Drawing Faces
One thing I could never do was draw the human face. Due to the constant difficulty I have with getting everything in the right proportions, eyes would end up oddly spaced, the mouth would end up minuscule, the nose would be reshaped fifteen times and eventually I'd just give up and hide half the face with hair or something. Occasionally I wonder if this kind of problem is what drives many untalented people to manga-style art - it stays shit, but occasionally you assume they're just bad at drawing manga, as opposed to bad at drawing anything remotely human. In fact, I suspect that the terrible, over-the-top styles seen in such garbage as Dragonball Z originates from this kind of thing.
Nice shading on the clothes. Shame it still looks like delusional self-portraiture of Eric Cartman. If anyone ever mentions or makes me watch this garbage again I will personally wage war upon them and the TV stations which continue to spew this forth at a new generation of kids who could be watching something better. Raze the fuckers to the ground. Make them watch their own programmes on permanent loop. That sort of thing. Fucking hell, I despite this tosh.
Tosh is a good word.
I digress. The point of this post was to talk about how awful an artist I am, not to rant about how utterly, appallingly bad DBZ has always been. I've mentioned before how I basically only ever draw glorified stick-figures, and you will have noticed a distinct lack of facial features in this stuff too. Quite aside from the fact that this entire series of doodles originated from my idle scribblings in high school, the simple fact of the matter is that, through out my life, whenever I have attempted to improve my skills at drawing people, I have failed. Quick sketches to capture basic shapes - failed. Attempts to draw singular facial features, such as the nose, to improve on individual areas before putting things together - failed. Using grids to map out features and line them up correctly - failed. I just seemed to reach a point where I understood how to put shading on smooth simple objects and stopped there, unable to convincingly draw anything that wasn't a cube, cone or sphere.
Rather irritating, considering I rather wanted to be able to illustrate things and paint pretty pictures. I still get rather wistful whenever I look at one of Drew Struzan's posters. He's the guy who painted every single Star Wars poster, by the way. And all the Indiana Jones ones. EYE-KON-ICK. I want to go see the movies every time I see those posters, and when I've done that I curse that artist for making me waste more hours of my life again. His art is far superior to some of those films. That's the kind of thing I always really wanted to be able to do, but after years of 'no progress' you eventually start to give up.
I was recently told that I just suffer from a negative attitude. I probably do, but then I was pretty positive before I failed to get any better after years of trying. You try consistently failing for months on end and tell me how you feel after that. Still, I took that as a personalaffront challange to try again. Knowing that my style is currently quite 'blocky' and a bit exagerrated and it would probably be best to start with something that fits with that, I picked up an art deco book, flicked through to a picture of a woman and started sketching what I saw. Plenty of smooth lines and harsh shadows present in this style. No focus on realism yet, just getting things to 'go together'.
I stopped again pretty quickly. Looks off, to me.
I managed to identify all the shapes fairly well.
Again, however, they're all out of proportion. Huge eye, nose and mouth too small. The shading, though unfinished all over, is actually quite close to what I'm trying to achieve (though I'll go back to the iris later, too strong an outline) but, again, mouth is wrong. Got to work on that chin, too - probably needs to be a little larger. Or maybe I'm just confused by its comparison to the mouth, I think that's throwing me off. It all looks wrong and I can't go further until I pick out what's going wrong and fix it.
See what I have to work against? Me. There are some aspects of this I'm quite pleased with for a quick sketch but proportions are really important to me. They go wonky and the whole thing gets thrown off.
Nose or the mouth. Or both. The eye's too long. I didn't even notice all these things until I got to this point, and now I'm stuck.
Bugger. Try again.
I'll let you know how I get on.
Tosh is a good word.
I digress. The point of this post was to talk about how awful an artist I am, not to rant about how utterly, appallingly bad DBZ has always been. I've mentioned before how I basically only ever draw glorified stick-figures, and you will have noticed a distinct lack of facial features in this stuff too. Quite aside from the fact that this entire series of doodles originated from my idle scribblings in high school, the simple fact of the matter is that, through out my life, whenever I have attempted to improve my skills at drawing people, I have failed. Quick sketches to capture basic shapes - failed. Attempts to draw singular facial features, such as the nose, to improve on individual areas before putting things together - failed. Using grids to map out features and line them up correctly - failed. I just seemed to reach a point where I understood how to put shading on smooth simple objects and stopped there, unable to convincingly draw anything that wasn't a cube, cone or sphere.
Rather irritating, considering I rather wanted to be able to illustrate things and paint pretty pictures. I still get rather wistful whenever I look at one of Drew Struzan's posters. He's the guy who painted every single Star Wars poster, by the way. And all the Indiana Jones ones. EYE-KON-ICK. I want to go see the movies every time I see those posters, and when I've done that I curse that artist for making me waste more hours of my life again. His art is far superior to some of those films. That's the kind of thing I always really wanted to be able to do, but after years of 'no progress' you eventually start to give up.
I was recently told that I just suffer from a negative attitude. I probably do, but then I was pretty positive before I failed to get any better after years of trying. You try consistently failing for months on end and tell me how you feel after that. Still, I took that as a personal
I stopped again pretty quickly. Looks off, to me.
I managed to identify all the shapes fairly well.Again, however, they're all out of proportion. Huge eye, nose and mouth too small. The shading, though unfinished all over, is actually quite close to what I'm trying to achieve (though I'll go back to the iris later, too strong an outline) but, again, mouth is wrong. Got to work on that chin, too - probably needs to be a little larger. Or maybe I'm just confused by its comparison to the mouth, I think that's throwing me off. It all looks wrong and I can't go further until I pick out what's going wrong and fix it.
See what I have to work against? Me. There are some aspects of this I'm quite pleased with for a quick sketch but proportions are really important to me. They go wonky and the whole thing gets thrown off.
Nose or the mouth. Or both. The eye's too long. I didn't even notice all these things until I got to this point, and now I'm stuck.
Bugger. Try again.
I'll let you know how I get on.
posted at 2:26 am
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