Alright, this is our intermediate head structure lesson. We’re going to take things a little
bit farther, of course, than the basics. If you haven’t yet, please watch the basic
lesson first. It’ll help in this one. We’re going to take the basic construction of the
features and build them into their own mini-structures.
The little structures of the features will fit on the big structure of the head.
We’re going to work with some more difficult perspective positions.
We’re going to see how that ties carefully into the neck and into the shoulder line.
We’ll see how the old masters did it, and of course, that’s a fountain of information
there. So it’s always fun to go to that resource. Then we’re going to try it ourselves.
Meaning you’re going to try it yourself in timed poses and apply that information
practically. Then I’ll do it myself. We can compare and contrast.
So I’ll see you there and let’s get started.

Alright, now we’re going to do the intermediate structure of the head. What we’re going
to try and do is create a geography to place the features on. From there we can build all
the detail and get down to great renderings and technique. We can apply this information
to all our various mediums. They can be helpful for sculpting, drawing, and painting. So what
we want to do now is rather than just plotting out the two big shapes of the head, the two
architectural shapes—mask of the face, shape of the skull. Then basic positioning of those
features. Now we need to build a little extra information, a little bit more of geography,
plot out the secondary structures on the head and specifically the face, really, because
the head stays nice and big and simple for us. Luckily. But this we’re not quite so
lucky. So we have to plot out some information here so that we can then plug in our features
and build those to an evermore refined conclusion.
So this is what we have here. And now let’s figure out what to do with it. So what we’re
going to find now is we’re going to go from the skull into the front section, this skull
cap area. We’re going to find that the skull morphs into changes into bumps into the architecture
of the face. So basically, hairline down is all face. We’re going to figure out this
transition and some basic cheekbone mouth and chin structure so that we can then, as
I said, plot our new set of information on there.
So what we have now is our head, laid out just as we did before. We’re just building
on what we’ve already done. We’re not changing it. So we have that egg shape structure.
What we’re going to find when we start getting into this intermediate and then eventually
advanced levels of information, more detailed information is we’re going to want to get
a little more boxy. It’s going to be easier. Now, as a constructionist when I want to construct
things I have three basic choices: I have the bowl or egg idea. I have the tube or tapering
tube. And then I have the box or any kind of wedge. It doesn't have to be a right angle,
breadbox; it can be any kind of wedge shape.
I can go from rounder to squarer. Notice that when things are egg-like, and let’s take
it one step further. Let’s do a spherical shape. When I do a sphere I can do a fantastic
job of rendering, pretend I just did a fantastic job of rendering. It won’t matter too much
in terms of our basic structure. In other words, I’ll get a lot of three-dimensional
form, but I won’t know much about it’s position. And so when we’re trying to fit
things together in dynamic positions the more we know about the position of each structure
the better. I’ll take you through this here just momentarily to explain what I mean, but
for a more full explanation go to my basic structure class and I’ll explain this in great detail.
But now we have a nice spherical form beautifully rendered, has plenty of volume. It has great
form. It has not structure though. Form I’m going to find is the structure, plus its position
or perspective. Same word. Same meaning to those words. It’s synonymous. If I were
to make it an egg I could render that out beautifully again. It would have great form.
Now it has a little bit of position. We know it’s leaning over at the left. Top left
is leaning. Here we know it’s leaning, but also it’s tilting in space where we have
the top going into the paper, and the bottom is coming out of the paper. So it’s tilting.
This one we have it leaning, tilting, and facing. We know that we’re getting in a
three-quarter front or back or whatever it is. If we put the features here to our face,
boxy face, we know that it’s a front on top and side on the side there. Notice that
the more corners we put into our construction the more information we get about it’s perspective
position. I like to use position because this is intimidating. It feels like you’d need
to put in vanishing points and string things around the room, just the position. This is
the leaning position. This is the leaning and tilting position. This is the leaning
and tilting position, tilting in and out of space. This one adds the facing dimension that way.
So our three-dimensions have three positions.
Leaning, tilting, and facing, and in no particular order
you deal with those throughout to get a good, well-crafted, well-placed form.
In other words, the more corners I add, the more structure I get.
A form in position.
It’s important. So that means if I can make things a little more squarish, especially
when I get into difficult forms like a head and difficult positions as we’ll eventually
get into, those corners will bail me out a lot. We can get a lot without them, but that
gives us the most bang for the buck. So corners is more structure. Notice that our basic construction
lines are dealing with just that thing. This axle change is very much this change.
The short axis to the long axis of the egg tells us how it’s leaning. That gives us that
bit of information. That gives a short and long axis but also we have a step underneath.
That would be equivalent to showing that digastric plane stepping underneath to show that that
head is tilting back a little bit and so on.
Okay, so let’s just plot out what we’ve done so far in our last section and let’s
take it further in this section. Bottom edge of the lower lip right here. The ears sit
in here someplace. Make sure you add enough skull with or without the hair as your choice.
Sometimes the ears will actually be slightly out of whack. This is a little higher. This
is a little lower. You’ll see that on a model. You may or may not want to show it.
I actually did that by accident. It’s called bad drawing, but I’m going to pretend it’s
a lesson to be learned. So you decide then whether you go with that anomaly to show the
character of the person, or you bring it back to the regular ordinary where people won’t
question it, and you work to identify that symmetry and make the alterations accordingly.
If this is a male as we’ll make it here just for the heck of it, you’ll notice that
the neck is a little thicker. About jaw thickness. That’s as far as we got last time more or
less. We had a hairline in here, talked about the proportions. We’re not going to go through
that again, of course. All that kind of stuff. This may well build out into a pear shape
that has whatever character to it. All that good stuff. That’s as far as we got. Now,
what we’re going to find if we use the eyebrow line this is going to be a great way to get
that transition of the skull, the skullcap into the face structures. What we’ll find
in basic character is it’s going show us how we make the transition from rounder to
squarer. We can get the little square like a cylinder has a square corner on the bottom
and top. The box has square corners everywhere. Buy we can add more squareness to it naturally
in the features and the facial area because they lend themselves as major changes forward
and back and side to front and all that kind of stuff.
So we have a general character of roundness in the skull and oftentimes in the hairstyle
and squareness in the face and the features.
So if I start with that corner idea, I’m
going to pay particular attention to the arch of the eyebrow. Not everybody has an arching
eyebrow. Sometimes they just curve over naturally. But there is usually someplace where you get
a sense of where the rise stops and the eyebrow hairs start to fall again or sometimes just
poop out and stop there. We’re going to do this. So I can keep this symmetry pretty
well. Since I’m off to the edge here this always vexes me. Alright, now, what we might
even look for, and this becomes more important later. There is a little transition here.
It’s where the forehead turns into the nose.
If we looked at our construction we’d see
the forehead pushes out and then goes back. Then the nose pushes out and goes back.
Right here that pushing back is our section here.
That becomes a nice landmark. It also separates
the hair of the eyebrows. It will vary, of course, radically in shape depending on who
we’re drawing. It can really bunch up. It can actually kind of lump up before it goes
into the nose. It can be all but gone in a Roman nose where you just have a subtle transition,
classic Roman nose. Back, from forehead back to nose. You can do all sorts of things.
So anyway, that’s that. The eyes will sit in here just to be clear. You can do this.
What we’ll find here when we put those eyes in is the eyes are about an eye apart.
You put another eye, and it’s just from upper lid meets lower lid on the outside. Upper
lid meets lower lid on the inside. That distance you can stick another one in there. You’ve
got the separation of the eyes. Then you do another one more or less over here, and that
gives you the width of the face and skull where the cheekbones and skull come together.
Here’s the cheekbones in here. And that’s the widest part of the face, where the face
meets the skull at that cheekbone moment. We can just do this so we feel that in there.
Alright, so that’s that. Now, if I come back to the arching eyebrows, I will find
naturally that that is roughly just on average gets us started. We can adjust it for the
particular character we happen to be drawing, but roughly that’s the corner of the forehead,
where the front of the forehead breaks into the side of the forehead. But roughly that’s
the corner of the forehead, where the front of the forehead breaks into the side of the
forehead. In other words, it’s a temple line.
Let’s go here. Draw a head in profile.
Put on the features here so you can feel it roughly, the features anywhere. Here would
be the high. Here would be the arching eyebrow. Here would be that cheekbone moment here.
Make a little stylized eye so you can feel it like so. Maybe we’ll trim a little bit off that.
Okay, so that gets us about where we’re at from the front view on the side
view like that. Notice that this arching eyebrow right there, that’s the natural temple line.
On the skull it’s right here. For you anatomists, it’s basically where the temporalis muscle
attaches in there which is if you clench your teeth you’ll feel that flex there, and that’s
part of the working of the lower jaw so it runs along there.
That becomes that natural front to side plane like so.
Now, so the eyebrows arch more or less given the person, and that arch creates a nice corner
plane to describe more specifically now the architecture of the head. We didn’t have
that before. If I go back to the eyebrows and let them fall down, the hair of the eyebrow
ends high as I had it, but the direction we can continue down, and where that meets the
eye line that just on average roughly gives us the corner. Let’s do it over here. Eyebrow
line drops down. Eyeline drops across. That just roughly gives us the corner of the cheek
where the front of the cheek meets the side of the cheek right here. You’ll see that
front plane swing for right underneath the nose, somewhere around there. It’ll aim
like that. Notice that if you take that cheekbone, that higher cheekbone structure and the skull
structure, you get a very nice spherical shape, a nice ball. Oftentimes, you can just draw
a perfect ball especially when you pay attention to get the nice full skull behind that temple
area pushing out. You get a nice ball shape. You can see that that ball shape, any egg
if you look at it on end will be more spherical looking. If we look at it this way then we
can imagine cheekbones not down here, but up about here is where we’re talking about.
