Welcome to this chapter in the Advanced Head Drawing Series.
In this chapter, we’re looking at the effects of aging.
What we’re going to see here is that skin acts as just very tight drapery.
Usually we work with the prime of life when we’re doing models, but what happens if
we want to draw young children or old folks?
How does that affect the structure, the gesture?
How does the anatomy change?
The proportions change?
You can see the top of the shoulder has gotten very flat.
It’s not as full as it was in youth.
It’s starting to hollow out and flatten out here.
The skin has to go over both sides, and we get them that telltale front plane and side plane.

Alright, here we go with the effects of aging.
How do we take this character and age him, or in this case, her;
this is a female European character.
What happens with that?
For the most part, bones do not keep growing, cartilage does.
Anything that is cartilage is going to get bigger with age.
The ears are all cartilage.
The nose is mainly cartilage.
You’re going to get a longer and longer nose.
You’re going to get bigger and bigger ears.
Actually, the lower jaw will appear to grow in a way because these teeth
will grind down over time.
This jaw will start to come forward like that.
What was a nice barrel of the mouth this way can end up scooping this way.
We’re going to have a lot of subtle effects compounding, building on each other to create
actually rather dramatic results.
We’re going to get a lot of differences that will pile up over time and create brand-new
shapes, brand-new proportions to some extent.
The plates keep moving in the skull, and the skull shape can change a little bit too, as
a matter of fact.
The big effect is gravity.
There is going to be a wearing factor.
If you’re ever worn a leather jacket, say, and you keep doing this, you’ll get wrinkle
lines going this way.
Wrinkles happen by wear, by use and over use.
As you do this, it starts to fold up that loose leather material on your jacket arm,
and you start getting cross-striations of wear lines.
The same thing will happen on the face and the whole body, in fact, as you age.
Over the years, the continued motion, for example, winking or squinting in the sun or
squinting when you smoke, the famous smoke lines, or squinting when you smile.
When you squint this pushes up, this pushes down, squeezing, and it’s going to squeeze
that material.
The material has no place to go but to buckle up, and you get these little lumps and bumps
just like folding fabric here.
You’re going to get as I do pressure up and pressure down, we’ll get the wrinkles,
the folds going across.
What we’re going to see here is that skin acts as just very tight drapery.
Over time that drapery loosens and starts to be affected by gravity.
You can think of skin as tight drapery as a costume, and you can think of drapery or
costuming as very loose skin.
They really have the same dynamic.
We’re going to actually have to look at the laws of drapery.
What are the mechanics that go into drapery and folds.
Fold mechanics.
That’ll be kind of fun.
I enjoy that.
Gravity pulls on things, start dragging it down.
Wear lines work back and forth and compress and stretch and start creating cross currents
of material against that line of action.
And then the laws of drapery, what supports and what falls from that support, so support
and gravity play a great part of this.
As I said, we’ll have things wear down or things continuing to grow and proportions
will change.
So, with that little introduction, let’s go ahead and take a look.
Alright, let’s look at drapery first.
We won’t go through all the drapery.
That’s a lecture in itself, a lesson in itself.
We’ll get enough information that we can make some sense out of the loose flesh that’ll
tend to happen on an aged character.
Drapery.
Drapery is built off two mechanical ideas, two structural ideas.
The support system.
What’s supporting that fabric?
Then gravity.
For example, there are several kinds of folds, and depending on the system that you look
at and who has kind of figured out the whys and what you’ll get as little as three folds,
as many as seven or eight different kinds of folds.
It doesn’t really matter.
I’ll show you the basic mechanics of the one fold.
There is really a couple of them that we can look to, but one primary one.
So, if we have a towel, let’s say, pinned to a wall or pinned to line.
It’s drawing in the wind.
Here is what happens.
We have the supports.
In this case, it’s just these two points.
And then there is gravity.
Everything over here basically falls straight down with gravity.
Though, material might wad up.
And so it’ll force it out a little bit just because of the fabric.
Notice when it’s pinned it’s held tighter.
As we get away from that single point of support, it can open up a little bit.
So, we’ll start to see these triangular designs happen.
Then watch what happens.
The same thing would be over here if we wanted to play that out any farther.
It’ll start radiating out as we play that game that way, like so.
Notice the triangle here, but then watch here.
As we start moving farther away from this support, gravity starts to pull it down.
Again, you can see that triangular design doing, this radiating out from that point
of support.
We get these triangles.
So, drapery is design.
The design shape of drapery is triangles, triangular.
We’ll get what’s called diaper folds.
You pin at the hips of the little baby and then everything hangs between the two pin
supports like this.
And the fabric would do something like this, bump over, and this will hang down here, and
then this will start breaking away.
These two won’t complete the circuit necessarily, and so on.
Notice that these start out tight and open up, so these are triangular.
These are curved.
Notice also that—let’s do this—these groupings, these arrangements, the composition
of things is all triangular, but also these are triangular here.
It’s just a rounder triangle.
It becomes more of a crescent, but we’re thinking of those as triangular too, maybe
two triangles put together or something like that.
So, triangles.
Then the folds, that’s the arrangement of the folds.
Then the folds themselves, and you can see that here, is tubular, but it doesn’t get
to be a full tube because of the nature of the fabric.
It’s a big swath of fabric.
They become only partial tubes, if you can see that.
Here is the tube and here is the reverse tube.
We don’t get to complete—dot, dot, dot—that tube because it gets yanked around into the
next area of fabric.
What we’re going to do then is design our drapery on tubes and triangles, and so any
fold is going to be tubed and triangled.
Now, if you get really stiff fabric, those tubes can start to square off.
Burlap and they’ll kink and stuff.
They can get a little squarer.
Tubes and triangles has that nice alliteration, and so it’s easy to remember, so I always
just stay tubes and triangles even though it might be more boxy and squarish and triangle.
But, that doesn’t have the ring to it.
Tubes and triangles, that’s what we’re after.
Radiating designs.
Now, as that tube drops down with gravity, that’s assuming that there is a support
holding it up here.
It has to be or else it’ll just collapse on a heap in the floor, supported somehow
up here and then drops gravity.
If it’s supported from a single point, it will be more of a conical tube, but it’ll
still be a tube.
As I say, they become partial tubes for the reasons I just described.
But, if you get a support from below, say it hangs down and hits the lap and has to
cascade over.
If we get a support from below, we get a little bit different thing happening.
It’s still going to be tubular.
That’s the structure of the fold.
But now, it’s going to kink up like a garden hose.
Once it gets past the pressure it’ll go back down into its regular old descending
tube.
It’s going to kink like that and you get then zigzags.
Now, unless that fold, that chunk of drapery is just falling straight down, just held at
one high point, drops with gravity, which begins at the low center of the earth point,
unless we have that scenario then what’s going to happen is that drapery is going to
tend to sweep off into another direction.
So, let’s put a lower support, still the diaper fold, but it’s going to do that kind
of thing.
Then we have the same scenario of triangular design like so.
But notice how all of these folds, as opposed to the perfect drop fold, are at least a little
bit curved.
Remember that any living form is mainly water, and it has a curved long axis.
If you’re not absolutely, completely clear on what I mean by that long axis curve, that
gesture line, go back to the earlier lessons in beginning and intermediate head and figure
and do a tutorial on that.
This is critical.
This is the most important idea in art.
It’s the connecting line.
It’s the relationship between the forms.
It’s how everything in your work comes together, how color harmonizes, how notes and chords
of music become melodious, how characters fit into a character or story arc, and how
all of our structural, architectural parts fit together in an organic, lovely symphony
of forms and not piecemeal.
