As a beginner, I have been looking at this for days now, trying to make sense of these sketches. But none seems to work. Every once a while either it'd be>incorrected head shapes, too big, too long, too wide>wrong proportions of the facial features> eyes too small, too big, doesn't follow the form of the headMaybe this is too advanced for me? Can i anyone help me where to start to understand this better?
>>7970238Ah more bullshit guidelines, my favorite.I remember explaining this in another thread but you really gotta ignore these weird abstract guideline placements. By god especially the ones where you do your head drawings inside of the circle, it was a trap that I fell into as well until my art instructor told me how weird that was and showed me the more simple way.So for head construction you gotta realize the two main components of the skull. The cranium and the jaw. You focus on those two things first before you add any other bullshit cause where you place the eyes/ears/nose/etc is entirely based on the relationship between the cranium and the skull. The cranium is the easy thing to get down cause you start with a circle(it becomes more of a wider oblong as you get into the 3/4 and profile view). From there you draw the jaw and thats gonna be the key to how you want your character to look. If its a younger/baby character you draw it small and for an adult you may make it larger. You can draw it to make the head like an almond or give your character a chiseled jaw. After you draw that you establish guidelines for where to place shit like the eyeline then the base of the nose and where the lips lay. For a generic adult head the eyeline is generally halfway and then base of the nose is halfway from the eyeline to the chin and for the middle of your lips/mouth its like 1/3 from the base of your nose to the chin. But these are generic measurements, you can shift them as to your liking but you NEED to understand the relationship between cranium and jaw
>>7970238yeah it's above your skill level for now. you lack the observational skills to see the proportions and copy accurately. copy easier subject matters first, basic forms like cubes or spheres first. then more complex forms like a loomis head. redraw it from imagination to test what you remember. what you forgot is what you need to focus on. then you need emulate the method/workflow of artists you like to see which parts work for you. copying isn't the goal, understanding what we draw is the goal. repeat until it becomes intuitive.simon has been posting lately, maybe he'll pop up here.
Heres a more generic drawing to showcase that.Start with craniumPlace a guideline that marks where the head is facing(determines whether its front or 3/4 or profileDraw a representation of the jawThen place the guidelines for your specific character. Thats about it, the rest of the problems you face is dependent on your subject/character. Like here in my generic example its a kind of moe blob but you can see how in the far right example I shrunk that jaw and look what difference that makes for the design.
watch the first 10 seconds and then stop:https://i.warosu.org/data/ic/img/0079/52/1780069948729806.mp4focus on getting this first stage right, don't bother with the details that come after, instead do a lot of repetition and check that your proportions and placements are consistently correct
>>7970247>>7970249>>7970251>>7970266So I have read and screenshot these a lot via warosu. I understood the advice but every time I tried doing that it's always not right. Everything fall flat. I actually don't know where to go to understand about the cranium and the jaw. Maybe it's because I didn't draw enough myself?>>7970252I'll try this when I get home tonight.So this is a copy picture of the head I tried. I'm reading Preston Blair book right now. As you can see everything fall flat. I got into the habit of EYEBALLING construction and proportions, that's cheating and I don't know what to do about it.
>>7970270And here's a front facing of a character I drew myself. Everything gone off the rail when I tried drawing her head in other angles instead of just front facing. I currently don't have other drawings now so I'll upload more tonight. I really need help because it's been a whole month and I couldn't get over a simple ball head.
eye line doesn't curve, retards, the brow line curvesvilppu literally rants about this
>>7970275I don't understand. Can you make an example and explain more in detail?
to understand this you must first not be aphantasic(not) sorry but you've hit your literal genetic / biological limits
>>7970277>can you waste your time regurgitating vilppu instead of me watching vilppu's head drawing lessonshang on, let me think about this
>>7970279Understood. I'll go watch that lesson. Thanks for your advice.