This point is right here. Here is basically the eye line coming across right here going
underneath the nose. The fleshy nose will be lower than the cadaverous nose there, the
skeletal nose. It flips down here, and you can see how that completes
more or less our ball structure.

So at this point we’re seeing just a like little sliver, quite a bit of side plane visible.
Look how narrow the forehead is front to side. Look how wide the cheeks are front to side.
We’re just getting that much whereas here we’re getting this much. So notice that
the cheeks are the widest part of the face, and the forehead is much more narrow. You
can see it tracking here with that kind of zig-zagging and S-curve in and out, swinging
over. Now, it swings over. I dusted it under the nose. I didn’t draw it dark because
it doesn’t go there. It’s starts, it aims for that. But it doesn’t finish there. You
can see the zygomatic arch where the temporalis muscle connects, the masseter muscle connects
below temporalis above, it fills in this space here. This pushes out wide to protect the
eyes. The bone is actually thicker here than it is here to protect that eye. So if something
strikes the cheekbone pushes out to protect. The forehead pushes out to protect. The nose
is pushed out to protect, and the eye hides in that little cave. So we can feel that wrapping
around to create that protective orbit, that protective cave to house the ball.
But, before we get there the masseter comes down. All the communication muscles that make
your lips go in a snarl or a sneer or a smile, all those communication muscles go and attach
there. They string up like a pulley system, a curtain pulley on a stage to pull up and
let down. So all of those are filling in this space back, forward, and in, filling up that
space. We don’t complete that movement. We start it and then we fall off into those
cable-like connections. So what that does for us then is we move over, move across the
bony protrusion of the face and then fall down into the pulling cables of the mouth
of the lips. All this is really to control the lips. Not to move the whole jaw, but to
move the lips into smiles and sneers and such. Notice now that this comes in quite narrow
and is as narrow or a little more narrow or a little less narrow, just depends. You can
see he looks very hollowed out like he’s doing that, and so just to paint on the character
it might cut way in, and it might pull way it like that. It’ll vary.
But anyway, it’s going to be more narrow more than likely, unless you’re really filled
up in here. Then the cheeks and somewhere similar to the forehead. This pulls down,
and if it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger it might bump way out. Other people might cut way in.
It just varies. But it’ll do what it does, and this again is then all front plane holding
the nose and the structures to communicate with the mouth and then dropping down into
side plane. Again, narrows in. So you can see we have a bit of a diamond action happening here.
here. We go into the more narrow forehead. We come out to the wider cheek, and then we
go into the more narrow cheeks and mouth, and then the very narrow chin. We’re going
to continue that dive down. Some people their hairline will intrude way in to reinforce
that diamond shape. Others will flare out and recede back to open it up, and so maybe
it gets a little more triangular or delta shaped or whatever.
But you can look for those big designs and work with them. In fact, your hair specialist,
your hair advisor, they’ll look at your face shape to pick out the current fashion
they did for me, of course, to make you look lovely and beautiful and all those adjectives
that we hope for. But anyway, the face shape can have a big determination on how you dress
it with hair and hat and everything else. There are heart shapes. There are oval shapes.
There are square shapes. There are all sorts of shapes, whatever else. That pulls there.
Then it drops down. Once it gets somewhere near the bottom of the lips it’s going to
bump in again to that narrow chin. That’s the narrowest part of the face. This is the
widest part. This is the narrowest part here and here somewhere in between. So we’re
going to bump forward again. Let’s do our downward motion here.
Notice this is somewhere around the dimple areas if you’re smiling. If you’ve got
that movie start movie you get those dimples with the cute Shirley Temple smiles. Those
dimples are somewhere in that plane change, that corner there. Then it swings forward
again to the very narrow chin. So front to side corner, front to side corner.
We'll work out more information on this at our advanced level. This gives us front to side, front
to side like that. Notice how the face with that cheek and start of the jaw, look at how
heavily that overlaps the ears. The ears can be drawn a couple of different ways in this
position. But, however, they’re drawn notice how we’re losing a lot of the ear behind
that cheek area, the cheekbone area. So here is the whole ear. But as we look this way,
this thrusting out of the cheek hides that. And so it’s important to put that overlap
just like the face in front of the neck. We want to make sure that we don’t just draw
the ears like this. They usually don’t do that. Every once in awhile like that Norman
Rockwell we saw, you’ll see the little kid with the big ears. Sometimes we grow into
our ears and it does look like that. But that’s kind of almost a caricature of what we think
of as the ear. More likely, more seriously, and usually more appropriately the ear will
be like this. It’ll be going back. Notice the ears lays on the side of the face more
or less and lays back and doesn’t stick out. Although there is many a person you’ll
see where they actually stick out and do this. Generally they lay back aerodynamically along
the plane, roughly the plane of the face.
Alright, so that’s the basic structure of the head. Now we’re going to add one basic
structure to a feature, and that’s the nose. Because it’s so architectural in shape we
can’t ignore it. Every feature we’re going to have to deal with as an architectural shape
or series of shapes. But most of the time they sit more or less with some exceptions,
more or less on the plane on the bumpy plane of the face. And so we can ignore them structurally
at this beginning stage. But this sticks out and is big enough that we need to deal with
it right now at this stage. Our earlier stage we could just mark it off as we’ve done
here, but now we need to start dealing with it as an architectural shape. Partly just
because of its size, but the other reason is notice that the plane of the face is more
or less vertical here. And yet, the nose pushes way out. It moves out in its own direction,
and so when we look at a nose—we ran into the problem a little bit in our drawing sessions
together, but I kind of brushed over those. I barely mentioned it.
But we’ll find is as you look at my face, it’s in flat perspective like this. But
as you look at my nose, it’s in foreshortened perspective like this. It’s coming out at you.
So if I go here you can see that they’re going at their own angle like so. Here we
oftentimes forget it about, and we draw it like this. It ends up feeling like that in
these kind of views. So we’ve got to get it to come out. Now what particularly is important
is when we start getting into dynamic perspectives. If I’m looking at a face in flat perspective
and the nose is slightly foreshortened, when I get into dramatic perspective, that nose
is going to be dramatically foreshortened in some way. And so what that means is that
if I tilt my head back just a little bit that nose gets very, very short very quick. And
when we’re drawing those underneath perspective drawings, when we’re underneath with our
camera we saw that, but we just chose to ignore it. I chose to ignore it basically. But notice
it gets very, very short. So what I want to do is when the head goes up, when I get underneath
the head I want to see how close the tip of the nose anywhere in here is to the eye line,
and then that’s going to tell me how long to make that nose. Otherwise, what happens
is we get under a head—it says draw it here. We’ve got this and the ears are maybe way
down here. What we do is we draw this. Then we wonder why it doesn’t work. I drew the
nose as long as I know that nose to be. It’s a long feature. So why isn’t that working?
Well, it isn’t working because this foreshortening. When I do that you see very little bridge
of the nose and maybe no bridge of the nose. So it’s all tip. What I do is I look to
where the tip of the nose, whatever that means, and pick a spot. And see as you up at it how
close it gets to the eye line. So the tip of the nose and then the root of the nose
where it sits. You can just draw a little shape like that so you’re drawing this underneath
idea as you look up at it. Or you can box it out like that. It doesn’t matter. But
now I see how close it is and I get the sense of how little bridge, there’s that little
wedge shape that we drew here. And so here. You can see how little bridge there is. So
maybe the highlight, maybe the shadow shape, but right there we’re almost at the eye line.
That gives us that positioning more correctly, and then I come down the length
along the filtrum here, that upper mouth structure, to feel close the lips are to that bottom.
That’s not going to change too much. There is the lower edge of the lower lip right there
just so you can see it. Let’s do a little bit of the lips here.
We’ll talk, of course, how to do that, just so you can visualize it. Then we’ve got
the chin below as a ball or a box. It doesn’t matter. Any of these can be round or square.
It’s the positioning that matters. There is that high cheekbone structure here. We
want to add more skull and such out there to it. This is swinging for underneath the
nose but falls down, falls down and then swings forward again, swings forward again. This
sits in here and then this is a mess to deal with. Actually, it’s very easy but I’ll
show you the trick to that. We’ll save that for later.
But anyway, that’s the secret of the nose. The forehead, just so you can see it. Here’s
the arch of the eyebrow, so there is the narrowing of that front plane as it goes into the forehead.
Here we can treat the top of our constructed forehead without the hairline and such as
a box just to kind of feel that mass. The ears get extra low. I’ll explain exactly
why that’s the case in a second. And there we have it.
Okay, so these are the basic front, basic front and side planes. Also, if we come back
here, eye line gives us the wide cheeks. Eyebrow line gives us the end of the front plane of
the forehead. Here is the forehead. Right here, if we pretend there are no eyeballs
and eyelids bumping out that’s the bottom plane of the forehead. Here it is here. I’ll
leave that little wedge in there. There is a bottom plane of the forehead. See how that
works now? I’m going to take this whole forehead temple, upper eye socket area and
bring it down here. Oops, let me make sure I’m on the page here for you. And we have
this kind of shape. That wedge sits in here. The nose comes off of that in whatever perspective
position it takes. We’re going to find the eyeballs and eye sockets sitting here, balls
and holes. We’ll deal with that. But that becomes the whole wedge idea.
Give or take lumps and bumps, that drops into shadow.
Give or take lumps and bumps this is facing forward,
and these are facing to the side or actually more to the corner plane this way.
This would be the side plane over here as we get the skull into the widest part with the cheek.
So we’d actually have a one, two, three, four, five, fourth and fifth plane
structure. It does that. One, two, three. One, two, three. That kind of thing. So you
can see the advantage of using the boxes. We understand exactly where it changes direction.
That is going to help us plot it out in space. We can then apply a certain value that’s
maybe a lighter value on the front and darker values on the side.
It gives us control of our rendering also that way.