Gesture is the key.
It’s the fundamental idea, fundamental design line.
If you’re not and absolutely clear on everything I just said, stop the tape, stop the recording.
Go back and review that stuff.
You’ll be doing yourself a favor.
But drapery, the bottom line is drapery has the same gestural idea most of the time.
Not all the time, most of the time that any living form has especially since as figurative
artists, we’re probably putting our drapery and costuming on a figure.
The sheet is up over the lap, the beautiful dress cascading down the body or across a
seated or reclining position.
It’s doing to have that fluid, wonderful, gestural body underneath it to help.
But even if it doesn’t, even if it’s clothes hanging on the laundry line, it’s going
to have that mechanical, that design, that fundamental life truth.
Like cloud formations, like water in a river, like flame attacking, all those things aren’t
necessarily alive in the real sense, but they are alive in terms of their design because
that same watery organic idea even if they’re not made of water.
There is little or no water in this chunk of silk, say, or in that fire that’s raging.
They have that same smoke from a campfire.
It has that same organic, fluid quality to it, and so it feels alive.
We want to make sure that life comes through.
Of course, the drapery we’re finally going to talk about is the drapery that is on the
face and so absolutely have to have that long axis curve to track that lovely fluid idea.
We get zigzags.
We’re going to have tubes and triangles.
And when we have any kind of pressure from below we’re going to get these tubes to
go into a zigzag design.
When they’re relaxed or not pressured and not pressured from both ends, they’ll tend
to have a curve or S-curve design, so curves and zigzags or S-curves and zigzags, either one.
This is the same idea of the dynamics of life.
If you’ve got an aggressive life—again, in our 101 Gestural thinking,
beginning gesture idea.
We say beginning but it’s the most advanced thing you can get into your work, the most
valuable, the most critical thing you get in your work.
We’ve got to talk about our right away beginning courses, but it’s the hardest thing to get,
most critical, and in that sense it’s the most advanced thing we can talk about.
We’ve been talking about it for a while.
Life when it’s aggressive, zigzags, zigzags, and so you want to make sure that you understand
that drapery does the same thing.
When it’s compressed, just like if I hunch down to get ready to do a jump, everything
compresses into a zigzag, like so.
Zigzags show life in great tension with a lot of potential energy ready to explode,
ready to burst apart.
So, when I do this everything is compressed.
I’m working hard.
It’s fighting against something physically or emotionally, and eventually it’s got
to release somehow, either by blowing up and being furious or just giving up in exhaustion.
We want to watch for those designs then.
What is the zigzag in terms of design?
It’s made up of a tube, of course, and it’s going to be a partial tube because it’ll
go off into other directions.
Notice that these tubes also each create—a zigzag as a series of triangles, isn’t it?
It’s triangular too.
We’re still back to tubes and triangles when we talk about the zigzag idea.
What you’ll find when you start expanding this into other fabrics—we won’t have
time to get into it.
You’ll end up with Z’s.
Notice the zigzag is a Z.
And that’s why it’s named zigzag because it’s Z-shaped.
As these tubes start to just be not just an isolated tube like a garden hose, but a fabric
that’s a continuation of a dynamic plane that’s being crumpled and bent and worked
on, then you’ll get these tubes splitting out before they go off into the surrounding
territory, and you’ll get wise, and you’ll get X’s like that.
X, Y, Z.
Notice, again, each of these letters are triangular in design, so a couple of different ways to
think of it.
So that’s what we’re going to do on drapery, and no more even though it’s a big subject.
Alright, let’s take a look at our aged character now.
There is going to be stages of aging, but we’d spend six hours up here talking if
we do that.
We’re just going to talk from the prime of life at this moment.
Well just go from the prime of life to old age.
What happens there, that’s a big enough area to work on.
Let’s do the prime of life.
We’ll do a male, but it’ll apply to female.
We’ll see the differences, subtle differences when we get into our demonstrations and assignments
that we do.
Okay, so here is a typical character, let’s say, something like that.
It can vary a lot, but let’s say that’s the hairline.
Alright.
Now, as this person ages, and I’ll do a little feature here in a second, and I’ll
do a little rendering of the eye because that’s a hard one, the hardest part of the face.
I’ll show you incrementally how that eye ages pretty well in that little rendering.
For now we’re just going to kind of do broad stroke for the whole head.
Here is what happens.
I already talked a little bit in our beginning here about how the bones of the teeth wear
down so that chin juts forward and how the ears get big or the nose gets bigger, usually
more hooked as it grows easily.
It grows down this way.
Not always, but almost always.
That way the hair, of course, will recede back if it’s a male and sometimes the female,
but definitely with the male it can recede back.
Then we’re going to have the muscle.
There are several muscles here, but there are only two really prominent ones.
The temporalis muscle here.
It sits right in this area.
Let me show you.
It sits right in here.
Notice if we didn’t have that muscle in here we could put a pencil right in there.
There would be a little crater.
It’d be a great way to hold marbles to put in there.
But, the temporalis fills in here, there, and then it helps when I chew or talk, when
I move that lower jaw you can feel this flex a little bit like that.
It helps with the teeth, with chewing, masticating.
Then there is the masseter muscle.
It works here and comes right over here.
It’s thicker than that.
It’s about as thick as thumb and the pencil head, the pin head together.
Notice this is very thin, and this is what gives that chin that nice width.
When you feel how wide that chin is you’re hitting the muscle.
Even though it feels like you’re hitting the bone really clearly, it’s that much
meat, basically, right over the top there.
That goes back that way.
The other muscles, for the most part, that are on the face and skull, we have a frontalis
muscle here, right in here, actually.
It fills in this area, the frontal lobe.
It gives, it swells that up a little bit more, and it can swell it up a lot.
We can see in our talk about the sexes, male and female, where we say this part could be
more prominent and separate out against that brow ridge.
This area in here, the supracilias and the glabella is another structure that goes over it.
The corrugator muscles.
They go to here along with this to do expressions.
With surprise, it helps to pull the eyebrows up.
The motion goes this way like our leather jacket, so when the eyebrows go up we get
the creases here that become ever more evident as you get older.
What stays nice and smooth after you’ve done that expression as a young person, eventually
those erosions, those rivulets, those creases will stay.
You’ll walk around and even though you’re like this, you’re not surprised all the
time, you’ll still have those little corrugations there going across the line of action as it
wrinkles up.
Think of blinds on a window.
You pull the blinds up and they go up here, and that material which was doing this to
begin with ends up turning into zigzags and they fold right up.
So, it’s that kind of thing.
You’ve got all these little ridges pointing out, and that’s what those creases do.
These areas are all communication muscles, they’re called.
These are structural, practical muscles that move.
That’s usually the way we think of muscles.
They’re moving something.
I’ve got a load here.
In this case, a very light load, and this is going to help to move that load.
It’s going to reposition this lower arm by acting on it, by contracting, and the contraction
of this muscle changes the shape of the muscle and changes the position of some of the jointed
structure like so.
Likewise, the masseter and the temporalis change position of that jaw.
When the jaw is not working it drops down.
But, these are purely for communication.
I’m angry.
I’m surprised.
I’m scared.
We’ll see that in our expression stage, all those kinds of things.
Over here we have a series of muscles.
Here these stretch over.
I call these the Elvis Presley muscles because they make you do this.
They’re really snarling muscles to show teeth, generally to show teeth in nature is
to show anger.
If a chimp shows the teeth they’re not smiling at you, they’re going to bite you or beat
you up.