>>7970280it's the nma course, he also laughs at the idea of starting with a ball and says it's dumb basically
>>7970270You cant just bullshit your fucking studies. If you fucking have to just draw over the thing you are trying study from and see where the guidelines lay. Try drawing an actual human skull. And dont just fucking "eyeball" it do serious drawings
>>7970275Glen Keane fucking does it so Vilppu can eat my fucking ass
>>7970284that "eye line" is not structurally the same thing as OP eye line, I'll let you figure it out
>>7970277rotate your head in front of a mirror?
>>7970296I just touched my brows and I think I understood a little. It's because the eyes are inside eye sockets?
>>7970297Eyes are not inside eye sockets, eyeballs are.
>>79702381/2I hesitate to do this, because to explain the thinking behind the method is far more complicated than just accepting it as a procedure. But I will try. This does require a solid understanding of primitives beforehand.This method is actually a variant of the box. Essentially I am using the circle, the ellipse, and the cylinder to define a box that I don't fully draw. This may seem counterintuitive and needlessly complex, but it is designed to overcome a problem - most people are bad at drawing boxes. They lose sight of how the sides of the box should relate to one another and the 3 axes. The circle and ellipse fix that by containing the box.It starts with a circle because a circle has equal height and width. That gives you a reference point of both the center of the head mass, and makes it easier to define whatever height and width you want for the head. Usually, a head is taller than it is wide.After drawing the first two parallel lines that sets a rough boundary for the head, an ellipse is drawn. It is aligned with the eye line, but it is not the eye line itself. In fact it may be better not to call it the eye line, but the equator of the face.Essentially, what we have is a cylinder within a sphere. You could just draw a box, but that takes more lines. With practice, it becomes easier and faster to describe the orientation of the head with a cylinder.The "eye edge" is not the eye edge. It is the face edge, where the front and the side planes of the face meet. That point and the equator determines the placement of the eye line and the ear line, thus forming the corner of our partial conceptual box.We divide the eye line and the ear line to find where the eyes and the ears should actually be placed. These points fit most faces. The difference comes mainly from the size and shape of the features themselves.
>>79703302/2So that's the explanation. Very wordy. But look at the lean implementation in the first image. It has fewer steps than something like Loomis. Fewer steps means fewer things that might go wrong. But it is still complete enough that it can be applied with consistency to various angles, various designs. It does still involve practice and developing some personal judgement.Let us apply all of this to your drawing of Laharl. Your construction was primarily just a loosely drawn sphere, and because of that, its orientation is completely ambiguous. You also didn't measure the placement of the features cleanly. There's almost no point to this construction.My construction for Laharl seems like overkill. It probably is. But as you can see in the earliest step, almost all of the most important problems have been solved. There is a clear orientation. That is important even if it becomes less clear later in the drawing. There is proper placement. That means that even if the drawing is not an exact copy of the original, there is an internal logical consistency to it. It is imperfect, but convincing.Now here's the best thing. Once you learn this, instead of working backwards from an existing design, you can move forward and design from the ground up. You can tinker the proportions or the details, but things like orientation and alignment will not hold you back.
>>7970330>>7970332So, is keep practicing your method until it clicks for me the good way to do it? I was afraid because some anons and friends of mine said this method was advanced and I should learn something like the loomis head first. I also just downloaded this book maybe this might help. Also thank you for taking your time to explain the method clearly! I'll practife more tonight. Any suggestion is appreciated!
>>7970335You don't have to practice my method. Learn whatever you like. I think my method is simple, only the explanation is long.What I will say though, is that you actually need to work on your primitives first. And your patience, and the amount of care you put into the drawing. And stuff like pure gesture drawings. While I think there is a lot of value in drawing these characters, maybe just stick to mannequins for now. Don't worry about hair, don't worry about eyelashes, just a basic head with dots for eyes. Details take time away from the fundamentals you should be training.Go to X and find the accounts of Asian animators in their first year, or students. They post pages upon pages of mannequin drawings, gestures, and life drawings. They lock in their base. If you want to draw like them, maybe you should train like them.
simon threads are always a treat
>>7970247This is similar to How to Draw Manga Sketching Manga-Style Vol 1 explains drawing heads. Maybe it was because I was leaning towards drawing "anime heads" but I found this circle and x method to be easier to understand.
>>7970238Can you link to the original thread? Or at least the original image?