Alright, now, the ears. Notice when we’re looking straight on at a head the ears are
going to sit in that middle third position that we talked about. One, two, three, and/or
we can think of the ears as at the top of the eyebrow line. In some models you’ll
see the top of the ear line. I like the eyebrow line as I’ve described because it allow
me to box over. We’ll see that more clearly as we get into deeper and deeper perspective.
You saw a little bit in our timed drawing lessons together. But anyway, these line up
pretty close. As I look straight on eye to eye to this character I see the ear is very
close to the eyebrow line. From here I see. From here I see they are on a plane, you know,
a horizontal plane or linear connection. But now look what happens when this guy, this
character looks up. Here is the eye in here, let’s say. Here is the eyebrow. We’re
going to see the ear here. If we put this in a box, the box is going this way. So now
the eyebrow to ear is on this slant because of the position change like so.
And so when I look here it drops down. But if I look over here I get this kind of thing.
I’ll find that if I go straight across the ear might line up with the bottom of the nose
or the line of the mouth. Let’s say it lines up with the upper edge of the upper lip. Let’s
say the bottom comes to just a little bit near the end of the front plane of the chin,
let’s say. So it sits here. You’ll start to draw that because some darn teacher told
you to, and you go, no. No, that can’t be. That looks silly doing that. And you’ll
do this. You’ll put it up here. You’ll spend two years of your life putting it up
there because you can’t believe those ears would do that to you.
So let me prove it to you so you save a couple years. Here is my ear. We’re at the top
of the ear right there. Notice that it’s at the eyebrow line more or less. Now, when
that head looks up now look what happens. Here is the line of the mouth. The top of
the ear is here. As you look past it’s probably fairly close. In fact, I’ll join you for
a second. It’s fairly close to the line of the mouth. Same thing here. Let’s do
it on this side. Here it is here. Let’s do it like that, I guess. Here it is here
lined up. Now, when it tips up look at how that ear, and maybe this is the bottom of
the ear, here is about at the nose. Look at how the bottom of the ear can be way down
here. It can be underneath it even. So don’t miss it. If you push it way up it’ll look
like a science fiction cat people, where you have cat ears that are more on top of your
head. It’ll start to look like that and not human ears down here. It looks funny when
you draw it, but it’s the truth.
So check out your friends and family, yourself in the mirror, models on the model stand,
reference on your computer or wherever you’re working from. Get that in your head so that
you don’t waste the time I wasted trying to not believe it. Very, very low. Truth be
told, when I get these kind of views I’ll actually oftentimes, having said everything
else, I’ll sneak them up just a little bit because it does look a little funny. I’ll
sneak it up just a little bit. But don’t push it up here. It’ll muck you up. It’s
a sign of an amateur to do that. That’s a giveaway. The audience will feel it. With
luck you’ll have hair covering some of that, and you won’t have to make that awful choice
I’m forcing you to make by doing that.
Alright, now let’s look at that jaw line. The jaw line is a particular problem. There
is the chin. Notice the corner of the jaw. The jaw gets softened and sometimes softened
radically depending on the view of the head and the character of the model. But generally,
there is a good corner to be seen even in the fleshiness there. You can get a sense
that this is going up to the ear. This is going across the bottom towards the chin,
bottom plane going up along the side plane. So anyway, that corner. Now, here is the problem.
When we look at it like this it looks great. When we look at it like this it looks great.
When we look at it like this or this it looks great because you stick with that corner going
up. It’s always this, some version of that. It just reads nicely. You can see it here
bumping up. Seeing that corner bump up high near the earlobe and that chin bumping down
low in the center is very satisfying and reads correctly because that’s how we see most
things most of the time.
It’s very much the same problem that we’re having with the ear. The perception is that
is the way it should be because that’s the way we always see it. But notice what happens
when we get underneath it then we have that horrible horseshoe problem. We go from low
jaw to high chin to low jaw. Even if they got that nose right they do this. Nobody buys
it. It looks like a Halloween mask. It looks distorted. It looks terrible. We don’t know
what to do because that is what we’re seeing, but it’s unbelievable. The ears shouldn’t
be here, and the horseshoes shouldn’t be there. We fight both of them and it causes trouble.
So, here's what we do.
Notice that on the head as in most of the body we have what’s bilateral symmetry.
There is a nipple here and a nipple here. There is a shoulder here and a shoulder here.
Elbow here, elbow here. Cheekbone, cheekbone. Ear, ear. Eye, eye. We have symmetry. It’s
not perfect symmetry. In fact, if we make it perfect it’ll look funny, and it’ll
throw things out of whack. There have been experiments where they’ll take this side
of the face and flip it over, you know, just flip it over in the computer so this is perfectly
like that. It doesn’t look like the guy. In fact, it looks funny. But on the converse,
if you see people that are too asymmetrical—this ear is very low compared to this ear. My eye
is a little smaller here than there. If that gets too out of whack or even cheekbones can
be big or smaller, that kind of stuff. Too much out of whack, then that’s unbelievable.
What we like is that regularity, but not perfection. Life is not perfect. It’s evolved slowly
and imperfectly into what it is. Yet, it has a basic symmetry to it. We look to that even
in our philosophies and our religion, good and evil, light and dark, male/female, ying
and yang, all that kind of stuff. So the balancing act.
So, having said that, what I’m going to do is know that there is a corner here and
a corner here. If the head tilts in a certain perspective the arch of the eyebrow is going
to find my symmetry. That’s that construction line we used to plot out the head in position.
The cheekbones, the corners of the mouth. The corners of the front of the chin, the
ears, whatever I see is going to have a symmetry that constructs consistently across, give
or take the imperfections. That’s going to be true with the corners of the jaw.
So in general, notice that the center of the chin is lower than the corners of the jaw,
but if I tilt the head up now the corners of the jaw may well be lower than the chin.
All I have to do is plot that. So I come back and I look to my construction lines. Eyebrow
line, eye line, nose, corners of the mouth, ears. What I do is I say is where are the
corners of the jaw. I feel a construction line across there that is in keeping the same tilt or
angle or horizontal and all these other construction lines are. Then I just look to see is the
chin a little bit higher? The bottom of the chin. I can close one eye, bring my pencil
up to that model on the model stand. Do I see a little bit of chin above my corners
of the, you know, this is going to come up to the corners of the jaw. Do I have this
a little above or a little below? Figure it out. If it’s a little below it’s not a
big deal. Usually you can work that out. It’s the above that gives us trouble. So all I
do is I look for where that chin sits. In this case, the chin sits a little bit above,
and then this is my change. I don’t do the horseshoe. I make it very much a schematic
at first. There are the corners of the jaw. Here is the chin here. Lips sit on top of
that like so. I do that. Later I can round it off. But I stay away from that wobbly horseshoe,
that sloppy horseshoe. Keep it more of a schematic.
Notice that my constructions start out with an egg probably, or a capsule shape. That
egg continued through, and I had to trim it back most likely. This is going to be give
or take. I’ll adjust now that I know the proportions. That’s going to be the digastric
plane. It will bump over the throat here, the larynx. But that is all going to be bottom
plane. So I’m going to feel this all the way through. I’m going to come back and
get that. I’m going to find the corners of the jaw. Make it a little bit squarer.
I can round it off later. Then that does that. This is my bottom plane. What it is is chin,
pretend that jaw is a little bit lower. The corner of the jaw is lower. That’s what
we’re picking out as the bottom plane, the bottom plane.
Okay? Does that make sense? Ears get pushed low. Compare them to a construction line across;
believe it. Chin gets high. The corners of the jaw get low. Chin gets high. The corners
of the jaw get low. Compare that to a construction line. Believe it. Make it a little squarer.
When in doubt make it a little more boxy, a little squarer. It’ll give you better
perspective. Corners give you more structure. Puts it in a good position, a dynamic position
and dynamic perspective. It’s more believable. You’ll prove it to yourself that it’s
true. You’ll prove it to your audience that it’s true. Then, like a wood carver we can
always come back and round off the corners. So we can come back and take that chiseled
shape and soften it up. But it’s going to plot correctly if we keep those nice and well-cornered.
Notice that I can make a box out of curved lines. I can make things boxy and never draw
a straight line. So you can also do this kind of thing and give it whatever
curvature you feel it needs.
Okay, so those are kind of the construction secrets of those awkward moments.
We'll find more awkward moments in a later lecture, but that’s all we need for now. We’ve
got our basic front and side planes, some of our basic bottom planes here. Let’s now
look at our top planes. Alright, so now let’s look at some dynamic
positions of the head from the top view. One of the lovely things we found about this is
we have that nice design contrast of the round skull and oftentimes hairstyle against a more
architectural, more boxy features. We found that if we play up that squareness, that boxy
quality, it pays dividends for plotting this head in position, and especially in these
difficult positions we can really break it down nicely and capture it accurately in space
by going to the boxy corners, getting those corners.
But, with our roundness of the head we start to lose that.
So what we’re going to find now is it will be generally our strategy, it’s certainly
my strategy. No matter how round something is we’ll oftentimes need to give it a slight
square quality. So I’m going to look for square circles, square eggs in effect. I’ll
show you how to do that. We’ll find again, the squarer I can make something the more
clearly I can put it in position because when it’s square I’ve got corners that tell
me where the top meets the back and where the back meets the side, and where the side
meets the bottom. Plotting out those box logic positions is going to give me
great control in placing it in space.

So what I’m saying is let’s make this skull a little boxier now. See what it does
for us. So here is my round skull when I’m on top.
Let’s put a part down the middle of the imaginary hair, if it had hair. Here are the
features that are already nice and square in concept if we choose to make them. We can
certainly make them more tubular based or egg-shaped, of course. But for the reasons
we talked about, we’re not going to do that. So there is the front of the box. Here is
the side of the box. This is what we we’re doing in our basic drawing session and in
our first beginning construction session. I just did that oftentimes without explaining
it. Here is the corner of the jaw. When I did it, though, it felt instantly better.