We use it for a little bit different.
We can do it also.
It can be a snarl or a not-very-happy smile like a smile I’m-going-to-be-happy-when-I-kill-you
smile, or it can be a generous smile of gratitude for the joy you’ve been given.
Those pool there, and there are other ones there.
We won’t get into it.
This isn’t the time for a full anatomy lesson.
Each of these areas, and the reason I’m speaking to them, fill in.
Notice that bone structure does two things: It protects the organs here.
It protects the brain here.
It protects the eye here.
If you get whacked you still have an eyeball.
Eyeballs don’t bug out.
They sit back in.
That’s why the brow is forward and the eye sits back in and the cheek is forward.
That’s why we get that zigzag idea that we saw so strongly in the male.
It pushes forward.
We go back into the eye.
It pushes forward and then we go down to the mouth.
So, this bone structure here is for support and protection.
Support for the muscles.
The muscles have something to hang off of and have leverage to do their work.
Sometimes not tons of leverage, sometimes a tremendous about of leverage, like in the
hips.
It juts out to attach too.
Now, understanding that means you need to also understand that as the character ages—now,
all sorts of things can happen with age.
You can gain a lot of weight.
I don’t know anything about that.
Or you can thin out.
Generally, the muscle structure is going to thin.
You’re going to lose muscle mass.
Whatever thickness that muscle was in the prime of life will become more and more atrophied
over time so that thick muscle will become a thinner muscle.
Also, the fat.
You can get fatter.
You can get heavier.
You can get more adipose tissue, more surface fat as time goes on.
But generally, as you get to a certain point you’re going to start shedding that.
You’re going to age.
The skin actually gets thinner here.
I get more sensitive to the sun.
I’ve got a little something right here that is sensitive to the sun.
If you touch a 90-year-old like that they’ll end up bruising in five minutes, oftentimes.
It thins out the layer of fat under that.
We have actual blubber like a whale, which is not smart in terms of evolution.
Evolution made a boo-boo there.
We’re much better off being a dog.
You can see here my older skin now—I’m in my mid to late 50s—it gets thin and wrinkly
when I grab it like that.
It didn’t do that 20 years ago.
But, underneath that thin bit of skin, I can feel the fat underneath, and then under the
fat I can feel the muscle.
The fat is actually attached to the skin.
That’s blubber like a whale.
If you cut open a whale carcass, it’ll fold out and you’ve got the fat and the skin
open together, and it lays open a huge wound and it bleeds a lot.
Any injury then causes great damage.
The advantage of the blubber is it’s great for cold weather.
If you take a dog you can grab their skin or a little puppy, the mom will pick it up
by the scruff, and it’s all skin.
If they get bit by another dog or a wolf by a wolf, they’re going to bite that skin.
The fat and muscle are separated from that, and there is far less damage done.
As you get thinner that blubber gets thinner.
Now we’ve got muscle mass, but that muscle is still there but it’s smaller.
We’ve got a thinner costume over it.
It’s like taking off a thick parka and keeping on a thin T-shirt.
We can see much clearer the form that’s underneath that form-fitting or whatever looser
material, tight or loose, depending.
That means as the character ages, at a certain point you’re going to see more skull, more
skeleton come to the surface.
The cheeks seem higher.
You’ll get more hollows in here.
You’ll get more hollows underneath.
Oftentimes, this area in here will thin out.
This area in here will thin out.
You can see this little channel here.
This will thin out and so we’ll get from the eye a strong line here when we were younger.
When we were an adult or young child, we didn’t see that separation.
Now we see a strong separation there.
The brow ridge can seem more lumpy and bumpy because this doesn’t have the thin fat like
silt over a landscape fills in the depressions.
We lose that.
We start to see the mapping of those subtle separations, and they look less subtle, more
strident.
All those things start to develop.
Cartilage keeps growing.
Oftentimes, we’ll start to see the separations of the various bones.
There are two bones splitting here for the nasal bone coming down the septum in between
the wings which are cartilage and the tip of the nose.
Those will start to separate.
We have wings, tip, and bridge of the nose in each of those, and on the bridge, the top,
and the sides.
Each kind of facet and section can separate one from the other, and we start to see these
knobby breaks where one part ends and another begins.
That smooth line of youth is gone.
So, just like in the male figure, when we’re talking about our male course, the aged figure,
whether male or female, is craggier.
The landscape is rougher for all those reason.
The architecture of the little things starts to pop up and become very evident on the greater
mapping of the big things.
We still have to get those big, giant structures first.
It’s really like having a picnic table and laying out, throwing out your nice picnic
cloth and lay it over it.
It’s nice and smooth when you first lay it on, but once we’ve had the use and abuse
and the dishes have been put on/taken off, there are a lot of wrinkles.
That big plane and that big massive structure of the table that’s underneath is still
there, but now we have all these imperfections on top of that nice surface.
Was that a good analogy?
I’m not sure.
But anyway, that’s what we’ve got.
Alright, so that’s where we’re at.
There are other things we’ll see.
Let’s look at some of those now.
As this fellow ages, we have his eye here.
And I’ll show you the eye carefully, as I said.
I’m not going to do too much about that eye.
What we’ll find is that because things atrophied, the hollow of that socket, that hollowed out
underneath gets stronger and stronger and stronger.
This can get lumpier and bumpier.
The hairline can recede and completely disappear.
The hair itself thins out.
The line of the temple here can become strong and so this temporal line here with the muscle,
we can get an actual line that we see.
Sometimes we’ll have a ridge and a bump there.
Instead of this nice smooth transition, and kind of like the cheekbone, will do that and
into that temple.
This will start to hollow out here, and it’ll swing over and hang off that bridge, zygomatic
arch, and flow down again.
This can start to push out farther.
That means the eye socket, the orbit can hollow out, so we’ll start to get bumps here where
the lid sag down.
The bone structure, temporalis starts to show off here.
The inner eye, nose, and cheek connection, intersection can start to show itself, and
then like the diaper fold—here comes our fold technology—we’ve got that lower lid.
It can fill up with moisture if you have a rough night at the party or something.
In fact, my little 9-year-old girl, when she gets real tired she gets really puffy here.
You’ll see that and fill in there.
That’s not because she’s too old at nine, it’s because with the fatigue the moisture
collects in there and actually discolors.
You’ll see it discolor a little bit because of all that blood in there.
That’ll hang off.
We’ll see that better as we do our eye.
We’ll get these cross striations, the crow’s feet they’re called.
If you live in Costa del Sol or you live in La Hoya Beach in California, the sun lines
because you’re squinting all the time, or if you’re a male actor.
I don’t know how the female actors do it, but they have all these spotlights.
They have all these spotlights on me so I’m squinting a little bit when I look at you.
I get wrinkle lines, and it makes me look older.
It wears those things out.
So, being out in the sun, being under bright lights, all those things have their affect.
We’ll look at those more carefully.
This can keep growing.
The parts can start separating.
The teeth wear down, and the lips thin down.
And we’ll look at those lips only in the demos.
Otherwise, I’ll spend too much time up here, and we won’t get to actual examples.
This line will get very strong.
This line will get very strong.
The lips will thin out.
They’ll get to be a slash, and they’ll do a very strange thing.
They’ve done it forever.
You can see in the old movies and the old TV shows, especially, where they didn’t
have very good lighting.
The makeup artist will take some 70 year-old actor, say like Bing Crosby or something.
I don’t know who is 70 years old now.
Say, Anthony Hopkins.
He is in bigger productions where they’re more careful.
