Hello! You have been inspiring me for years with your artwork; you are so talented! I've been meaning to ask you, how do you create such different but realistic faces and bodies for your characters? They are all so unique and believable. It astounds me! Thank you for sharing your work for us to see.
Hello there, thank you so much for your kind words <3
I need to admit one of the thing I am always worried about is that each and every of my drawings will end up looking as if they always featured the same person. I am currently convinced most faces I draw are too similar between them, despite doing my best(?) to avoid it, so your words catch me a bit off guard...
The base of creating different features is mostly -observing- our surroundings. I think the reason one ends up drawing the same features over and over is because we unconsciously are drawn(ahah) toward what we know better... Our own faces, for example, most of my drawing are always influenced by some of my features -coughnosecoughcough- no matter how hard I try... point is,after learning the base anatomy of the face the next step is getting accustomed to as many different features as possible and try to make them “yours”. Be it by staring intently at people on the street (but.. uh, that’s a bit awkward, I can testify, maybe it’s better to avoid it xD) or looking at pictures of people (I recommend real life people, as in photos). Play finding differences, even the ones that are obvious, but make sure you *do* notice them. You don’t even need to draw them if you don’t want to (I hardly do that myself, but I need to admit it might be useful to put it on paper at some point, and practice is always good anyway).
Then, next time you are drawing you might end up thinking “that man I saw there had a chin I really liked, I might try to use that”. Of course you will not remember it perfectly, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s your drawing, not “that man’s portrait”, and you will still make a conscious effort to change features while keeping your “style”.
Now I wonder if anything of what I wrote made sense, but I’m not going to read it again, otherwise I’m sure I will delete everything >_>