Now we know if we go to the arch of the eyebrow that’s a natural corner for the whole forehead
using the temple line in effect. That gives me that lovely corner that I can then sculpt
off of and render off of nicely. Down to the eye line we get the bottom plane
of the forehead as it steps back before we build off that nose. IF we descend down the
eyebrow line to the eye line we get the nice, wide cheeks. We can feel that. In this case
on the contour on the other side of the three-quarter, and again that defines the front plane, takes
us along our side plane then. And all the way down. We can do the same thing in the
hose and mouth and lips. I’ll show you how to do that as we get to those features. Certainly,
the chin to the jaw line there, it goes down this way more or less. This is all side plane
here. This is all front plane here in this area. Then at some point it becomes top plane.
So where exactly? Well, if we continue the temple line up, the temporalis. You can see
a subtle change there. Temporalis will add a little bump in there. It’ll be hidden
by the hair usually, but it’s there. That becomes a natural. We can ghost the line,
and it can be higher or lower. It doesn’t have to be very accurate. But that’s a good
natural place to create a boxy corner. It’s not a perfect place because this is rounding
off slowly. We’re cutting off abruptly. But it gives us a good beginning construction.
So this goes back. It gives me a natural corner now, top to side, which is great. We could
live without having a top to front. But if you wanted that front, just use the hairline
if it’s not receded away or gone or bangs covering it. You could also then give a little
boxier quality here. Will get a more satisfying conclusion to that and a more nuanced conclusion
later in our advanced structure. But for now, that’s plenty good enough. So notice now
I’ve taken something round and I’ve given it a tiny little hitch. The easiest way to
do that is to overlap your lines. If you’re drawing curves let the curve dust out, drift
out, and let a new curve cut back in. There is your corner rather than doing this down.
Then it just kind of wanders and gets rubbery. This way we get implied corners or clear corners
that then define. Now we have a front plane there again. This is all top plane.
Notice how we could then take this same construction line. It’s met with all these other construction
lines. This is all front plane. They’re all parallel. You can say, wait, wait; these
are not parallel. I know my perspective. They vanish to a vanishing point off here. Yes,
they do, but since they are finally organic, rounded forms we don’t have to do that.
Even if I draw a big head as I will in our advanced section and render it out for you,
you’ll find that I don’t have to vanish those because I’ll end up rounding the chin
out on some level to show it’s organic quality. It won’t stay like this robot man that we
have now. We don’t have to worry about that. So you can just make them perfectly parallel.
It’ll be great.
Notice we can take that same positioning logic—these are all parallel lines, and bring it back
to the back of the skull too, or the back of the hairstyle. If you’re industrious
you might want to go back to your old master drawings, that timed sessions we did together,
and look at the hairstyles. Go to the model session, not timed, but look to the old masters
section and look to the model section and see how there is a slight squareness oftentimes
to the hairstyle that suggests this box logic. Notice we can turn this into a beveled corner.
That’s going to be more of a truism. But we don’t have to be that sophisticated at
this stage, or for construction even if we’re going to do a fine rendering we can soften
that corner and round those boxes out in the rendering, and we don’t have to construct
it out. We will in our advanced section, but we don’t have to.
So you can do it that way, or you can do it this way or this way. That’s close enough
for construction. That fits here. Here is maybe the neck going off this way like this.
It’s a little too much there, like so. And then the body would be here. Notice now have
a fitting, satisfying conclusion to our head drama. Let’s do it again. The ear gets very
close to the front of the features. I like to take that eye socket and bump it out like
that. Take a little notch out of it so I can feel where the eye socket is. This, whether
we can see it or not, the top of that bump is where the eyebrow is. Oftentimes, you can
see a little bit of the lashes in there. You may not oftentimes don’t see the eyeball,
eyelids, but that’s enough. This would be the corner of the cheek right in here, right
there, right here would be right here. So that’s what I’m doing here—in a sloppier
way, but that’s what I’m doing. Then the ear is very low because we’re on top of
the head like so. Notice how low it gets. The part of the hair would be going up. Remember
it’s not a perfect right angle. It lifts up like so. We could the other eyebrow—the
other eyebrow line would be over here. It would be doing something like this. We can’t
see any of that information because we’re not on any kind of front view. We can’t
get this wonderful constructed truth laid out that’s so apparent. If I can see both
corners of the mouth, both arches of the eyebrow, both back corners of the head or hair. I’ve
got it. Everything else tracks, and I can plot it out.
I can’t do that here because I see none of that. I only see the feature on the side
plane. I see a bit of one constructed idea. I don’t get the symmetrical other side so
I can’t find its axis, but I can on the head. I can right here or right here, whatever
part of that I see. There it is. Then I can come back to the back of the head this way
and make this egg shape very, very boxy or just slightly more square-ish. So I give that rounded corner,
and then this, this, this. This would be the temple line. This would be the back of the
head here. Notice that back plane stays well away from the ear, at least a couple ears
away usually. Anywhere in here would be fine. You don’t have to be super careful because
it’ll be a rounded corner. That could be there. That could be up here. That’s actually
more accurate probably, but this could be the corner plane as it drops down.
So you can see this would be the temple line running back here. It’d be running back
here like so. So by taking that very round skull or very round hairstyle and making it slightly
or greatly square. In other words, by giving it corners, now we’ve set it in a perspective
space that we could put in as a perspective room with our vanishing points if we needed
to. So the bookcase and the walls and everything vanishes to one, two, or three-point perspective.
This figure sitting in the room, sitting on the chair would do the same thing. Head looking
up out through the window. If we see the features they will hide behind that cheekbone because
they’re hiding behind that corner where the side meets the front. It’s important
to put the features over on the front and keep them off the side with the ear so we
don’t want to do this with the nose and the lips and do this with the nostril. They’ll
destroy it. We want it behind that interruption of the cheek. So that gives us that.
So whenever I need more kick—notice this could be a hairstyle too. You could have flyaways
even with the hairstyle, but we come back at some key moment and find that construction.
We’ll see that in our demonstration period. So that’s that.
One last thing, and this kind of my secret weapon here. You need any kind of thing that
moves towards the profile. If I’ve got a head that’s in some kind of dynamic position,
what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this little bump that I had, and I’m going
to turn it into a notch. A notch, like a whistle notch. Let’s take a tube and carve a whistle
notch out of it. This is the perspective of the tube so that would be the perspective
of the notch. Notice how the bottom of the notch tracks of the perspective of the tube,
and the top of the notch tracks the perspective of the tube. Then they blend together because
they’ve been carved out together. Notice how that top of the notch tucks right back
under and mimics the tucking under or the bottom of the tube. So it’s in perfect perspective.
That’s what I’m going to do to the eye socket. The eye socket is just a notch. It’s
a whole. It’s a cave. So when we get into these positions where we’re in a three-quarter,
front-view it’s just like eyeglasses in effect.
Back view we can’t see it. Maybe we see a little dimple dip there but nothing else.
But when we get into the profile, three-quarter view, we’re going to find that whistle notch
idea. What I’m going to use for the whistle notch, and I’ll show you in a second, but
what I’m going to use is the eyebrow, just the hair of the eyebrow and the cheekbone
at wherever is convenient. It can be where the highlight hits or a shadow turns. It can
be where the lower lid meets the cheek. Anywhere in there. I usually kind of aim for between
where the lower lid lumps against the cheek and where the highlight is. It can be anyplace,
and depending on the position you’re in, it’ll move around conveniently. It’ll
change and you’ll want to change your choice. So I’m going to take the arch of the eyebrow,
and I’m going to spin it right into the cheekbone, the cheekbone area. Highlight where
it meets the lower lid wherever. I’m going to take my notch out. You can see what we’re visualizing here.
This is a head in some kind of profile that we’re slightly underneath.
Make sure that skull goes up high enough. Let’s make our skull boxy so it helps reinforce
that perspective. You don’t have to, but to see that this is the notch. The eye would
sit in here like so. So, whistle notch.
There’s the mask of the face. There is the arch of the eyebrow.
Notice how the whistle notch got very shallow here. I won’t shade it in.
I’m just doing that so you can see it more easily. Let me draw back over that so it's clear.
Here the eyebrow swings around into the bump of the cheek. Now I’m just
using the swell of the cheek here because that’s what I can see. The nose would be
in here someplace hidden. You know, maybe we’d see the lips. That would be the chin.
There would be that digastric plane underneath.
Let me do a little better job on this.
I drew that twice there. When we get into these profile views, that’s the sternocleidomastoid. If
I do this, I can feel that it starts right underneath my earlobe right behind my corner
of the jaw, and it goes right down both sides, right down to the pit of the neck where the
collarbones come together right there. That’s a great way to triangulate. The bottom of
the chin takes that throat area without the Adam’s apple, swings right down to the pit
of the neck. Collarbone comes over to the pit of the neck. This goes off in that hourglass
shape, but this pulls right down. I just draw the front edge, but this thing would be like
that cable, and it pulls that head around like that.
Notice when we start to get into a back view, moving towards the back view, that cable,
that sternocleidomastoid in the back will create that tubular idea. Then we get to a
back view or a front view, that’s what creates the tube is those two muscles there. Then
they go off into our sagging triangle idea. But they create the tube idea. The throat
and the spine create the hourglass idea. This is going to always go from the ear, underneath
the ear to the pit of the neck. You can use that to get a better attachment. Notice how
this puts the throat behind the rest of the neck and creates a nice overlap that then
gets played up in spades in our back view. Here it is here. There is that sternocleidomastoid.
There is a little bit of the throat we can see. Here’s the backside, 7th vertebrae.