They’ll paint their lips, and then they’ll extend the red.
It’s lipstick.
They’re just doing makeup, lipstick.
They’ll extend.
There is as far as my lip goes.
They’ll bring it a little farther.
They’ll take it over the edge of that bump and barrel of that membrane with the lip.
Again, look at the earlier courses, beginning lessons and such on the head, and you’ll
see the specific structure of that.
That’ll thin out but they’ll extend the lips out and up.
They always make them too red and too obvious.
There is not a subtle transition so they end up with this bright red face, bright red face,
and they’ll put a little bit of ruddy blood makeup here so that feel, and in the old days
they actually used blood.
They’ll do a little cut of some critter or themselves or a servant or something, and
they’ll actually rub blood on there to get a little bit of rouge there.
They’ll do this job of trying to make them look younger than they are.
It never works out right.
Now, because this jaw goes forward, you’ve got two things that will happen.
It will actually start to look thinner and thinner and thinner.
Now, one of my favorite comedians of all time is Steve Martin in America here.
I don’t know of an analog in other countries.
He had, as a young comic, a really strong comic, this big, full chin.
Big knob here, big jaw, handsome guy.
He is still a handsome man, but now in his 70s, whatever he is age-wise; he is in his
70s, I think.
That chin looks very small.
It looks like it’s gone up here and it looks more like this now.
What was this
kind of job—and if you know Steve Martin, in the old, old days, Saturday Night Live
days, when he was a stand-up comic, he’d put an arrow on his head.
He had this nice, strong chin.
Now, as the teeth wear down, as the muscles atrophy, and you’d think with the skin sagging
it would sag down and make it look longer, but this line starts to soften here.
This line comes down here, chin separates.
We have this whole separation of the chin, the little pillowy areas that we looked at
on the male, especially in our earlier chapter, that’ll separate.
We’ll get these overlapping forms.
We’ll get jowls in here.
This line will start to—rather than being a nice line—will start to break apart.
The chin, the jowls will start to get the skin sagging here.
This digastric plane which was nice and clean, will start filling up.
And when Ronald Regan, our 80s president, he was in 70s.
I think he was 70 when he was first president.
He looked like he had a turtleneck shirt on because the skin didn’t go back here and
down, and we were right here like this.
You’ll see this in a lot of men and women.
We’ll see it in some of the references, where there is no step back and down from
digastric plane into Adam’s apple for the male.
It just goes right across.
They’ll be a little bump here for the chin, maybe, and then it’ll just sag down.
That’s that diaper full just hanging down like that.
You’ll oftentimes get these kind of diaper folds there, something like that.
We’ll get this stuff from back here because you’re doing this.
We’ll get wrinkles in here.
This will thin out too.
The neck will get much, much thinner.
The skull will show off.
In fact, you can see the nuchal point there.
This little guy will show off because these muscles, these erector muscles and then the
shrugging muscles that go over them attach right here.
Those will all thin out.
Instead of doing this, it’ll come off this, and you’ll actually see this little point
there.
Rather than being a bull neck maybe in youth, it becomes thinner and thinner and thinner,
more concave.
Much more as the feminine or younger neck to head relationship that we talked about
in the sexes talk.
That all gets thinner there, comes down, and then oftentimes this comes down here.
We’ll have this kind of thing.
I’m obviously exaggerating that.
There is that triangular idea.
There are the diaper folds again.
Then there are all sorts of variations that could happen on that.
I’ll show you as we get it.
This can get bigger.
Oftentimes, the earlobes get kind of loose and flappy.
If you get a high wind they’ll flutter like that.
I’m joking on that.
Don’t do that.
Anyway, they can get very, very big.
You look at really old folks walking around.
Oftentimes, they have outsized ears, very, very big ears.
All these things, this will start to separate.
These will start to separate.
You can have these lines, these lines.
These can get cross-striations because you’re working them this way and working them that way.
You’re surprised, now you’re angry.
You’re surprised, now you’re angry.
Back and forth, back and forth.
We get the same way with this.
Cross-striations.
The spider webbing effect.
If you get, say, an old man or old women who has spent their whole life in the sun, and
they’re European who aren’t really designed to being in the sun, as opposed to Polynesian
or something like that, you’ll get this incredible landscape of cracked Earth.
It looks like the Mohave desert of dry, parched earth, or the Dead Sea or something like that.
Let’s see, desert.
One of the deserts in America.
I’m blocking on it.
Anyway, that’s what happens.
Things atrophy.
Things fall and give with gravity.
Things wear out over time.
We get striations and cross-striations from use lines.
Things grow and change, and you can…get that chin going this way too.
Those teeth wear out.
If you take your dentures out.
Teeth, the jaw slams closed but keeps going because you don’t have that almost inch
of material there.
It slams shut more fully instead of ending here.
It ends here.
It goes up and we lose that barrel of the mouth that I am so consistently strident on.
You’ve got to get that barrel of the mouth to show the teeth.
If you don’t have teeth, and your lips have thinned out, there is no bulging structure,
hard structure underneath, and there are no soft pillows laying on top of that hard structure.
Instead of getting this great convexity and great stair steps of forms, we end up getting
this concavity.
This even perfect line, or even sometimes you’ll get the upper lip thinning out and
the lower lip will push out like that.
There is actually one of the head drawings I did, did that a little bit with a young man.
We’ll get that kind of deal here.
This will push out like that.
Alright, so let’s—let me make sure I’ve got all the stuff I wanted to talk about.
I think I did.
Let’s look at the eye now.

Okay, so let’s take a look at an eye.
Look to my lessons on all the features in order to get the full impact and full information
on all this kind of stuff.
This will give us something to work with here.
Anyway, upper and lower lid, the pupil and iris are in here someplace.
Then we have the cheekbone, zygomatic arch, and the bone structure, the thicker bone that
wraps around the supraciliary arch that’s in here, and all the other muscle mass goes
over the top of that.
The nose goes off here.
We won’t worry about that.
What happens now is gravity takes over.
Where the muscle is attached to the bone, that’s not moving, but it’s going to atrophy
and thin.
The skin will thin.
The fat will then.
Gravity will pull and pull and pull over long tortuous years of your life, and what was
a nice high crease where the orbicular structure meets the lid will start to drop.
What’ll happen is that crease will start to drop, and this is where the beautiful people,
the Hollywood movie stars, some richer people, they’ll start doing a little bit of plastic
surgery to fight that.
What happens is that the skin falls and it lays over and starts to make you look tired
because it starts to make your eyes squint.
The outside corner of the loose skin covers the outside corner of
the upper lid.
What’s going to happen now is the lid with the lashes—the lashes will thin out too—lower
lid can sag a little bit.
We’ll just keep it there, though.
Let’s go ahead and light this so you can see it more clearly.
Okay, so let’s do this.
Here is the hair of the eyebrow in here, let’s say.
It sits up there.
There is that youthful crease.
There is that eyeball dropping out of light into shadow.
There is the cast shadow from this full structure.
It casts across and slightly shades that upper lid.
Then in this hollow where the eye ends, where the forehead ends,
where the nose ends is in here.
We get a subtle graceful exit.
We just let that smear out for time’s sake.
Graceful exit from that anterior hollow out into the cheekbone, and it’s shading, suggesting
the zygomatic arch here.
It’s filled up with the masseter bone and the temporalis.
As time goes on, what was just a little—let’s do this first before time goes on.
What was a little shadow, because this is the lower lid, so steps, steps, steps.
Lower lid steps out and then this goes down and tucks under.
It steps down and goes down and tucks under.
