Drawing2

Today, on a Reddit post, I told a drawing beginner the following:

IMO, as a beginner, heads are an incredibly complex subject to begin with. There are a number of fundamental skills that have to be developed that apply directly to the drawing of heads:

1) Form - Thinking of heads and their various appendages not as lines on a piece of paper, but as three-dimensional objects existing in space.

2) Construction - knowing how to simplify/break down complex shapes into more simple shapes. Think, "building a cube from individual squares", or "making a cylinder from circles and a square".

3) Proportion - being able to accurately measure distances between points of interest, and maintaining that relationship in a drawing.

In my opinion, faces in particular have a lot of features that can distract you from being able to accurately represent or reproduce a face or head (especially light and shadow!).

What I would highly recommend you do is to take up some still-lifes with some simple objects, like a vase or a pot, and start trying to pull apart what makes them look like they do.

Once you've figured out some techniques for constructing those simple objects, start applying what you've learned to the shape of the head and its various parts.

Hope this helps!

At the time, I thought this might have been good advice, but reflecting on it now, I can see that it’s incomplete advice.

The person in question was attempting to draw heads/faces from reference, laid out in a manner similar to the following:

In my post, I advised them to take it upon themselves to create techniques that cover the aforementioned subjects of form, construction, and proportion by actively studying simpler subjects, like a pot or a vase… which on the surface, seems like pretty okay advice.

My issue is that I don’t believe that I gave them any kind of jump-off point to get them started. Let’s go into how I might tackle this same issue, with some examples.

Let’s take the following image of a vase:

How might I tackle attempting to draw this vase in three dimensions?

Well, first-off, this particular image doesn’t leave much to go off of, because of the perspective of the camera. However, considering one-point perspective in this case, I can begin to make some approximations as far as the construction of this vase.

First, though, proportions seem to be the most apparent and obvious thing to start with here, since we have the silhouette of the subject. Let’s make some measurement lines that allow us get proper proportions:

I’ve taken the liberty of marking the approximate location of the center point, and the attached horizon line, marked in red.

Keeping in mind that gravity runs perpendicular to the ground (and that the vase is able to stand, we’re going to make the assumption that the bottom of the vase is completely flat.

If we were to turn the vase 90° away from us, so that the vase’s bottom is facing us, what shape would we see? I’ll give you a hint:

Cool! So we can immediately make a base out of a circle. But wait, a minute, in the picture of the vase, the bottom is looking as though it’s curved, rather than flat.

This is because of perspective; because our eye level is at the center of the vase, the bottom of the vase is very very slightly facing away from us… or, rather, our eye. If we were to imagine our eye in relation to the vase, it might look something like this:

What I want to get across with this is that what I called Form is the ability to understand how an object in space looks in relation to the eye, even when moved or rotated.

Going back to our drawing, we can begin to Construct our vase using a perspective-skewed circle for its bottom, along with some additional circles constructing its top and main body. Like so:

From there, it’s simple to connect our reference points from earlier, while paying attention to the negative space in the original picture to complete the silhouette of our own:

Again, though, trying to learn construction and form is incredibly difficult from a photograph because you cannot turn the 2D representation of a 3D object in space. You would have to have a base understanding of the 3D object being represented in order to effectively use photographic reference.

That’s all I’m trying to get at, anyway.