This is a spine. This is our shrugging muscle, our sagging triangle idea. This would be the
torso coming down through. See how nicely that connects, ties the ear then to the mask
of the face to the bottom of the bottom plane of the face, the digastric plane ties it to
the other side of the neck in symmetry so that feels that connectivity because of the
symmetry this way, I guess. Then it moves into that transitional move into the shrugging
muscles, that triangle. There it is there. This pulls in here, pulls in here, but then
it adds in out there. Okay, but use that silly-named muscle to help
coordinate and make a better connection and to show more tension, more aggressive tension,
a steely eyed hero ready to pounce on the bad guy or whatever it is. It gives tension
there, which is certainly what you—you don’t always want to do that, but it can be convenient
to do that. Use the whistle notch. We’ll see that in greater variation when we do our
old masters in our time. So let’s stop there.

Alright, so let’s look at our same master drawings now and take them a little farther.
We’ve got our Holbein, one of the greatest portrait draftsmen ever. He still affects
artists. They still look modern even today. In the 80s he was hugely influential with
illustrators, actually, and he still is with fine artists today. Fantastic stuff. So here
are those wide cheeks. You can see the tone right here. We’re going to find that the
shadow follows those architectural corners that we’ve plotted out very nicely when
we get into rendering in our advanced structure.
So there you can see the nice wide cheeks. Here you can see, now, we don’t have a full
arch, but we have a high point dropping down. It actually bumps twice here and here. I’m
going to use this wider cause that’s where the tones are. We’ll talk about why there
are a couple of bumps there in the advanced structure. But this, let’s do that.
Here is our side temple plane, side temple plane, side temple in there. There you can see that
side plane coming down. Let’s do that coming down to that. You can see it swinging towards
the bottom of the nose. It almost never fails to do that and then drops down, falls down.
So it comes down here. You can see where those dimple marks would be in here and here, anywhere
around that slightly outside or significantly outside the corners of the mouth. It swings
over, steps in. Swings over, steps in. There is the chin, front of the chin. This is all
side plane. Notice that the laws of light teach us and tonal composition value design
teach us that when we have a plane change we’ll have a value change.
So in this little study, this little schematic, we’re going to say all side planes get darker
and all front planes get lighter. Now, if we do our construction line you can see how
they track beautifully. Of course, we really saw that in the last go around. And you can
see with this little dusting here how most of this, give or take the bump of the eyeballs
and lids, let’s just go right through the nose, that creates our bottom plane for our
forehead in a very simplified way. Then that bottom plane is broken up slightly or aggressively
with the nose and that wedge structure. In here it’s aggressive breakup. It really
cuts out and segments those two sockets. But the nose fits in here and comes down to here.
Neck, again, sits in there. Skull and all that good stuff.
Alright, here we see now that we’re slightly on top of the head. Here is the nice broad
skull and—I’m sorry, nice broad forehead. In different times in art history a wide,
flat skull—let me try that again. I said skull twice now. Wide, flat forehead was considered
beautiful and a sign of intelligence. This was a time also in art deco age in the turn
of the century 1880s, 1920s, 1940s in there. Liondecker, famous illustrator. You’ll see
that and a bunch of other folks. Cornwell. See this nice, broad, flat forehead. It was
considered beautiful. It’s still considered beautiful. I find it beautiful. This drops
down here. There is that bottom plane there. Here is where it breaks. Let me move that
down a little bit farther. Then we can see in this case the cheeks don’t get as dramatically
wide compared to the forehead as they did over on the Holbein.
Over here we had this great—let me exaggerate it a little bit. We had this great bump out
from the relatively narrow front plane of the forehead way out to the very wide cheeks.
Here you’ll notice it’s a subtler transition. They don’t bump out as much, but they do
bump out. And it swings towards the nose but falls down. In this case, it’s a very subtle
fall. It’s not as dramatic. This is much more skeletal because she is a more austere
character. She is not fleshy. This is a fleshier young woman. You can see how it comes and
stays outside the mouth. Let me kick that back. It stays outside the corners of the
mouth. We’ll just call those the corners of the mouth there. Or out here. Then it drops
in again to that little chin. Look how narrow that chin is. Look at how we depart from the
chin and go up to the corners of the jaw. As round as her face is, we still feel those
corners. We still get a sense of that jaw corner, especially on this side.
Okay, here is our Piazetta, more the perfect profile. He is that movement down, movement
back. The jaw line, mask of the face by a simplified hairline, and we could also think
of the skull this way in here like so off the bottom corner of the chin. Always show
that digastric plane if you can. Don’t ever just do this unless it’s an older folk who
has lost that separation there. Move back and then down. This comes down here. If we
could feel or see, hopefully we’ll feel it in the illustration and the rendering.
But if we could see we’d notice that the eye line lines up very nicely with where the
skull meets the neck. See if we can see anything in there. Right here, here is where the neck
meets the skull, let’s say. It suggests that even though the hair moves outside of
it. Then here is our eyebrow right there. There
is our eye socket that we talked about in a flat perspective. Notice one of the key
ideas is that we step back from the forehead to the eye. Look at how far the eyeball right
there, way back here. Notice how—here’s the nose out here. I’m going to add that
in there. Notice how far we go back in before we hit eyeball. Way back inside the lid. Look
at how the lid steps back. I’m exaggerating it to make a point. That’s not exaggerated
from reality. It’s just overdone for this drawing. We will also see that very clearly.
Lashes would come off that. We’ll see that very clearly when we look at the structure
of the eye there.
But one of the key features, the key strategies I should say, for the eye is to set it inside
and back into that hollow, back into the orbit. Don’t let it bug out. The farther you can
push it from the front of the nose, the farther back from the edge of the nose into that whistle
notch. Here’s the whistle notch using the eyebrow, swinging that eyebrow down to the
cheek line where the cheek, in this case where the cheek meets lower lid you can see it right
there. That’s going to be our strategy for creating that socket to set that eye beautifully
in, a structure to hold the eye structure. That’s one of our reasons for breaking down
the secondary structure. We’ve got a good graphic map, a landscape to place our important
features in. So that plots that out.
Then, of course, as we had said before, that eye socket whistle notch idea becomes the
corner where front meets side, where front meets side. I’m throwing in a perspective
that’s not there, but just so you can see that corner transition. Then the temple line
would be right up here. So this would act as the top against the side there. If I take
this out of here you can see how
that tone if we simplify it—give me just a moment here. That gives us the sense of
the back of the head, the beveling back as it steps around that constructed mass. This
kind of idea.
Here’s our little Tiepolo, this lovely little drawing, just ink and wash. Again, we can
see how setting up for the idea and the great strategy of how the shadows build off the
corners. And so one of the key things as we do our secondary structure, our intermediate
structure and into our advanced, we’re really finding lots of new corners, key corners to
separate and hold features and to separate and hold value, so light against the shadow.
You can see here as simple as this is, our shadow shapes are defined, and we alluded
to that in the last go-about with this drawing. But those shadow shapes define a basic idea
of the features.
Notice this kind of zigzag here for the Madonna’s face, so we can see where this little bump
of shadow happens. That’s that wider cheekbone. Let’s take that out and figure out what’s
going on. This is a fun way to work. I love thinking this stuff through like this. But
it’s a great way to develop your understanding. We have this kind of slopped-in eye, this
painterly eye. It’s not exactly right. You can see how big and snout-like the nose is.
But that’s unusual for the beginning of the nose, and I’ll show you why it works
just fine in a second. And then this bumps here. So this is the shadowing we have. And
then everything down here drops into shadow including that lovely neck and the cast shadow
of the head onto our shoulder structure here. Then these just beautiful lyrical lines that
he paints in there that are just fantastic.
So that’s more or less what we have. We have a hint of the costuming going on here.
Let me just lay that in for a second for reasons I’ll show you a little bit later. Now, let’s
decipher this. Well, if we were to pick out an eyebrow—
there would be the eyebrow.
This would be the corner of the forehead. If I box that out you can see that. That’s our
basic corner that we deciphered. This would come out and bump along here, and this would
be where it goes under the nose like that. You can see as it goes under the nose the
cheek pushes out to protect the eye and then goes around the nose and down towards the
mouth is what it’s really doing for those communication.
And as it turns that corner of the widest part of the face, that wide cheek thrusting
out to protect, and that cheek narrowing to deal with mouth and chin, it makes a transition
back under. That’s why he chose to put the light there.
Let me make sure you’re seeing what I’m drawing.
Right here you can see that shadow shape changes there. Now he shortcut
the nose. The nose should be a little bit longer than that. But also, we’re well underneath
it, so it was just a shorthand to say that we’re underneath this; make a short nose.
But it has to be fixed just like the snout, the two wide of nose to be fixed. But it gives
us the painterly suggestion of what we need to deal with. That’s all especially a master
like this needed as it can be shorthand for how it should be perfectly designed later.
You’ll do that in the finish. This wraps up here.
Now, he’s missing this little bit. He didn’t bother to put this in, but that cheekbone
is not in correct over here. Since it’s wider here, widening out here—
let me do something that’ll show it widening out here and stepping. It widens out at the forehead too.
You can actually get it locking around like this.
We can get that cheek, that chunk
of light stepping around like this. Oftentimes this will fill back in around like that.
He didn’t bother to because he is going to have that hood covering that, and that little
bit is no big deal. He’ll deal with it later. Also, this could drop into deep shadow here,
and this—let’s see here.
Give me just a moment.
This could be glancing light. It’s not as deep a tone as that cheek turning away.
So it may be suggesting that, softening that. So anyway, that sits like that. Then you can see back
here he’s giving us an idea of the gesture of the head going back, of the neck and skull.
Connection of the skull and neck high at the eye line, basically gives us all that good
stuff and then we move on from there. But you can see how beautifully and simply. It’s
really giving some very true and very sophisticated structure. Likewise, on the little baby Jesus
there with the two egg shapes we visited that on the last go-around, so we won’t go back to that.
But with these really terrific talents you can see how even at the simplest stage they’re
dealing with great sophistication of anatomy and construction and value systems
and all sorts of things like that.

