More Graph Paper Skulls

Head Proportion

While working on these I have DaVinci, Loomis, Reilly, Goldfinger, and the Golden Ratio masks out, along with a collection of my old diagrams.

On this profile I started with bell jar  and worked on figuring out what moves forward and what moves back from the front facial plane.

Graph paper skulls

The top set were done using the bell jar heads from the last post as a template, keeping everything flat.  I used the photographs of a skull sculpture in Eliot Goldfinger's Human Anatomy for Artists (p 326-327) as reference for the lower set.   

Bell jar head experiment

No foreshortening/compression, just sliding the features along the curve of the ellipse, keeping the proportions consistent.  Not that they don't look weird, but I expected them to look weirder. 

Out sketching people

Coffee house and food court.  It's been a while.

Fall Heads

From Karl's and Nathan's classes

Expressions

There's a really big gap between the material in the last post and this one. The first three are from what-i-do-is-secret  the rest are the first half of the 25 essential expressions challenge 

Long pose diagramed heads

I'm a few weeks behind on my scanning.  These are from the second week of Nathan Fowkes' class at LAAFA.  45 and a 35 mins.

There are no lines -more head diagrams

I've been searching through books and the internet for the diagrams of other artists that have tried to break down the very complicated human head into simple ideas.  I thought these three lined up next to each other looked especially neat.

Here I applied the Reilly diagram to my general model's proportions and tried to shade it simply.  I could not get it to look right.

So I tried applying it to a specific head.  I went back to the first Bertillon card I traced back in  July.    I like the way it worked out.  Long lines.

and it finally sunk in that the side of the head is flat.  

Trial and error, variation and selection, and design - Tim Harford at TED

Nicole

Quick Figures

From Karl's class

Nathan Fowkes Head Drawing Class

The second of two one-hour long poses.

Earlier drawings of Mark - May 2010,  July 2011 and Nathan's drawings 

Figure Drawing 09/22/11

1's, 3's, 5's, a 10 and a 15.  Found it really difficult to keep focused on just the concepts.  Kept getting distraceted into copying the pretty contours. They're hard to resist =)

Figures

Back to figure drawing class with Karl Gnass.  In the spring figure drawing session I spent a lot of time studying anatomy.  This time around I'm not going to think about it at all.  I'm going to focus on describing what the model is doing in in terms of axis, balance and direction, cleanly and clearly with as few lines as possible.  I've been looking through and reading Donald Graham's Composing Pictures and Michael Mattesi's Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators. 

These are all my drawings from Thursday night pretty much as they were drawn on the page in class.  I'm posting them like this because I intend to use the simplified figures to work on my in-class page compositions and I'd like to record my progress.

Head Class Drawings

In Class Head Turn

Inspired by Lenn Redman's How to Draw Caricatures, instead of drawing the poses the model took on Monday, I tried to work out how her structure and features differ from my general model.  Her eyes, eyebrows, and bottom of her nose are higher. Her eyes are slightly larger on the outside, nose narrower, and chin lower. Luckily the poses she took weren't too extreme, but it was still really tough to extrapolate the straight on perspective from the different angled poses.

Head Diagram

I took Nathan Fowkes' portrait workshop earlier this month after seeing posts on his website of the neat diagram he uses.  It's a variation of Frank Reilly's diagram (Frank Reilly's teachings).  I had it in mind while working on earlier variations of my model but this time I was paying a lot more attention to it.  I found the workshop very helpful. 

The cheek area continues to be the area I find the most confusing.  In doing these I tried to keep in mind a comment from Nathan to keep the lines wrapping around the form and not going against it and a comment form Karl about paying attention to the way the forms are connected.  

Temple Grandin

From paused video reference.  Experiment with brush and ink.

Temple Grandin's TED Talk

VS Ramachandran

From paused video reference using my diagram underneath.  I took more time to think about what I was doing on this set. Karl reminded me to make sure the neck and back of the head are solid.  

 VS Ramachandran at TED

5 min expressions

John Maki in Karl's class.  5 mins.  freehanded the diagram on these.

Jill Bolte Taylor

More practice with the template.  Paused video reference.  About 20 mins each

at TED and on Radiolab

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Practicing using my template with paused video reference.  Tried to do them quickly as if I was in class but they still ended up being 10-20 mins each.

NOVA Science Now

Template Application

For class this week I printed out the five templates that I created in Illustrator with their mirror images on the backs, cut them out so each one was separate and maneuverable, and slid whichever seemed most appropriate under layout paper at the correct angle for each pose.  This way I had a solid structure to leap off of for each drawing.  My drawings of Mark from last spring here.

5 min poses

Class Drawing Correction

The one on the left I drew in class and the right is my attempt to fix the structural problems.

specific skull

It's not quite right yet but it's getting better.  

Doing lots of google image and youtube searches for skull and facial muscle references.  I like the accuracy goal of the facial reconstruction material.  Two places I thought were neat - Elizabeth Daynes, Z brush workshop

Face Photo Studies

Studying real faces in order to strengthen the design of my general model. I'm trying to figure out what I'm looking at and how to describe it through diagraming.

I got these photos here. The diagrams are traced directly over, not freehanded.

I started out really rigid, trying to keep the lines as straight as possible

then got more organic

got too complex around the mouth area.

Started looking up lighting to better understand what it's showing me.  Found the front view of  Lincoln's head with frontal lighting on James Gurney's blog he has a bunch of posts on portrait lighting.