This catches some shadow too.
Not as quickly or as deeply or as darkly oftentimes as that, but it does catch shadow.
It’s just a quick little break and sometimes it’s just a slightly darker halftone.
The more you do this, the more it’s going to age.
This is something we play down if we’re doing a pretty young lady or a handsome virile
man, I guess.
Now, the skin hangs here and the skin hangs here off that zygomatic arch, and then here
is what happens.
This will start hollowing out, and so that shadow will start to creep.
Lose that.
We’ll just suggest this, like so.
Now, as time goes on, the winking, blinking goes, and what’ll happen is we’ll start
getting these crow’s feet, and they’ll radiate off this corner.
This is the pin of support.
Remember, in our drapery lesson it radiates from that pin of support, and those diaper
folds and those drop folds happen.
That’s what we’re getting here.
It’s like little garden hoses.
They are tubular designs.
Remember, tubes and triangles.
You’ll just get a few of those, and it will just stack up like the garden hose.
Next, what’ll happen is as this deepens, usually it starts out as a little bit and
becomes a big deal.
Now we’ll start getting the bags under the eyes.
Notice that now the radiation is increasing greater and greater triangular design.
This will hang this way in some form.
We’ll make a huge deal out of it so that you get the point, but you’re going to want
to be a little more artful, obviously, with this.
It hollows up.
That’ll start moving that way.
Gravity is pulling so all of these want to roll down,
build up like a snowbank starting to sag.
It’s going to start to give, and so this bottom edge will start to fill and get deeper
and deeper and deeper and more and more separate from the underplane,
which was the suggestion of the smoother plane early on.
These radiations continue up here and will start getting stressed this way as you squint
and flex and the eye moves over that, and then stressed this way as we blink open and
closed. You get these cross-striations, and each of these becomes like so.
Like so.
And then we get the cross-striations this way too.
Radiates out.
Again, each of these starts doing that, and so on.
The other thing that’s happening at the same time is this nice, clean line is dropping.
It’ll drop and drop and drop until it ends up covering some of that eye this way.
Oftentimes it’ll follow that eyeline and end up right here and just becoming a ghost
of that contour of the lid, of the original contour of the lid.
Other times it’ll come across and cover that outside corner of the lid.
This is the—when this happens, this is one of the first places other than tucks where
people who are worried about those kinds of things will start getting plastic surgery.
We can still get those cross-striations and such on top of it, like that, and so on.
That’s the basics of it.
Let’s look at some reference now.
We’ll do the demos and we’ll look at some of these and some of the other things that
happen, a feature—I’ll try and target each feature as well as the whole face, and
we’ll move on from there.
Do those demos.
We’ll do your assignment, and then we’ll wrap it up.

Okay, so as we look at this character now, in our section on the sexes, we found that
almost every character you’re going to draw is going to have some of archetypically male
characteristics and vice versa.
That’s going to be true with aging.
You’re going to have areas of the body or areas of the face and head in this case, that
age at different rates.
You’ll have a younger area here and an older area there, and they’ll mix up.
Some people, of course, age more slowly.
I hardly look any different than my 20s.
That’s good and bad news.
Okay, so his nose, let me play that up a little stronger, has aged pretty significantly.
Notice the telltale movement down.
The more that tip gets lower than the nostril, the wing area, the more you know that’s
grown with age usually.
Types can do that too.
Look at how thin the lips have gotten.
Those are all in keeping with an older man in his 70s, let’s assume.
Now we have that telltale slash, thin lip look.
We’ve got the corners of the mouth that have aged beautifully.
There is not much—this could be much stronger.
It’s very subtle.
The same way here.
You don’t have a lot of poutiness going on.
The philtrum, that depression here is something I haven’t mentioned.
That thins out too.
That has thinned out on him.
Sometimes it just becomes a little crease like this.
In the earlier stages it typically is a little dish, a little crater in effect.
Here we do have that crease there.
This area here has aged some, but again, not a lot.
Here the dimple lines, something we haven’t talked about as the mouth stretches into a
smile and compresses into a pucker.
He’s going to work that back and forth just like the eyelids work the cheek area back
and forth.
As it goes this way, it’s going to get that cross-striation, and we’ll get material
building up in lines that end up staying and never going away.
Not much there at all.
These lines can get very strong—we’ll see it some other reference—and break that
jawline again, a quite youthful jawline.
So far there is not a lot that’s showing his age.
That’s genetics and lifestyle, both.
Now, let’s look at the eye area.
We’ve got the corrugator muscles in here.
The eye is in here.
We have that telltale deep hollow of a socket.
It gets much deeper typically.
We have a massive shadow here in this area.
That’s a sign of age.
Look at how beautifully the upper lid has maintained its relative thickness for such
a deep socket there.
It hasn’t crowded down.
We don’t have it sagging over in the way that we’ll see in some other characters
that we’ll draw.
We do have a little bit of a bag under the eye in here, kind of a puffy bag.
That’s some of the first actions that happen.
That could happen even in your 20s on some people.
Other times it takes until the 30s when it starts to show up.
That’s an area that plastic surgery for movie stars happens.
This separation of the cheekbone from the outer eyelid structure, that lower structure
is showing some age, but not much.
There is very little crow’s feet happening, partly because his eyebrows are lifting up,
stretching up this way.
That’s creating these creases.
This is showing quite a bit of age here.
And the thinness of the skin, there is even a little bit of cross-striation there.
The thinness of the skin is showing his age also.
Of course, the hair, the bald hair and the blotchy skin.
The age spots starting to show up here.
All that, the texture of that skin is thin and brittle, and it’s starting to get a
little bit mottled.
All that shows age.
Crow’s feet are quite subdued, so a real mixed bag there.
The hollow of the cheek is getting a little more hollowed.
The hollow of the temporalis a little more hollowed.
That’s showing some age.
That masseter muscle coming off the front of the zygomatic arch and fading back here
and staying there and then affecting the clean line of the jaw.
Those are all showing a little bit of age, but not as much as they should.
He is, again, well preserved.
This digastric plane is dropping some.
Not a ton, but it’s dropping some.
Adam’s apple is starting to get lost in that looser skin.
We start to see the drop, the hanging diaper idea of the digastric plane going into the throat.
We start to see it drop this way and then start to break in and sag into the neck.
That’s happening there.
You can see with that cast shadow it’s a fairly strong form that’s blocking this
coming down in here.
Then let’s go over to the ears here.
Ears have gotten big, another telltale, especially the earlobes.
That’s not always but usually a clear sign.
The lobes have kind of—as big as the ears have gotten, the lobes have gotten bigger yet.
That’s usually a good sign that’s an aged ear rather than an ear that’s just a big
ear for that particular person.
And you can start seeing creases coming here, creases in front of the ears.
At 58 I’m starting to see those on myself.
Then this probably the most aged area here.
As you can see the creases from the neck as the head looks up and looks down and turns
side to side, it’s stressing off of that spine because that’s a rotation point.
Then we’re getting these creases happening as it goes this way.
The skin falls with gravity and goes across the throat and starts wrapping around.
We’re getting these wrapping folds coming this way.
They radiate from that connection to the head.
A thin neck, again, a sign of age.
Then those structures, remember our diaper fold here like that, that’s what’s happening
here off the trapezius.
And you can see the top of the shoulder has gotten very flat.
It’s not full with that shrugging muscle as it was in youth.
It’s starting to hollow out and flatten out rather than being full.
It’s doing that.
The collarbone.
We haven’t talked about that.