Alright, our Raphael again. You can see in context to our last lecture, you can see the
boxy quality here. It’s just a marvel to see. Look at that forehead. There is the corner
right there. It turns right there. Instead of arching up, it just comes straight across
and drops down. There is that broad brow again, that beautiful aesthetic of the brow. You
can see how this steps here like so. You can see that beautiful stepping action here that
creates that box logic. We know what he was thinking. He was thinking in terms of boxes.
Notice how once we’ve got that we’ve got everything here. You can see the hairline
here. We alluded to that last time. It tracks. All these things track. Even this very, very
rounded nose tracks for just a moment. You can even see how once he’s got that boxy
idea, and we’ll see this when we get into the features more carefully I’m going to
cheat on the lighting here. You can see how the front of the eyelid as opposed to the
side of the eyelid also creates that boxy step going back this way. You can see this
is our ear more or less. Let’s put it there, there. We’re getting the eye construction
tracking through. Oftentimes you’ll see it over here also, and you do in this case
right here. It’s bumping and then coming back, and so there is that symmetrical architecture
that so holds our attention and tells us that this is a handsome and healthy character.
That’s really what handsome and beautiful is all about. It’s just a code word for
healthy. The genes are going to be passed on well. If things are even they’re healthy.
If they’re cancerous, if they’re out of whack, if they’re asymmetrical it gives
us a sense in our genetic bones that that is not good to pass on.
So that’s that. All these things then box around. He really has gone to the boxy idea.
You can see the mustache moves there, the chin and beard, where the chin would be let’s
say here moves along. Now, let’s look at the head. Well, it’s very, very round. So
we get that idea. That’s somewhat suggestive—I can do a little better than that. That’s
somewhat suggestive of this. You know, it’s coming this way, so coming this way.
That head is a slightly fuller version, tipped up version of that top of the tube idea.
You could even argue that if I picked up just the curls that were all here…
I'll play that up way more than he did. You can see how that tracks, that top of the tube idea
pretty well, like so.
So we have that sense of an egg on top. We can track the full egg in here like so. We
have a sense of the tube, as I said. And with the bangs, the full shape of the bangs and
the top section of that hair an exaggerated tube. Let’s see if we can find the box then.
Well, this is coming up here and back this way. So if for any moment we can find I want to do that. So rather than
just say, well, there is a curl, there is a curl I’m going off those curls as they
arc along and let them kind of fade in and fade out in lovely hatching technique or whatever
I’m doing. I want to first say, well, the box would be like this. I want to make sure
that a couple of those curls track that box. Then I wanted to look to the front to see
if I can repeat that suggestion in here.
You won’t find it every time, but you will find it most of the time. You want to draw
it all the time at first. There is that side plane temple. There is that wider cheek. The
highlight sits in there. Whenever I see this come all the way over to this side feel that
connectivity. There is that egg idea, that rhythm idea before it drops down. It ends
there, comes over on this side, hides behind the mustache, drops into the front of the
chin in here and moves on.
Okay, so notice that we’re thinking of the box to feel that rhythm across really this
way. Feel that connectivity front transcending into the side. Then also I go back to the
egg on top of that box. Again, we’ll see this more clearly when we get to our advanced
session. But I want to feel how this and this—there’s that—and that Raphael baby in the last on,
or I mean the Tiepolo baby in the last one. You can see the egg. The beautiful thing about
the egg is the egg gives this perfect, fluid, easy connectivity. We flow from one to the
other. The box, every time we see a corner we want to stop. It eventually stops us. But
it gives great positioning, great sense of solidity. So we want to balance those. I’ll
come in. I’ll take something that’s round and push it to it more square understanding,
boxy understanding. Then I’ll come back in and reinvigorate the roundness so that
I can feel that things flow beautifully together.
Alright, so let’s look at our authority figure here. We talked about some of the issues
here, but let’s come back to it and then take them a little farther. Here is that plane
of the face. Let’s take it over here. What we’re seeing is forehead, cheek, chin, bottom
plane, digastric plane right there. Once again, that’s going to be the corner of the head.
This is all side plane here, and then we step over it and we get into the eyes, whatever
little we can see and the nose, whatever we can see in the mouth structure. And the handing
lower lip and a little bit of the chin. Those are all front planes.
All that is around the other side.
If we make it even simpler, that’s what we start with, and then we come in and we
take a notch out. That’s all we can see of that whistle notch because most of it has
gone away. If it was a full or a true profile we’d see it like this, more fully bumped.
If it was slightly underneath this we’re going to follow the, I’m going to play this
up now—follow the eyebrow line down and tuck this around where the lower lid meets
the eyeball. I’m sorry, where the lower lid meets the cheek and take it that way.
Let’s look at that here in our simple whistle notch analogy like this. So this becomes the
eyebrow descending. This becomes the cheek and lower lid, the ball of the lower lid.
Eyeball meeting the cheek, that kind of thing.
If we are on top of it, I’m sorry, if we
were underneath it. That was when we were on top of it. If we’re underneath it then
we’ll see it this way going that way, at that would do this, whatever little bit of
the eye we see and the nose and the mouth hiding behind. So that’s our whistle notch.
Now, let’s do it again, and let’s look at how the hair and skull, we don’t see
the skull but the hair and the implied skull
give us a lot of information here that’s valuable. Here is the ear right in front.
And now look at how we’re really slightly in this position right here. We’re in this
position. So look at how the hairstyle and the lighting reinforce—we can do it that
way, this way, this way. This way, this way. Pinching not perfectly but pretty darn close.
Let’s go back and look at it again. Pretty good, huh? That’s where the hair kind of
sweeps up into that cowlick or whatever you call it. This pulls down here. This pulls
down here. Here it is here. Here it is here, and it’s twisting off a little bit. You
could argue it’s twisting off less than that. I did on the last go around, but I’ll
go ahead and push it. That was a little convenient. I cheated to make it a little more convenient.
But now I’ll go the other way and make it a little less flattering to our boxy idea.
But since this is coming up and pinching it’s distorting it and pushing it up. It’s pinching
against that. You can see it when we do this. See how that pinch happens just like it pinches
in here, pinches in here. It’s pinching in there so that distorts it a little bit.
But most of it rings true very nicely. We get that boxy idea. You can see this dark
accent. I’m highlighting either side of it. This dark accent takes us down that corner
too and we can feel that kind of chiseled effect.
So anyway, that puts us on top of that head nicely.
One more time, visualize that and now try and visualize all that boxy stuff in that.
That’s what we want to do as terrific craftsman is make sure we can visualize that box logic
or that simple shape within all the stuff we see. There we go. This steps down because
of the crafting of the costume. The hair is a decorative rather than a truly structural
effect. But you can see how the decoration, the accent or the place where the hair is
still ghosting, still showing us that underlying architecture. Here it drifts down lower because
the hair is scooping down to hide. Let’s play that up. This is dropping this way so
it hides that high point that it should have. The ear is going off just slightly, slightly
cockeyed to the other features. There is that nose twisting off this way and the mouth.
You can see nicely how the mouth steps over, front, corner, stepping back to the bigger
structure of the mouth there. I’m sorry, stepping back to the bigger structure of the
face on that. We’ll talk about that later, how the little structures build on top of
the big structure. Here is a nice, attractive wide, broad forehead. Front plane. Here is
the side planes. Let’s make it a little darker here. Coming out and down. Out and
down. There is our—let’s see here. Let’s do that. There are the wide cheeks pinching
around that squished cheek and eye structure. There it is there going towards the nose and
then falling down. So we still have it there don’t we?
Here would be in here if we could see it. Okay.

Alright, in our Manet that’s so simplified, let’s see if we can find our stuff here.
Let’s lighten that up a little bit lighter, I guess. Let me take that out. Look at that
right here, this darker gray. So it’s still a change. You can say, well, that’s reaching,
Steve. But look at where the eyebrow poofs out, right around that same area. So there
is our corner. You can’t argue with me because you’re not here to argue, so I get to say
there is our corner. We’ll find that there is a little corner plane in here. There is
a front center and there is a corner planes to the forehead there, and that’s actually
there. Then, of course, this is our side plane coming down to our wider cheeks. Here is the
wider cheek, wider cheek; let me take that back. Look at how I just, like that female,
that Madonna with the Tiepolo. There it is there again, that little string. In this case
it’s reflected light, but it shows how that eye socket forehead bumps over and then the
wider cheek comes around it to contain it in here.
So that’s that string in there, more or less.
There is the wider cheekbone going from the widest point. Here is that red, little red there.
Here is a shadow shape coming through under the nose, and then it falls down into
that dimple area. Dimple area here. And then, of course, it steps forward again to the chin
right in here. Then because she is a full-figured woman we’ve got the digastric plane kind
of bulging out underneath in slight double chin. Forgive me, Madame. Right there. So
those structures are still here. Here is the stepping down. This cuts through. We can imagine this.
this. This all gets blasted out. This bumps out for reasons we’ll find out when we get
more sophisticated data. This would be the bottom plane in here. This is just blasted
out with light so we don’t see it. But it’s really kind of a side light with not much
overhead coming through, from a window presumably. You can see it with a cast shadow of the nose
here. Right in here. There is no—typically you’d see a drop shadow of the nose like
that because the light is coming from here. In that case it looks like Charlie Chaplin.
In this case a side light, so it blasts this area out. But still, that bottom plane here
is the wedge of the nose, the simplified wedge of the nose separating those planes. There
is that little wedge in the center.
