What’s your method on drawing heads and coloring? Your artwork is beautiful and really inspiring!
I often have a reference! Sometimes I stick very closely to my reference, other times it’s a guide for basic facial structure or even just the lighting alone. I’m sticking close on this one because I did it mainly for an example.
Since in this case I’ve been asked what my process is I just drew as I tend to draw which means I’ve eschewed a lot of the detailed guidelines like what you’ll find in the Reilly Method because I’m relatively accustomed to facial proportions. If you’re a beginner I do recommend studying up on proportions and maybe trying the Reilly Method!
So for myself I’ve just started with a circle and the vertical centerline. You’ll notice I’ve drawn the circle and centerline over my reference first, as well as a kind of diamond shape. Having those lines on my ref image makes it easier for me to parse what I’m looking at and copy the same general spatial relationships between features in my drawing.
I’ve added a similar diamond shape on my drawing and marked out the bottom of the nose and seam of the mouth. This diamond shape is something I picked up from another artist on Tumblr, @vetyr (who is Art Goals) did a post about it a while back iirc
Since I skipped marking out guidelines in my own process just some basic notes of what I keep in mind: the bottom of the nose coincides with the bottom of the circle marking the cranium. The brow line is generally closer to the center of the circle than the eyeline.
Roughly marking out the locations/sizes of some features. I’m not very mechanically precise so my process is pretty messy and involves several layers of increasingly tight sketches. At this stage I’m scratching it out quick and just trying to get everything roughly in place
Added the outline of the head.
I lower the opacity and make a new layer for my second pass. Now that I’ve got the general idea of spatial relationships down I’m looking at getting more accurate shapes, but I’m still going rough at this stage because I’m zoomed out making sure not only is everything generally the right shape, but still proportionate and relatively symmetrical. It helps me to go kind of loose and zoomed out for a few passes not worrying about perfection, so that I’m still considering how the whole thing works together as a whole and not skewing parts of it out of proportion by honing in too close and focusing on pieces in isolation.
I flip it horizontally, lower opacity again, and make another pass on a new layer straightening out any bits that were skewed out of symmetry. As I go in making smaller, neater shapes. My former sketches have some rough guidelines marked in as I went to track details and facial plains; I’ll keep those sketches up on a low opacity to help guide my shading later.
I flip it back, lower opacity one more time and make a final “neat” line art focusing only on the smallest, most detailed areas. My priority here is mainly “if I decide not to fully render this and I need to leave my line art on in the final product, I only want as few lines as necessary to keep the face legible. Each of my previous sketches are on increasing opacity from 10-20% so that the neatest sketches are more apparent but not getting muddled in with my final lines.
I made sure I had a solid, unbroken silhouette outline, and then used the magic wand tool to select the area outside my character, then inverted my selection so the entire bust is selected neatly with minimal effort. Then I filled it using my base skin tone.
To the left you can see the palette I made for myself. Starting from the base tone, I create 4-5 gradually darkening swatches. The difference in shade from one to the next is VERY slight because there’s not a lot of heavy value difference in the overall planes of the face. From there, there’s a pretty hard jump to my darkest shades I’ll be using. These will be in very small (eye/nose/mouth details) or heavily shadowed (neck, areas where hair falls over skin) areas only! Same with my highlights.
My lightest shadow goes over a pretty broad space. I’m working on a masked later clipped to my base layer. I’ll be using a hard brush (actually plain old G Pen) to block in my shades, though in this case because this shade is the starting point of all my shadows I just paint bucket filled it in and then blocked the base tone back into the areas that will be better lit. Like chipping away at a block instead of adding onto it. It saves me time.
I hop on down the line to my next darkest shade and block it in areas like the cheekbones, temples, sides of the nose, eye sockets, etc – as I add each of these shades, I’ll be doing so in smaller and smaller areas, following my reference.
To be continued in a reblog! It’ll be a longpost orz
The next couple are sort of more of the same and I don’t have much to say about them. I just continue the process of blocking in increasingly darker shades from my palette into smaller and smaller areas!
Here I’ve jumped to one of my really dark shades and you can see it goes into veeery small areas. This is getting into the realm of a technique some artists use called occlusion, fitting very fine, dark shading precisely, into the areas where ambient light does not easily bounce – areas between skin and hair or into narrower folds of skin around the eyes and nose. Detail shadows.
I decided to go back and add one more jump from my midtones to my darkest shades to soften the edges.
Blocked in some highlights. I don’t think I ended up using the brighter highlight because there weren’t a lot of shiny spots..
Here I started blending with a painterly brush set to a medium-low color stretch and paint density. The particular tool I used was a painterly chalk tool from Frenden.
I added her eyebrows using a hard brush and softened the edges with a soft brush using the skin tones around it. Then took a small hard brush and sketched the skin tones into the eyebrows along the edges to chip away from the solid dark shape and give the illusion of individual hairs.
Went in for the smaller details like her irises, eye shine, teeth.
Yet more details! I added the freckles using a tone scraping brush that came with CSP (found under the airbrush tool) and played with varying hardness, particle size and particle density until I got the look I wanted. The freckles are on an additional multiply layer, and I toyed with the opacity to get it where I wanted.
I seldom work really hard on hair and usually just fill in a dark color, then block in big shapes of light and small cuts of darker shadow to create chunks of hair. I’ll go in and add some highlights but I don’t bother with carefully rendering individual hairs – the “suggestion of detail” is usually enough.
Aaaand color! I created another clipped layer set to the Color blending mode so that I can brush on some hues to give her more life without altering the shades and values I worked so hard on. A muddy desaturated red brushed around her nose, a brighter, more vivid red for her lips, some orange around her eyelids, etc.
And that’s about it! Other than that it’s just cleaning up the edges of the color layer and adding some effects!
Here’s the final product!
