How do you draw a profile to match the front face? They end up becoming two different people...
I used to have a lot of trouble with this myself until I figured out one simple trick. All you gotta do is know how to work with layers in a program like Photoshop, SAI, Manga Studio, etc, or have a ruler if you’re a traditional artist.
1. Let’s take a look at this dude. I drew the front of the face first and then tried to match the profile the best I could. Looking at it quickly it seems fine, doesn’t it? (well, other than the eyebrows; I forgot he was frowning.) But when you focus you can tell it looks.. well, off, compared to the one to the left.
2. This part can be a bit tricky. Take each layer and change the lines to a different, contrasting color or make it a different opacity (or both) and then overlap them. To make it less confusing, put the layers as “multiply”. This way you can see the lines without confusing them too much. Try adjusting it to match as good as you can. Now when we have all the parts next to each-other, we can tell what’s wrong. The mouth is too high up, the nose is way too short, the eyes are also too high up, the forehead is too big, and the skull is too small. Thank goodness I at least got the neck and chin right! Let’s adjust these things so that they are at least the right height. (For you traditional artist, just use the ruler to measure the parts!)
3. Now the most obvious things are fixed, and we can see a big improvement. Everything matches height-wise. Nothing is glaringly wrong, but there’s still some details that are off. if you look closely, you can see that the cheek doesn’t quite match up, as well as the eye-shape and the nose shape. Also the expression. (On another note, I made the skull on the blue one a bit smaller, just so you don’t get confused. I noticed it was an anatomy error)
4. Fixed the minor details, and as you can see, there was a major difference. I’m going to make different tutorial on noses later on, but how do you know if a nose is down-turned or up-turned by looking at it from the front? Well, a down-turned nose is usually V-shaped, like the guy in my picture. An up-turned nose usually have more visible nostrils. Anyway. I’m happy with the results, let’s put the finished products next to each other.
Yep! We can tell it’s the same guy now. Small things make a huge difference, and this trick is really easy once you get used to it. It might feel a bit trippy at first with all the lines clashing, but as I said, you get used to it. Let’s see the before-and-after.
Not quite the same dude.
But yeah, there you go! If you’re interested to see more of my tutorials, just click [here]. Also, send me an ask if you have any tutorial request, I’d love to help!