This one, though, let’s go ahead and look at this lovely drawing. Notice how with a
nice, male thick neck, I’m going to make it thicker. Give me just a moment. From these
back views you can actually the back of the head and the neck into a tube. It might be
a tube that’s perfectly tubular. It would be the skull in there with the ears in here
with the hairline line in here, or it might be a tube that gets a little skinnier, kind of a lollipop
effect like that. In this case it gets a little skinnier, but I beefed it up to make my point
here. Then we have this wonderful ball shape in here. Notice how the shading, you know,
if we took that ball and put it here and lit it as the figure lit, since it is rather ball-shaped
in design it will light very similar. It’ll have little organic variations, but it will
light very similar to a true ball in that same position with that same light source.
That tells you whether you’ve chosen a good simple shape. If I pick the right shape, and
then if I put a very simple version of that in the same position and light it from the
same position, I should get the same light and shadow shape on it.
For example, if we think of that elbow as a box shape and the back of the arm as a box
shape notice how I can just simplify that shadow, and we see that box truth very clearly.
Then I go back and say, well, that box shows itself right here and here, but then I have
some other stuff going on here, an egg or two or whatever is going on. It’s a variation
of that or a little boxy tail to it or something like that. So anyway, that’s a good test
to see if it’s tracking well. If your rendered detail, specifically your shadow and light
shapes follow the simple logic of our simple forms.
Okay, now let’s take it back to the box idea here. So if come here and here and here,
forget that sprawling growth pattern on the back of the skull then we can see the hairline here, the highlights
here. You can see the boxy idea that tracks. You can see how it can be refined out. See
that shadow pattern picking up this side here, dropping down. It can be even more clearly
stated. So there is that box there or the simpler ideas—give me a second there—
would be thinking of it this way.
Like so.
Okay, probably the best way to go because it is so ball-like is go ahead and start with a ball.
Add whatever variations give you its character or help you understand its proportions.
Sometimes you need some of this little stuff to feel that you got the big stuff right because
it can get kind of abstract at turning things into the simple things that were the simple
architectural truths. But do that and come back and say, okay, I want that to build this way.
Look for shape patterns or shadow patterns. Those will oftentimes be the same or just
textural patterns that pick up, that track or end, like this chunk of light runs along
this plane here. This whole back section of dark tracks that ball or that boxy section.
We can work it out as a boxy section too.
And so this is tracking along here more or less, and then as you break it into'
ever more complicated planes you’ll get ever more refined shapes on and on and on.
Okay, so boxes, balls, and tubes. We could certainly have drawn it as a tubular—not
sure what happened there. There we go. I don’t know what I did there. We could have certainly
drawn it as a tube idea like so. Those ears tell us how it’s tipping very nicely. This
tells us the track as we’ve done in our first go around in this drawing. Track down
there, but it could be a tube idea. Then the bottom of the hairline is tracking more or
less the perspective curvature of the tube and so do a lot of these light and shadow
patterns. Lots of truths there. Lots of choices. You might use a tube up here. Then you go
over here, a box back here. You can mix and match as we will. Now, let’s stop there.
Let’s do some timed poses and then we’ll move on.

Alright, in this section of our lesson it’s going to be timed poses. What I want you to do is do a little
assignment. Try to apply some of this information to the reference that we’re providing. You have a certain
time to work. Don’t worry too much about it if you go over a minute or two, if you finish a little quicker.
That’s okay. We just want to get that intermediate information down and under control.
So go ahead and give it a shot, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Transcription not available.

Alright, now it is my turn to do the timed pose. I’m going to go ahead and apply that
intermediate information to our reference material. I’m going to worth with that time
frame, but I’m not going to be too tied to it. If I go a little over, a little under,
that is quite alright. I just want to apply that basic information and make sure it makes
sense to me in that practical drawing format. So let’s give that a try.
Now that you’ve had a chance to do your timed poses, and you can watch or draw along
with me, whatever you like. I’m using Seth Cole paper. It’s heavy ledger paper. Then
I’m using Faber-Castell pencils, Indian Red, which is 9201-192. I always have a couple
of them, that way if I break a pencil I don’t have to stop. I can keep going.
So five minute drawing. We’re going to intermediate structure. Let’s go ahead and start.
So there is the basic structure. Here is the center line which becomes our dynamic gesture
line when we get an action pose. Eyebrow is going to be somewhere in here. Eye line. I’m
going to follow the same process I followed for the basic structure. I’m just going
to take it farther is all. And since I am going to take it farther maybe I spend a little
bit more time. We’re going from one minute to five minute. We’re giving ourselves a
lot of time because we’re now playing with more pieces to the puzzle, and that means
there are more variables, more stuff to goof us up basically. So we want to take our time.
So I’m going to try and do a hairline that’s not generic but is simple,
but reflects her hairline and/or hairstyle.
Notice, quite often criss-cross like this. I’m chiseling it
out like a box so I can get the corner or the top, the side. It gives me a little bit
more control to see where things begin and end rather than just chasing it around with
curves. So it’s a good strategy to use when you’re practicing the observation and really
trying to key in on what’s going on there.
She has little fuller features and then a
chin in here. A little bit fuller neck too.
Always kind of consider the source, where
that part is coming from or going into. And I’m just going to chase down a little bit
of those shadow shapes that we haven’t talked about yet, but just to kind of figure out
how far I go. Alright, so this is more or less what I had before, and now what I’m
going to look for is where the eyebrows arch. That’s going to be the corner plane, where
the eyebrows arch. That’s going to be the corner plane.
It’s going to pull on down here.
The nose now is going to start with this little wedge shape...
and build on through. And I want to feel the tip of the nose and the bottom of the nose.
I’m going to do an, at this point, a fairly unsatisfying nose. Just kind of blocking in
that wedge shape. It’s going to feel a little clunky at this stage. You don’t want it
to be anymore than that really.
Let me do actually this. Here is the bottom plane of the forehead. I’ll give it a little
bit of a tone. It’s going through where the bottom of the lids meet the white of the
eyes or where the two lids come together. We haven’t talked about features so we’re
not going to draw in those features, but we can get just kind of a
crude oval or almond shape to suggest.
Again, I’ll use the little things there that I’ll figure out later.
But I’ll just observe a little detail and that will help me kind of plot out the greater
structure. If I were to make all side or corner planes a little darker than all front plane
as in the bottom, that’s what we have there. Here is the, like going down there.
Then at the end it’s going to pop into this chin in here, and so that side plane tucks under
almost like a beard. The beard line would follow.
Then the mouth we could just lay in
again as a placeholder at this point until we figure it out. Laying in that mouth we
can see that the nose should be a little bit higher. We’ll bump it up here.
That's our basic structure.
Now we have this almost profile.
Center line would be here. I depend on that hairline quite
a bit for the mask of the shape. Now, you can’t just go back here, but oftentimes
I don’t feel comfortable with that being particular accurate, so I’ll actually use
the hairstyle, the hairline back along the temple to the sideburn area and just to get
a clearer sense of exactly how far we go back to hit that ear. I can still be wrong, and
I can still change it if I need to, but it gets me a little more comfort in feeling that
I’m a little closer to where I need to be. There is that sternocleidomastoid
and this is pulling back here.
Then the eyebrow line is a little higher. You have to come down
to that ear so we’ll make that ear a little lower. Then the eye line is in here.
Then we’re going to feel the forehead come out. Go back in to that eye line, bottom plane
of the forehead. If I always find off the center line that little wedge that separates
the eyebrows, that ends the forehead and starts the nose. Here is the nose coming off this way.
This little section in here, that little wedge shape. Find that. That’s going to
be a real nice landmark for finding exactly where the eyebrows arch up to, fall down from.
It spaces and begins the nose. It spaces and plots out the eye. Notice that we go from
eyebrow. Here is the hair of the eyebrow there. Then we step way back to the beginning of
the eye. Here is the beginning of the eye here. We just do that for it. Notice how far
we step in. That’s suggested by this movement in here. Block out the eye there. That is
all as we have here, that’s all bottom plane. So let’s just dust that as a bottom plane.
Now the lids pop out, catch light. The action or the angle of the light will throw light
or shadow in there, but the basic structure is as we’ve shown it.
And then there is the basic side plane. We’ll dust that back down this way coming out here
just so you can see it. The lower lid would be here. If we were to draw it as an eyeball,
the eyeball would be inside the eye socket here like so. The eyeball would be in here.
The lids do a lot to obscure that, but when we get into our features and our advanced
structure we’ll see exactly how that plays out. But if you’re wondering, there would
be the hint of the skull structure underneath. This is all front of the cheek in here. In
here beyond the eyeball, there is the eyeball here, cheek. Cheek. And we can feel just a
little bit of the cheek going behind the nose there. That is the shape that goes under the nose.
It goes under the nose but falls off more quickly. You can see that nice curly-Q
shadow there. We’ll deal with that later as a complex idea for now. It’s just going
to stay as a simple idea. The nose comes down. Nose goes up. There is that basic snout of
the nose that gets us started. Again, more to talk about. Here is mouth line, mouth area
in here. Chin area is in here. There is that side plane of the jaw coming in and crowding
the front of the chin. Then this goes back here, digastric plane. Give us a nice plane
underneath. Let’s make that slightly darker just so you can see it. Neck goes off there.
One last thing before we move on. There is a sternocleidomastoid muscles that goes from
behind the ear, comes down to the pit of the neck, really over here, and it sits like this
on the neck basically. That gives us a nice triangulation to find where the neck ends
and the torso begins. Looking past that then there is the tube of the neck. So this creates
a triangle coordinated attack to find that point more accurately. But the whole shape
goes off this way.
Alright, now we have a down shot. Each time I’ve drawn the structure and then put the
gesture on it. Let’s start, for the heck of it, it doesn’t matter what you do, as
long as you get both before you move on. Let’s do the gesture line this time. Gesture comes
down and maybe even will do the T for the head. The center line of the features, and
I don’t know where those features end yet, so I can make them too long if I want. Then
the eyebrow line. When I lay these lines in I want to compare them to a horizontal and
a vertical so that I can see if they are vertical and if they aren’t horizontal like so. Then
we’ll play this down, and you can really kind of just bring this down this way. Eyebrow,
or I mean hairline here. Let’s say we want to just keep it simple because we’re not
sure that’s where it goes. You can just do this, absolutely. And you can do that,
absolutely. Then come back and make sure these track together. That’s going to allow, that’s
the sideburn area here that I’m drawing. It’s the construction here. Most heads are
going to get a little bit flat here, and so this line will coordinate.