The collarbone will either disappear, or as someone gets much more old and the muscles
atrophy, the skin thins; more likely it will protrude.
The collarbone is quiet strong here.
We can even see is starting close to its connection against the sternum there where it finishes
its origin really.
It comes over here and we’re seeing it connecting into the deltoid in here.
We’re seeing that collarbone, all the clavicle all the way over there to its connection and
even the shoulder blade.
Let’s go on to the next one.

Alright, so now we have a younger woman in just the beginning signs of aging.
Let’s see what happens.
We’ll see some distinct differences now from what we did last time in the rate of
the aging.
It has to do with the character.
Not everybody has the generic eye structure and starts out with little ears and big ears
and such.
There are all sorts of variations.
Let’s take a look at what see is in terms of this information.
Alright, so let’s go ahead and lay Jennifer in.
I’ve drawn her since she was about 19.
She’s been here for quite a while, and so it’s interesting to see the evolution of that.
Notice that classic, feminine, clean, smooth brow with not a lot of brow ridge.
Notice that here is the eyebrow that’s particularly feminine it its nice step up.
Her hairline in here and all that good stuff we won’t pay too much attention to.
Let’s get a little bit of the nose here.
Notice how we come off the forehead, the eyebrow is here, let’s say.
Then we’re going to tuck into that.
This is going to start going into the bottom plane of the forehead.
We’ve got the eyeball in there with its eyelids, and the cheek goes around it, if
we could see past the nose like so.
Now, a little bit of aging has gone on, so this is dropping a little lower like that.
Now, as a young woman she didn’t have a full length—let’s come back over here.
She didn’t have a full length of lid.
There was never a lot of lid there, but it has dropped some still.
We’ll see that over on this side, see about here.
This orbicular area is going right over the top of the upper lid and covering it completely.
So, that shows a lot of age, but it’s mixed in with her character, so it doesn’t make
her look 80 years old or anything, but it gives her some aging there.
Then in here we can see that same bit.
It covers it completely on the outside and mostly on the inside.
We’re starting to get a little bit more form change here, this lower lid structure
is separating from the cheek, and so this is shading more than it did, and this is separating.
You can see how the skin is starting to thin here.
That’s the eyeball underneath.
We don’t have a super deep hollow, super deep step back like we had in the last model.
It’s starting to intrude on that outer edge of the upper lid a little bit there.
She’s always had very thin lashes, but those lashes can thin out.
You can see them here pretty well.
Then we’re getting this separation of the nose from the forehead and from the cheek,
and that nose fades back out, and that’s beautifully preserved.
That’s hardly any difference than when she was 20.
This subtle little landscaping from the front of the nose, side of the nose, and then back
onto the cheek.
But out here, a little bit more.
This is hollowing out.
That eyeball is coming to the surface and not being padded and hidden by the lid.
We’re not getting the bags under the eyes like we started to on the other one.
They weren’t bad there either.
Then this wraps around.
We’re getting the hair of the eyebrow.
Let’s put that in a little bit.
They’re thin and manicured.
Then this is all side plane and this goes into that temple line here, comes up here.
Nice, clean line.
It comes out here, and this is the wider cheek separating and pinching around the narrower
forehead, wider cheek, narrower forehead.
It doesn’t go up this high, but just to give you that idea as it wraps around there.
That’s a nice clean line, and then it’s starting and we come back in and find that
clean line.
Then we see then that the skin is starting to mottle just a little bit and starting to
break that what would have been a cleaner line in youth, but not very much.
Again, really hold and preserving well the rigors of sun and diet and stress and activity
and stuff.
Just the tiniest little bit of crow’s feet, just one there.
This has gotten just slightly more pronounced over the years.
And then this drops right down.
The nose is as it always was more or less.
It’s probably gotten a little bit longer over the years, but nothing that you’d notice.
I’m just going to leave that as is because of that fact.
It’s a young nose.
The lips are thinning out, and the separation of this barrel of the from the jowl area,
you can see this is well in front of, and that’s well behind.
That’s shown up a little bit more aged.
The philtrum is still a nice divot as it always was.
The lips have thinned out just a little bit.
And her expression is kind of a taught-lipped expression, that doesn’t help.
They would look more youthful if the expression wasn’t as tight.
If it was a portfolio shot or something, she’d reshoot that, probably, but that was not the
point of this photoshoot.
Notice how the chin comes right off that lip and mouth structure
and separates from the cheek and jowl structure.
And so we’ll see now the jowl bumping, and I’m going to play that up a little bit more
so you can see it.
Notice how the lip structure, the whole mouth structure, really, making this much stronger
than it should be into the chin structure.
It’s almost like the Pinocchio, the little marionette doll where you’ve got that inner
mouth and jaw doing this so it looks like the little thing can talk.
That’s separating out, and we can see the other side of it here.
Again, because of the pursed lips, it’s stretching the skin and so we’re seeing
this little marionette structure there.
Not any lines going up here, really, but that jowl area here is pulling down with age, so
a little more aged.
That’s matched by this step here.
You can see these line up just like the eyebrows line up.
So, notice when we see these contours that’s going to be a youthful eye socket with the
eyebrow.
This is weighted below.
What we’re looking at is we’re looking at the corner that curves on these things.
Where does it flatten out?
Where does it speed up and change direction most quickly?
That’s the corner of the curve.
Notice that it’s higher here.
It’s here.
Here now its lower, and that’s that falling over, that sagging over the edge.
Gravity pulls it and pulls it down lower and starts to lump over so we can see it here.
We can see it there.
Those are distinctly different lines with distinctly different quality to them to show
that support up here someplace and gravity drawing it down this way.
That’s important, and clearly, the more you do it the more aged it is.
If we want to age her we’re going to really play that up.
If we want to flatter her we’re going to really play that down and lift those lines
up so they’re not weighted below.
They’re drawn up higher.
Whatever is facing down does not sag very much.
It stays tighter.
I hope that’s clear.
Then we’ve got the pull of the line here.
I’ll play that up again.
You’re going to notice as I play things up, it’s making her older than she really
is or really looks.
Here we have a little bit of a separation of the chin pinching, and that digastric plane
is loosened, and that’s the other way it can go.
As that digastric plane pulls, usually that chin more or less, and then it starts to fade
down this way as that digastric plane, what was here in youth ends up being here and here
and here as you age.
Again, the dimples over here…this is going to show some age here too.
Every time we have these separations of these smaller forms, they’re going to tend to age.
Especially if those—I’m going to overdo this again.
I’m adding 10 years to her looks, really.
Every time these things sag down rather than peak.
You make the corner of the curve peak high.
It feels younger.
If you make the corner of the curve peak low, that’s that diaper fold idea.
Peak low, it’s going to feel older.
By really tucking that under, it’s drooping.
Then this line, the more this line can’t hold its direction, it comes up and kind of
stops in here.
It picks up again and kind of goes offline.
It should be going this way.
It goes this way, and it goes this way.
Then we get back here and it gets lost again, and the backside of the jaw is picked up in here.
Then it gets lost again.
Instead of going back towards the chin, it drags down toward the neck.
The ears stay nice and young.
They’re still very small.
Hairline, of course, hasn’t changed and all that kind of stuff.
The neck is going to get thinner and thinner, a little thinner than it was in youth, but
still beautifully long and feminine, that length.
The sternocleidomastoid is popping out a little bit more than it did.
There we have it.
Okay.
Alright, so with this one we get that nice idea of the digastric plane almost all gone.
Let’s do a little bit of work to lay this in.
A nose which was probably turned up in youth is now straighter and then dropping down at
the tip, falling at the tip.
