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Facial proportions in 13/8 steps

August 9, 2007 in Editorials, Tutorials | No comments

…or make that “phi,” which I’ll go into in a moment. First, let’s discuss facial proportions.

Facial proportions
A lot has been written on facial proportions. In the probably 10 books I own on portraits + all the ones I’ve browsed through in the bookstore and/or library – PLUS all of the guides I’ve seen on the Internet, NOBODY MATCHES PERFECTLY. That is, no two facial proportion references match up to each other.

  • Is the hairline at 1/3 up from the brow? Or is it 1/2 up from the brow to the top of the head?
  • Is the eyeline at the middle of the head or the browline?
  • Is the ear at the mouth line or the nose line?
  • Do I believe John Howard Sanden or Burne Hogarth? Or neither?
  • etc., etc., etc.

Who’s right? None of the artists I’ve seen are right – and I can say this because almost all of them reference their own drawings when they point out proportions, not pictures of real faces. Duh! They all mean well buy they’re just giving you their personal rules of thumb. Let’s go beyond opinion and do some research on beauty – including some good resources for artists, plastic surgery information! After all, how do plastic surgeons know just how long to make a nose or just how much to tweak to make a face pretty again? They certainly don’t reference their favorite book on portraiture by Douglas Graves.

Phi
Okay, back to “phi” or the cryptic 13/8 reference in the title. Phi is a Greek name for what’s also known as “the golden mean” or the perfect ratio or even “Fibonacci.” If you’re into graphic design, you’ve GOT to check this out! It’s a sequence of numbers that, one added to the next makes the third. For example, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … to infinity. If you divide the numbers, they get closer and closer to the golden mean, or 1.618:1. Keep that in mind: nearly 1/3 but not quite.

As an aside, my brother-in-law has a Mopar book and it concludes with the Chrysler 300M designers. When asked about the bold design, they noted that the car has Fibonacci written all over it. Indeed. In case you didn’t get it, I think the car is stunning and very masculine, a standout in the crowd by any measure (like it or not).

Portraits and the golden mean
Okay, so what do portraits have to do with some dead Italian guy and Chrysler 300Ms? The human face is literally sculpted out of the golden mean. Not thirds, not quarters, not halves… 1.618:1. Check out this reference image from PhiMatrix.com:

http://www.phimatrix.com/images/phi-woman.jpg

Phi proportions

If you take the tip of her nose to the back of her head and find the 1.618:1 mark, it’s right at her ear (the “ear hole,” if you will). Starting from that line, draw another 1.618:1 mark and it’s where her neck meets her chin. Draw another one and it’s the back of her eye. Again, and it’s the front of her eye and the back of her mouth. AGAIN and you’re at the bridge of her nose. Finally, one more time and you’re at the front of her teeth and the septum under her nose.

Can you say, “wow?” I knew you could. <pulls on sweater and changes shoes, goes to see King Friday>

And I didn’t even go over the horizontal lines! This picture could even be split into even more 1.618:1 sections ad infinitum and you could keep finding perfectly matched features (of course, the more attractive the person, the closer to perfect, which is why learning to see is so important!).

Let’s look again:

Holy cannoli, Batman, do you think we’re on to something? If I see one more reference that says that the iris is 1/3 the width of the eye or that the pupil is 1/3 the width of the pupil, I’m going to scream. I mean it, I’ll do it… I will! Watch me! AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!

Observations
Okay, I’m better now. But I think you get my point – and I think I have 2 key points that I would like you to take away from this article:

  1. The proportions of the human face are 1.618:1 all over the place
  2. You have to use that as a reference and really measure for yourself unless your only subjects are supermodels (keep dreaming)

Keep learning to see and keep on questioning authority. Even me. I’m wrong at least 38.2% of the time (yes, that’s that’s the other portion of the 1:1.618 ratio, or slightly more than 1/3, which is NOT a good number for facial proportions).

Learning to see (part 2): Modified Blind contours

August 8, 2007 in Process, Tutorials | No comments

In part 2 we’re going to take it to the next step in learning to see properly with modified blind contours.

If you haven’t already, please start with the blind contour. Shortcuts will only hurt yourself in the long run; please don’t cheat yourself.

The process
Step 1: sit comfortaby with your favorite drawing pencil/pen/charcoal/whatever and a pad of paper

Step 2: turn your head AWAY from your drawing surface and look at your object (your non-drawing hand should work just fine). Difficulty: hold something in your hand (your choice)

Step 3: only move your pencil as your eye moves on the surface/contours of the object and your hand. This time, you MAY look at your drawing; however, you may NOT move your pencil while looking at your paper, ONLY move your pencil while looking at the drawing

IMPORTANT: your drawing will most likely look funny. You will make mistakes in proportion, relation, size, etc. because you’re going all-out the first time, no erasing, no do-overs (that’s “no mulligans” for you golfer-types). This is okay – if your drawing is perfect, then you cheated. No cheating. I will know and you will not build the nerve connections required.

Example:
Modified_blind_contour

What’s in it for me?
You might be asking yourself, “Self, why am I drawing funny looking hands? Does this guy know what he’s talking about?” Yes, I do know, and you’re NOT drawing funny hands, you are training your eye to see. You are building nerve connections that didn’t exist before. You are honing an ability to move that pencil properly. These basic exercises CANNOT be overemphasized.