Even it does I can kind of feel that.
So what I’m doing is thinking of a capsule idea because then I can make sure they track
together as the head gives them more dynamic positions. Here would be the eye line here.
Here is the little wedge shape. Notice I’m doing this before I’ve committed to the
chin. I haven’t finished the shape because I’m not sure how to finish the shape because
it’s in a perspective, dynamic perspective. That can get tricky. So you don’t start
rendering eyeballs and such, but you can spend a little bit more time with smaller structures
and landmarks to be more confident of the bigger structures. Now, remember, when we’re
on top of the head we’re seeing a longer nose. Then it’s going to be a foreshortened
mouth, and it’s going to all go on this same direction. Front of the mouth, front
of the nose, front of the lips, all that stuff. Then they can do what they’re going to do.
We won’t muck with that too much because we need to think about it a little bit. Then
the chin. Now I feel better about where that head goes. Now I’ll complete the mask of
the face and come back and get the arch of the eyebrow.
And figure out where, where… I’ll use whatever I need to, two or three things to
figure out where that goes. Now, I’m going to do that, and then that will, when I have
that chin, that cheekbone, that’s going to be the widest part of the front of the
face. The widest part of the front of the face. Then that we’ll tell me more accurately
where my ear is. I can even come back at that point and sketch this stuff in a little more correctly.
I can do things like where does this point line up here? Is it to the outside
of the eye or close to it? That allows me to not to do this or this with that. We get
it pretty accurate. Is that where that goes? It’s pretty close. Out here. Here. You might
spend five minutes just right here and never get to the whole head. That’s okay. Don’t
speed up just to try and finish. There is no race here. We’re trying to observe clearly,
accurately through the lens of our two ideas, gesture and structure, what is going on in
this particular instance with this particular character.
Now, we want to make sure that that head goes back far enough. I’d rather have a little
too much skull so I get that L-shape going and not cut it off. Since she’s got full
done-up hair there we’ve go room for error.
You come back and adjust and correct and track.
If I draw this side, I come over this side to feel how they relate. There we go.

Alright, on this one I’m going to draw a little smaller. We’re looking on top again,
but now we’re from behind so actually the skull and actually the hairstyle dominates.
I can see the hairstyle pretty clearly, and I feels somewhat confident in drawing that
hairstyle. I’m going to just draw the costuming that I see. The hair. Not the skull, not the
anatomy underneath. Just the accent of the hairstyle. Then that is going to suggest the
going back in some way of the skull, this idea. Then I’m going to come down here.
You don’t have to be a purist in this stuff. You can mix and match the order of things
to make it more fun, to challenge yourself, or to make it easier to get something. Start
with the thing you understand best and then get into the stuff that’s a little more
mysterious as you have context and kind of build your courage and warm up your drawing
abilities and all that kind of stuff.
Now I’m going to go to the eye socket. Remember that eye socket idea. We’re just going to
take out a whistle notch. Since we’re on top of this, that whistle notch is going to
curve. Let me draw that a little bit bigger. It’s going to curve a little bit differently.
And so we’re going to come in here...
and take out that notch right like that...
like so. And then from where the hair of the eyebrow
is, top of the notch basically. If you can’t see it in here—we can barely see it. Then
you go over to the ear. In this case you have to go down. You can actually close one eye
and sight your pencil and let your pencil come down on the eyebrow and touch the top
of the ear and see the angle that it’s at. Figure out that angle. It’s going to be
lower. I’ll show you why it’s going to be lower in a second so we can see it clearly as lower.
If you want to put a thickness on top and behind so we can feel that perspective.
We’re behind it so we can see the outer rim or top of it, see that outer rim.
Pick that up.
Okay, now why is it lower? Because we are looking down on it like this basically. And so the eyebrow to
ear is going to do this more or less. That means we’re on top of that skull. Let’s
find that skull now. Now I’m going to do my best guess at the skull and I’m probably
going to be off a little bit, or even off quite a bit but it’s better than nothing.
It’s good practice. If I’m off a bunch the hair will hide it. If I’m off too much
I’ll stick my neck on the wrong spot. So we want to get it fairly close. We can not
see it very well, but that same sternocleidomastoid is right there. We can feel that. The digastric
plane, you can barely feel that. So it sits there. Then what I want to do is let the skull,
I’m sorry, let the hairstyle in some way or another give us a sense of that boxy idea.
So maybe I’ll square out the hairline at the nape of the neck there. Maybe I’ll square
off the front a little bit. Box off the top a little bit by chiseling it out. That will
give me a sense of, if not on the skull underneath, we don’t necessarily need that, but on the
hair shape itself, picking up the position of things.
And then the nose way up here. That’s sits there. When I get on top of the shoulders
that are laying down I put a little two by four in there that is as wide as the arm.
That gives me kind of a top to build out for the wider, like I did for the roof line. Build
out for the wider torso from the skinny neck and go from the top of the torso to the side
of the arm there. Notice I drew with a couple different sizes here. Really, three different sizes.
These two were smaller, bigger, way small. And it’s good to mix up the sizes
because if you always draw one size you’ll be stuck. If you try and draw it bigger your
proportions would get way out of whack. So mix it up a little bit. The bigger you go,
obviously the more it slows you down. You have more real estate to deal with.
The smaller you got the less detail you get.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. This one we’re underneath in a profile.
There is that sailboat shape again. Here is the mask of the face. Let’s use a real simplified
hairline. Somewhere in there is the ear. It might be up here. It might be down there.
I’m going to guess here, and then I’ll draw it light and I’ll change it and refine
that choice when I figure it out. Now, if I come down the forehead here is the eyebrow
line. You can see on the reference the forehead bumps back, and then the nose is there.
Then you’ve got an arching eyebrow here. So that bump right there, and you can actually see
it if you look carefully, but oftentimes you can’t. That’s the beginning of the far
eyebrow over here on this side. So there is my construction line. It’s here. So I’m
using the—instead of going from arching eyebrow to arching eyebrow, I’m going from
beginning eyebrow on the anterior to beginning eyebrow and using that to tilt. So that gives
me the tilt. When you do that you find that the arching eyebrow line is right up with
it oftentimes. So this is going to be here. Then coming over here, and it will be a little
bit lower and a little bit maybe smaller than I have, like so.
That gives me the corner of the box.
So this steps back. The nose comes out and down here. Now we want to do that whistle
notch like we did here, but now we’re underneath that whistle, and so we’ll be underneath
the notch. We’ll follow the arching eyebrow and then the cheekbone wherever we want.
Where the lower lid or the eyeball and the lower lid, I guess, meets the cheek. Where the highlight is.
Where the shadow shape is. Anywhere in there is fine. So we’ll just take this down
and swing it over. And this becomes the corner for the face. We go up. There is the side
plane again. This is all side plane. Ear is on the side plane. The eyebrow starts here.
Notice how we go way back in before we see the eye in here. I’ll just draw that in
so you can see it, but that would be the eyeball set way inside the eye socket in here. This
is in here someplace like this. We come down for the lips. Notice that the tip of the nose—you
can see the other eyelid or eyelashes. They line up. Tip of the nose, where the nose meets
the mouth. The lips coming down here. All the line of the lips are going to go on that
same angle. We don’t have to worry about converging lines. We can make them go parallel.
It’s absolutely fine even if you’re drawing a big drawing. You can converge them if you
want, but it’s just more to worry about. Here is the chin.
Since we’re underneath we’re going to see a lot of that digastric plane. Here we
can see a little of it. Here we can see a ton of it. And so the chin also would go this
way. Now, that mouth area. The mouth has a set if teeth, and if the teeth take a bite
out of a sandwich you’ll see the bite like that. They’re really round. Then the lips
stretch over that barrel of teeth or half sphere of teeth. And so you’ll see. You’ll
see it in the lips here. They turn this way to go back to the mouth, to go back to the
cheek. But you can also see it here bulging out. So if I were to simplify this mouth without
the stairsteps of the lips I’m going to bulge back that way. Bulge back that way.
You can see the bulge here on this one.
So make sure you feel that barrel and then the chin comes out of it, and that digastric
plane, the bottom of the mask of the face, and that neck goes back. The sternocleidomastoid
comes down, and then this is shadowed by the tubular finish line of that constructed shape.
The hair can get really full and go back. And we stop. You can always cheat. If I five
minutes are up, darn, I can’t do another mark. Well, yeah you can. Go ahead and play
with it. Or, my five minutes is up and I spent all five minutes just on that stinking, dirty,
rotten whistle notch. That’s absolutely great time spent. Don’t worry about finish
lines. Just get the stuff down that needs to get down and try and make it ring true
and try and analyze it. Try and come up with a convention that gives you a sense or having
an analogy that gives you an understanding of what you’re seeing and why. So don’t
worry about clocks. The five minutes or the one minute or the two minutes is there so
that you don’t spend 50 minutes on one drawing just trying to render your way into a solution.
We want to analyze it and stylize it and design it into our conception. We want to have an
idea and we want to practice developing more clarity in that idea and not using the crutch
of great technique to hide those problems.
Alright, that was our intermediate head drawing lesson. I hope you got something out of that
and were able to apply some of that practical information to your own drawing, see how it
worked with the old masters, and got ready for the next session. So our next lesson will
be eyes. We’re going to look at all things eyes and give you as much information as I
can in the time we have. And we’re going to then see how that fits back into that structure
that we’ve just worked so hard to get control of. So, I will see you then.