That gives a little bit of age to that nose, but it was a small nose to begin with, and
so that keeps, that smallness is not overwhelmed by any growth patterns.
It still stays pretty young.
The barrel of the mouth or the lips.
The lips are thinned, and of course the lipstick, bright color, can reshape that mouth and make
it stay much younger.
Then as we had with Jennifer in the last little demo, we’ve got that interior structure
of mouth and chin working together to age.
I’ve played that up a little bit.
The light has blasted this out and flattered her there nicely.
There is the barrel of the mouth here.
That’s the only little bit of pout line there is.
This stays quite young.
Notice that she is smiling, and so that’s pulling the cheeks up into the apple
and drawing back.
We’re getting a nice, lovely stretching back of those forearms and folds around the
mouth and cleaning up the line.
It’s why she has a nice smile.
It cleans that line up and is very flattering to her.
You can see again there is no crease of the upper lid.
That’s lost.
There is very little baggage underneath.
That, again, flatters her for her age.
Let’s see where we’re at here.
We’ve got some crow’s feet.
You can see how they radiate around.
A little bit going on here and a little bit of creases in here, that crinkly smile.
When that happens it intrudes into the nose.
It comes into the inside.
And there is that chin.
Here is that other side of the jowl area, the other apple coming around.
Then we have this really fun drop here.
Now look at that beautiful stretch as she turns away from us and looks out to her right.
We get that lovely gesture of that head.
The reason I wanted to show this pose is this right here.
Let me get this in here, and I’ll explain it.
Notice the throat.
I’ve drawn it in here even though it’s not showing up in our reference.
This is the frill of her dress there.
Notice what’s going on.
We’ve got the string of material this way.
If I get a little bit more to the front of that, here is the other side of it.
The neck, rather than being a tube, actually has a square front.
Instead of being a perfect boxy square it’s hollowed out.
Instead of being a boxy square it’s hollowed out like that.
It’s hollowed out because the skin goes on both sides of the throat almost like reins
around two sides of a horse.
The throat, the larynx is in there, and the skin has to go over both sides.
We get then that telltale corner, front plane, side plane, going that way.
The chin, this is casting over this.
The chin into the jaw, and then that jawline breaks apart a lot.
We don’t have a lot left of that jawline.
It fades here and ends up coming into a puffier cheek structure all the way up here.
Rather than being a nice, straight clean shot like this, digastric plane into the throat.
I’ll put an Adam’s apple there a little bit.
The throat here.
This is the bottom plane here of a youthful jawline.
Now this is stretched across and this is fallen into loose fabric or a diaper fold idea like that.
It’s moved all the way over to here, of course.
This, rather than being this nice, clean stepping stone here, this all drops off.
This line breaks apart and falls back over here as it does there.
You can see it end up right into the sideburn area where her hair comes out.
Then the ear—we don’t see a lot of the ear.
We know it’s big because it’s a lot of earlobe.
Look how much earlobe.
I’ll play it up here.
Look how much earlobe there is beyond the cavity of the ear canal structure in there.
That gives us a deep drop-off that’s giving, growing, and falling with time.
Then a little sense of that zygomatic arch.
In this case, rather than thinning out and atrophying, it’s gotten fleshier so it’s
filled in with material.
That bigger, fuller pillow shape rather than thinned out empty sack gives us that big round
drop there, which is a little different than our first character.
Alright, let’s stop there.

Alright, now it’s my turn.
I’m going to take
a couple minutes here and just sketch and have fun.
It’s got this wonderful strong brow, deep socket area.
We’re underneath, so this area is going to get very long since we’re looking up into it.
By the way, as you get older, I can attest to this one, the eyebrow hairs get longer
and longer.
If you get kind of the Merlin bushy eyebrows or Gandalf, that’s going to help age it.
Unfortunately, you get hairs in other parts of your body too that were never there.
Your ears, your nose.
It’s horrible, let me tell you.
Not that it happens to me.
It does happen to me.
You can’t play that factor up.
Not if you’re drawing me, mind you, but those other schmucks out there.
There is that lovely temple line.
This is wrapping around.
You can see that bone structure come to the surface.
Look at these lovely laugh—this is probably a very kind man.
Look at those wonderful laugh lines.
You can just tell he’s probably—he’s probably a really nasty old fellow, but he
looks like he’s a happy guy so we’ll go with happy.
I don’t know this gentleman.
Again, that barrel of the mouth is showing itself very strongly as it separates from
the cheek.
The cheekbones are, you can just see that contour bumping out strongly, and then that
hollow under.
This is staying nice.
We’re not getting a big bump like that, like we’ve seen in some of the other models,
but there is a little bit of sag.
Notice that it peaks low.
There is that tight crease rather than the little divot from the philtrum there.
And the line of the lips, look at how thin those lips are.
Since he is in a slight smiling pose, they thin out more, which adds to the aging.
Another telltale sign, you can get characters that are young or that separate, but getting
this to come up and over that wing is always a way to show the aging of the character.
We want to do a lot with that nose just for the heck of it.
Then we get here and starting to run out of time.
We’re getting a little break there with those dimples, but a pretty strong line there.
Ears have grown.
You can see that break of the contour.
I’ll play it up a little bit, showing that telltale growth pattern.
Here you can see that nuchal line coming in of the skull against the thinner neck, cords
of the neck.
Then is called the platysma muscle.
These are the strings that pull down, stringy muscles that pull down and connect there.
To be honest, I didn’t know that.
I was told that just a little bit ago.
I didn’t know it, and I know it now.
That’s the strings that connect down and up.
They aren’t functional.
They were communication muscles that let the adversary know how you were feeling way back
when that we don’t really need anymore.
Those muscles loosen, and that’s why you’re getting that string and that kind of front plane.
Here is that front plane with the throat well back in, the larynx well back in, the front
plane that we saw in the last pose going that way and that way.
We get this boxy front in effect even though it’s a divot out like so.
It’s a very cool shape.
You can get all sorts of fun stuff there.
If you look in the mirror and clinch your neck you’ll see those things pop out, and
you’ll get these radiating stringy muscles there.
They just loosen up and start to give, and the skin goes with it.
Then you lose that digastric plane.
Alright, here is our next model.
She has this night, tight hairline and a youthful hairstyle, and that, of course is a plus if
you’re trying to fight the age factor.
I gave up in my late 20s, frankly, but some people keep at it.
Always thinking of that forehead as being more narrow and the cheeks wider around.
She’s got this great arch going on with this expression.
She’s actually a good actress.
She’s kept that high.
There is not a lot of sagging there in this area.
Of course, looking down as she is flatters that.
If she looks down it stretches this and separates.
We get that very feminine high distance there, and the tailoring of these.
Here is the eyebrow.
That’s kind of all important for keeping that idea or that illusion going.
It’s just a silly fashion part of our culture that we think that’s beautiful.
Its’ not beautiful or unbeautiful; it’s just what we’ve decided to say it is.
That’s what we like and so that’s what we all tend to work for.
Let’s just do this to save time.
Actually, I underplayed her length there, but that’s okay.
We do have some baggage here, bags coming out.
Notice that is now not dropping straight down, it’s actually dropping down this way because
it’s trying to fall down with gravity.
It’s being pulled over that zygomatic arch.
This pulls out of the inside of the nose off the inside of the eyeball, sagging off the
bottom of that ball and then starting to lay over that arch.
That’s why it drifts that way rather than a perfect diaper fold going this way.
That’s pretty usual, and it’s pretty actually an error in the little eye demo I did for
you in our lesson.
