TW for gore, maybe: This might be a question that I should just submit a redline for, but I wasn't sure if it would count as gore. I'm trying to draw a picture of an android with part of her head missing and I can't figure out the perspective for the hole. Any advice? Thank you :)
Hey, this is kinda fun! I think that’s a very interesting little project so I want to help you out. Keep in mind, of course, that there are several ways of doing it, and you don’t necessarily have to follow mine - it’s just one suggestion.
Let’s start by planning the head in its ‘ideal’ state, before it’s broken.
You don’t have to add detail of the face in this part, but you can.
Just as the drawing suggests, you’re going to start VERY simple and just… remove… a chunk. For this, I chose a very basic shape - a square. Literally as if we selected a cube of her head and clicked ‘delete’. Now, this doesn’t look very ‘real’, but it helps us more easily plan the rest of the process.
Specifically, it gives us a simple plane upon which we can expand what the heck happened to her head.
Here, I’m still keeping it simple, but I’m beginning to add detail. It’s a robot, so I’m still working in squares, thinking about how things are built. The reason that I’m still working with very ‘simple’ shapes like cubes here is because we need to keep the perspective in mind, and this is the easier way to see the planes of things before we add heavy detail.
I put one cube of her face back IN, and took another one out of the back. This creates more depth, and it also gives us a sort of… untold story. Her face isn’t just missing - it’s unevenly ripped, possibly from the back.
You can add further lines to indicate what happened based on things like
Was it a direct hit with a blunt object or a weapon like a laser? (a laser would be cleaner, and we wouldn’t have to deviate much from the cleaner ‘square’)
What kind of parts the robot is made of, and how soft/hard are they? (if the robot is softer, almost organic, or has a hydraulic system under their skin, you’ll be using a lot softer lines as opposed to clean-cut ones)
Since we started from square parts and kept it simple, I also kept the insides fairly low-tech. They’re rectangles and cards, with a few wires popping out here and there to spice up the atmosphere. The fact that the wires are hanging gives us hints that this was a ripping motion that pulled them out, not just a clean cut that would sever them.
You might notice here that the edges of this damage are STILL really straight, and that might feel strange to you. There’s some relevance in keep it this way - for one thing, technology breaks easiest along faults and lines that are already there. If something is meant to be unattached (for maintenance) then it’s likely that it will break most easily in that spot.
In this photo, the phone is undeniably broken, but it’s also not just randomly shattered. It’s breaking apart in specific ways - the back and front are coming apart, because that’s where they are MEANT to be separated anyway, in case it needs fixing.
HOWEVER, if the damage is from a more crude weapon, or if it’s something heavy that would more likely crush the metal/wiring then you have to adjust for that and indicate a more ‘organic’ leve of bending.
This is just a small example - the skin around the injury is more haphazardly ripped, but the inside kind of remains relatively clean.
You can definitely go further and deepen it by going further inside her head, but since you said you’re having trouble with perspective, I’m wanted to keep it simple for now.
- Mod Seraph and Mod Chekhov
