. I drew an ear-esque shape around the center of the circle. The top of this ear worked as an indicator for the hairline, which I drew with a zig-zag sort of line that eventually reached the top of the circle.

    Overall, I find that drawing a side-view face is actually easier than drawing a front-view face. It was a bit daunting at first to understand the new perspective I was drawing from. However, I eventually found that a side-view face seemed to be far less technical and require less precision. With these basics now down, I’ll attempt to draw a fully-fledged face next week; i.e. an actual face rather than an outline with basic features lacking details.

My vlog