Drawing tips? I need to be able to do a proper side view. I keep having trouble with head shape.
Side profiles can be difficult for a lot of people because of the proportional aspect of it. For many years I just drew fishface because I couldn’t understand where anything lined up on the face, so the first thing I would suggest doing that might help is learning the planes of the face. If you can find some landmarks that every person has it can be easier later to differentiate each part of the face for different people. Also, get reference from real faces. It can sometimes be easier to understand from a drawn face because they’re simplified most times, but nothing beats the real thing and when I’m in a rut i usually practice anatomy from references. Once you get the hang of where your landmarks are, it can become much easier to freehand a face.
So for reference, I’ve stolen some pics from getty images and drawn over them:
these are the planes that I’m usually thinking about when I’m drawing a face. Try blocking them out from multiple angles but you don’t have to get too fancy with it like I did with the colors.
Moving on to how I actually draw them out freehand, I drew out some steps that will hopefully make sense:
As far as head shape goes, there are a lot of small proportional rules I usually follow. The head usually fall behind and largely in front of the neck, but the chin doesn’t normally start until closer to the front of the neck, but it’s very dependant on how large the jaw is. The ears and eyes line up normally, but that’s also dependant on the angle, that’s where guidelines come in handy. The eyebrows and the nose can normally follow the same line for the bridge of the nose, which is why I start the bridge above the eye placement. And as far as eye placement goes, it should be halfway up the face once you get the chin down, just make sure it doesn’t end up in the cheek. The mouth is halfway from the nose to chin and I normally focus on the upper lip to give it more dimension and separation from the bottom lip.
Hope that isn’t too bad of a word block, there’s just a lot that goes into it for me. Everyone finds their own method for remembering it but generally focus on reference and landmarks. Practice will usually involve finding little things that stand out to you within all the repetition. REALLY hope this helps at all, good luck!!!