The thing is, guys like him have a lot of experience with drawing heads so they can skip some construction steps.You should grind a lot of real heads first, preferably with Asaro head, then study a shitton of anime heads.
How to measure the proportion of the facial features??? The heck it becomes a mess.
I'm of the belief that not every method for drawing is suitable for every artist. Continue giving this method a go if you're really gun-ho on it, but if you're not making any progress, it may be better to cut your loses and try a different head construction method. Sometimes a method won't really click, until you try other methods that do and you realise what it was you weren't understanding before.>>7970335What's this book called? Looks kinda interesting.>>7970386>The heck it becomes a mess.You're working digitally, just create another layer, lower the opacity of the messy layer below, and continue drawing. This isn't traditional, you can delete and erase things as much as you want, with no concern for the paper beneath.
>>7970400It's weichun anatomy.
>>7970408>It's weichun anatomy.Ah, I did know of that book, I hadn't read it yet, so I couldn't recognise the chapter introduction illustration.Thanks.
>>7970340>Go to X and find the accounts of Asian animators in their first year, or students.what to search to easily find them?
>>7970386>draw parallel lines willy nilly angled randomly>wtf how am i measuring wrong???
>cylindersi always knew my goat simon was also a disciple of steve huston
>>7970284I wish I could draw like Glen. How is he able to communicate so well through stylized faces
>>79702380/10 no muzzie. all cartoon girls need a muzzie and little button nose
>>7970359The only problem with the method in that pic is that due to treating the Cranium/Jaw as the same object when you are laying out the head is that it kind of makes you lock into a specific shape of the head early on when your drafting. When I did heads like in this pic >>7970266I was making slight adjustments to the jaw and cranium before I added shit like eye placement, I didnt lock myself in. Like it could work if you know what your doing/have a character ref sheet on standby but it might confuse newbies.Whats weird though is that in your pic it shows my preferred method on the far bottom right there when it comes to adding the chin. It even describes the benefit on how you can adjust the layout.Granted I would still use the first method if I was figure drawing where the head isnt the biggest priority and you have to consider the full figure so youd just lay down a generic circle and cross as you work on the rest of the figure and come back to the head later
>>7970238You guys have to understand that Tealfag is exceptionally talented and all the bullshit construction he does didnt get him there but that he made it up in a incomprehensible way to try to explain a non-existent process for begtards with no talent at all.Its like a bird trying to explain a pig how he flies. Its his birthright and he just fucking does.
>>7970841>trying to help permabegs using his constructionHe took the effort to make it, to help permabrgs like us. So I'm going to learn his construction and I'm going to apply it! I'm going to escape the permabeg hell and I'm not looking back once I got out. I'm tired of being a crab and you're not going to stop me from trying to learn his head construction! It's wonky but I feel like I'm getting there.
>>7970850His "head construction" doesnt have any solid basis on anatomy or perspective or literally fucking anything but his own feels.He is just making shit up with every drawing. Unless you are as talented as him to go pro within a year of drawing and make your own rules you arent going to learn shit from it because it isnt based on anything!
>>7970852Pyw or else it's just air talking. If what you said was true then your art must be good, yes?
just ignore the talentschizo, it's a dead end discussion.
>>7970850Hey, do you have the original image from OP?
It had been a while since I last drew anything, but I did so today.At first I couldn't do it. I made a sketch, it looked like ass, but I kept going. At a point when I moved from drawing one shape to the next, enlightenment came upon me and I remembered what drawing was all about. Then it was easy again.I could perceive the thing directly. One moment it wasn't with me, and then it was. I know exactly what it is. But I still can't put it into words. It's a mental process that you have to engage consciously. And it's not a spectrum, it's binary. It's not imagination or mind's eye. It's not a construction method. Even "feeling the form" captures only a fraction of what the thing is. It isn't like riding a bicycle, because you can actually forget it. It is definitely only one thing, though.At one point there was a canvas with some lines on it, and in the next moment there was a tiny world. The experience of it coming back to me was visceral.
>>7970332>>7970330>teal posts in the big 2026holy moly