Observations
Your drawing should NOT have “sketchy” lines – that is, you should NOT be moving your pencil back and forth in short little motions. Lots of people new to drawing do this. Please don’t be one of them. You should hold your pencil relatively far back and mostly flat to the paper, not like you hold it for writing. Yes, there IS a right way and it’s there for a reason: control and intention. You’re here because you want to get better, right? Then at least try my way for a while before you curse my name, yeah?

Writing grip:

writing

Drawing grip:
drawing_grip1

Drawing grip (alternate):
drawing_grip2

Homework:
10-20 minutes of blind contours
10-20 minutes of modified blind contours

Part 3: Pure Contours
With that, I’ll leave you to your modified blind contours until we meet again for part 3: Pure Contours. Now the good stuff really starts and, if you’ve been honest and diligent, you’ll really start to see rapid progress.

Learning to see (part 1): Blind Contours

August 8, 2007 in Process, Tutorials | No comments

Previously, I told you that you had to learn to see in order to learn to draw. I maintain that position and today I’m here to show you how to get further down that path: blind contour drawing.

The concept
The concept is deceptively simple: draw something, moving your hand/pencil bit-for-bit, inch-for-inch with your eye. Remember how edges don’t exist? Okay, well, we’re going to press the make-believe button and draw contours here, which are simply the edges you think you see but aren’t really there.

The process
Step 1: situate yourself comfortably with your drawing hand holding your medium (pencil, pen, chalk, remnants of a Snickers(TM), etc.)

Step 2: turn your head AWAY from your drawing. This is a BLIND contour. NO LOOKING!

Step 3: spend about 30 seconds looking at the object you are going to draw – I suggest using your non-drawing hand.

Step 4: put your medium to paper and start drawing, being careful to draw ONLY while your eye is moving

IMPORTANT: do not lift your pencil/pen/etc. off the paper. This will keep you from skipping around like crazy

ALSO IMPORTANT: your drawing will probably not look like your object. If it does, you cheated and I’ve found you out. That’s three nights of detention for you! While you’re there, practice your blind contours. Your hand may not look like anything but a big scribble of lines. Congratulations!

Blind_contour

What’s in it for me?
The immediate benefit to blind contours is this: you’ll really start to develop your hand-eye coordination and start building the neural pathways so that your hand starts to really draw what your eye sees!

I know it like the back of my hand
Something an art teacher once told me: you never really know what something looks like until you’ve drawn it. And she was 100% correct: in my years of teaching my “learning to see” class, I ALWAYS have students that are amazed at their own hands. You think you know something like the back of your hand? I bet you don’t – at least not until you’ve done some contour drawings of the back of your hand and REALLY know what it looks like. Is it wrinkly? Is your hand weathered? Do you have bony fingers? You might not have known before but you know now.

What else have you been missing in your life? Take the time to do a blind contour. Part 2 is “modified blind contours,” and gets even more interesting (if not a little less frustrating).

How not to draw a portrait

July 20, 2007 in Editorials, Process, Tutorials | No comments

The [tag-tec]human head[/tag-tec] is pretty consistent across the ages, across gender, across race, etc. We’re all human (except those that aren’t) so we all fall within some pretty narrow confines.

Take, for example, the eyes. We all have 2. Okay, we’re all supposed to have 2. You may have heard that the head is “5 eyes” across – and that’s a good rule of thumb, but drawing a portrait from rules of thumb will almost always leave you with a lifeless scribble that you’d rather bury at the bottom of the trash can. Under some stuff.

The point? Don’t draw a portrait based on what you think it should be because your 10th grade art teacher told you it had to be that way. Or because you read some drawing book and it seemed to work for that guy. Well, you’re not that guy. And neither am I.

So how do you do it properly? I’d like to preface a future post – about “cheating” when doing portraits, always a hot topic – by loosely quoting a phenomenal artist, Virgil Elliott, who said that, yes, you can “cheat,” but by not learning to see properly in the first place, you’re just cheating yourself and you’ll never really become a great artist. He said that, or words to that effect, on WetCanvas, when the topic of “cheating” came up for the umpteenth time.

“Properly” drawing a portrait (or painting one, for that matter), involves roughing in based on what you know to be true about proportion and the human head in general with what you actually see. Yes, you have to actually look, examine, re-examine, and maybe even erase and start over a bunch of times.

Drawing a portrait is a lot like tuning an instrument to itself. What I mean by that, for you guitarists out there, is if you don’t happen to have perfect pitch or access to a pitch pipe or tuner, you can adjust one string so that it’s close and then adjust the other strings to that string. Thus, the guitar isn’t at concert pitch but it’s close and it’s in tune with itself so most people (especially me) would never notice the difference.

Extrapolating, if you keep your portrait relative to itself, measuring, re-measuring, erasing, etc., until you’ve captured the nuances, and keep the rules of thumb on the back burner, you’ll actually come out with a really good portrait. I think that this portrait done for a group session on WetCanvas came out very good (though I see all the mistakes every time I look at it) even though I almost completely ignored all the stuff I learned about the head and just told my brain to “shut up and draw.”

Portrait of young woman

More to come on cheating, turning off your brain, learning to see, proportions, and other topics intimated in this post.