I dropped it straight down when I really shouldn’t have.
You have a little crease here you can see it going on in that fold because she’s stretching
her eyes.
It lets us see that nice upper eyeball separating there.
We’ll just drop this in here.
Then that’s what we see of the cheek going wide, and then, of course, the contour hairline
pulls it in to track that, a more narrow brow and that wider cheek.
Then we have those creases.
Notice how it flattens out, even sags a little bit as it drops around that frontalis over
the brow ridge and down the outside towards the zygomatic arch.
Notice I play these up big time as I talk about them, and it’s not flattering to do that.
If you play those down or leave them out it’s going to be more interesting.
They’re actually stronger than the way I’ve drawn the eyes, just as I was talking there,
so you certainly wouldn’t want to do that if you’re doing a portrait to show flattery
or just how in reality what is showing up as a stronger form structure.
It’s a less formed structure.
I kind of blew that in my demonstration to make my points.
We’ll skip the mouth since we’re moving on.
We get this nice little chin here.
Last time we drew her she had that strong smile.
Now she’s got more of the pursed lips.
We’re not pulling material away from that mouth and chin.
It’s kind of collapsing into it, so it’s stronger structures.
The jowl structure is getting quite strong and intruding into the chin in that pouty area.
Of course, the line of the jaw is radically affected by that and pulls down that way and
fades in that way, and then we have that cast shadow over in all that material there like so.
And then the neck stays thin.
Again, that line, rather than being a nice clean line, straight line, or full bulging
line, for a young neck it’s a wobbly line.
Notice the material is starting to build up and fall away from the structure being affected
by gravity.
That makes, again, that lower set curve.
It gives the aging effect that we’re after.
Earlobes are bigger.
They pop out a little bit stronger from the hairstyle and from the silhouette of the face.
That, again, adds to the age.
Alright.
Alright, Mark 1-9.
Intersesting thing, from this view we can see something that can add to the idea of
aging in an interesting way in a little bit of unusual way, but you can see it quite a bit.
Remember, we talked about the jaw because the teeth—I’m having to play this effect
up a little bit—because the teeth wear down.
That jaw closes up and it actually shortens the jaw.
Rather than the big manly jaw it starts to get a little more atrophied and a little more slight.
Rather than that robust, strong, it’s a little more fragile looking.
Here is that nose coming down.
That’s a telltale tip down.
It’s almost like a drip off the nose, a drip off the surface.
It’s starting to drip down there a little bit.
Let me get a little bit in here, and I’ll finish my thought of what I was going to show you.
Okay, so look at how sunken those eyes are.
As things atrophy, the bone structure is not going to move for the most part.
There are some variations.
The plates of the head to move a little bit.
Lower jaw moves a little bit.
The orbicular muscles, orbicularis oculi, those are going to atrophy.
And so his eyeball is seeing deeper into that hole, deeper into that socket, and the eyeball,
as that ball settles in it’s going to appear smaller in mass as the sun sets behind the
horizon, say.
It’s going to be smaller inside, and this is going to look bigger.
The smaller eyeball in there, bigger socket, more hollowed out, more sunken, more atrophied,
cavaderous, whatever flattering or unflattering term you want to use.
Same here.
All these things, the hollow.
Moving off the front of the zygomatic arch and back along that masseter that’s also
fading in power.
It’s got less pillowing of flesh and skin and fat over it.
This is going to hollow out to some degree top and bottom.
There is the zygomatic arch, the masseter is in here.
Temporalis muscle is in here.
You can see it actually swelling in here a little bit.
Parietal plate of the skull.
All that stuff adds on to it.
Then because the teeth are going to wear down, if they wear down, lips thinning and all that
kind of stuff.
The lower part of the face is going to look smaller.
If we get to a lesson at some point on the reverse of aging, you know, youth—babies
to children to teens—we will see that you grow into your skull.
You start out with a little tiny face and a big skull, and then the skull grows but
the face grows faster and ends up being that proportion there.
As you get older, you kind of reverse back a little bit.
Separating from that Adam’s apple.
And so now that lower jaw area, the nose got bigger, eye sockets got bigger, but from the
mouth down to the chin that jaw looks much smaller.
That can be another way of showing that age.
Then we have this wonderful, you can feel the skull coming right to the surface there.
There is our diaper fold idea, radiating curves off those drop folds in her neck, and you
can see those craggles that show sun has had an effect.
You can actually just get—like dried clay you’ll start to get these crackled, wrinkled
patterns back there that we won’t get into, but that gives us that.
Alright, let’s take another view of this same fellow.
Okay, so
we have an interesting thing going on here.
This is part of his basic look, but it adds to the idea of age.
Notice that the eyebrows and then the bottom plane of that forehead sags over, and so that
acts as a little diaper fold in itself.
I took it all the way across, but it doesn’t go all the way across.
Notice the crooked nose and how the nasal bone, the bridge, the ball and tip of the
nose, and even the asymmetry suggesting kind of uneven growth.
All those things can add to kind of the age factor of things.
The bags under the lower lid have not sagged real far down, but they have filled up.
They’re real puffy.
It’s a full kind of tubular garden hose kind of thing.
That adds to the age and/or fatigue of the character.
I’m just going to mark this here.
The upper lid is actually thicker than the lower lid.
You can see that here where the core shadow or the upper lids here, and we come all the
way into the core shadow of the lower lid.
That gives a feeling of that extra thickness.
Raising up over the temporal area and then coming down around that frontal area.
Last we had that, we played it way up and made it less than flattering.
In this case, we’ll play it down and make it more flattering.
He has kind of smiling eyes, so it adds to that good cheer factor that I want to give him.
We can also see the line of where the cheekbones pull out, and I’ll play that up to show
the atrophy of the muscles and the temporalis and masseter below.
When a clean line ends up being a sagging line or more of a broken, troubled line, that
adds to the width of the skull being wider there.
The ears coming in.
Ears get quite big, quite high, and kick out pretty strongly.
Again, that nice line of the ear, cleaner line that can happen—it doesn’t always
happen—ends up getting broken.
We’re getting those breaks there, and we’ll just lay this side in.
Shows that zygomatic area in there breaking well over here.
It’s a lovely shape and opens that up.
Even the cast shadow is a troubled line rolling over that craggy architecture.
That kind of architecture is very male.
You get a rougher topography.
We saw on the sexes lecture.
But, also in age every little thing starts to be affected and comes to the surface or
falls away.
It breaks things up a lot.
You don’t get the smooth pastoral setting of youth on that skin.
Looking down on this, that cleans up that jawline for him nicely, but the real boxy
chin and jaw is more male and because that chin—I’m making it separate more than
it is—because it breaks away from the jaw line, again, it feels like overgrowth of age.
Something that’s like a garden that’s been overgrown, been unattended for too long
kind of concept.
You can really apply kind of metaphors to these things very nicely to get what you need
out of the situation, find kind of a philosophical as well as an anatomical reason for doing
something, and that’s going to add to the power of your artwork in some real way.
Then the neck is very thin in here even though it’s lost in this on-to-of position.
Well, that was our lesson on the effects of aging.
Thanks for joining me again in this chapter of our advanced head drawing course.
I hope you’ll stick with this lesson for a while, practice it, apply it.
See how it works.
Let it percolate.
Do a sketchbook or a week or two just working with ages and see what happens.
Then move on to the next chapter, and then go back to the earlier chapters.
Keep this material fresh, building.
You go back to it you’re going to learn new things every time, I promise you.
Thanks so much.
I’ll see you next time.