I’ve been trying to get into drawing. I started two different beginners drawing classes in undergrad that I couldn’t finish bc I was too crazy and perfectionistic. Turns out the only way to get better at drawing is to draw lol
The crazy thing is I used to get so fucking frustrated sitting down to draw, either bc I was impatient or because I thought I was churning out garbage without learning anything (I dropped out of those drawing classes as soon as we got to shading, without fail)
So what I’ve been doing is going to museums and sketching sculptures. I have a really good book (Drawing Atelier – The Figure: how to draw in the classical style) and i’m realizing that there’s a lot of ways in to drawing, and there’s a lot to master (construction, shading, gestures, etc) but you have to DO IT in order to get better
also, practicing shapes. I need to get my head around transmitting 3D figures to a 2D medium (that’s why I kept dropping out of shading, i didn’t know how to give a line image depth)
anyway this morning i woke up thinking about drawing and i’ve decided i’m just gonna draw from life the stuff i WANT to draw and that inspires me (I drew a dancing Shiva a couple days ago at the Norton Simon), and whatever I need to learn I’ll get there on my own time
which i think is a good general art practice, no matter what you’re doing
Thank you! There’s one thing about drawing portraits that I don’t think I’ve ever touched on, and it’s the technique of constraining features. Basically, it becomes easier and more intuitive to rotate the face in 3D space once your mind grasps exactly where the features are located and, furthermore, where they can’t be located.
I use a weird double trapezoid shape that I’ve depicted below in red to keep track of facial feature placement every single time I draw a face. It follows the top of the eyebrows, touches the corner of the eye, traces down to the corner of the lips, and finally ends at the bottom of the lips.
The shape of the constraint will change depending on the person’s features, and it works for every angle of the head. For me it really internalized where each part of the face was, as well as where it started and ended. It kinda helps moderate your drawings; i.e., you’ll stop drawing features that are wildly misplaced or off-sized. I don’t literally draw this shape out every time I draw a face, but I see it in my mind’s eye 100% of the time.
If you’re still learning proportions, a good exercise is to grab pictures of people and trace this shape over them (either digitally or with a marker or something) to get an idea of what realistic constraints looks like. Then go back to studying faces, and constantly check your drawing by tracing along the eyebrows and down to the bottom of the lips to make sure that things aren’t off (e.g., the constraint isn’t terribly asymmetric). It takes a while to get used to, but it might help you get a good feel for portraiture.
There’s one other unrelated thing I like to do with faces, and if you’ve seen a lot of my pics you’ve already picked up on it. If you kinda add some shading to the area on the cheek just below the eye and down to the nose, I think it adds a decent amount of depth to a face. Don’t go overboard of course but there’s another little tip that could be of use.
love galore 