Need some Advise....

thouse are my first more or less good ones, (there are still a lot of crapy heads among thouse though´:o)
I need Advise on two things,
first, drawing hair. And second eyes and noses on the sideview.
C&C´s from someone with more sketching experience are wellcome aswell.

till then,
BackBONE

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Actually, a number of them are quite good. I’m bad at drawing people myself. Practice & critques help though :slight_smile:

The eyes look VERY large & round, although that is a common style, so you may want that comic/anime look. From the side though, you don’t have use much “triangle” shaping - it looks too round. Should be more of a ( > shape.
The nose though… looks like a pig’s nose with the round circle at the end :slight_smile: If you still want a simplified nose without nostrils, fine, just don’t bother doing the circle, I think. The second paper with the girl (especially the one in the top-right cornder, as she is looking over her shoulder) the < nose looks fine but the face on below doesn’t. Try doing the small shadow underneath instead, and/or small nostrils, either shaded or for a lighter effect, a partial circle. Probably only the top arc & one side and not necessary both sides either.
Best thing to do is:

  1. look up some books or tutorials on drawing them. there’s a ton of sites. cgsociety has several sketching/painting threads with reviews even.
  2. look at pictures (or people)
  3. keep up the practice.

I bet you like Masamune Shirow :smiley:

I’ll do one for the side views later, but right now this is something i just whipped up:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v611/Squiggly_P/doodles/Drawing_Diagram_001.jpg

  1. Most people start with these egg-shaped heads, and it’s good for practice, but it’s just guidelines. You don’t have to stick everything exactly on a line or be precise in the linework at all. I tend to draw really really rough, but then clean it up later. Don’t be afraid to get really rough, so long as it’s light (so light that it’s hardly noticeable in fact… you’re the only one who has to know it’s there at all)

  2. I didn’t really see the bit about side views till i was about to post this, so i thought i was doing good with the eyes, but you wanted side view stuff :frowning: in any case, there’s a billion ways to do eyes and eyebrows. It’s all based on the circle, but again, nothing has to be precise. it’s this lack of precision i think that causes a lot of confusion early on. The circles and lines drawn in the early stages of a drawing are just there so people can get a general position and check to make sure the perspective and facial positions are correct, not so much for really nailing the exact shape or size of the eyes and nose, etc.

  3. Rough and loose. The hair here is just loosely indicated with a few straight-ish lines. Later in the drawing I can go in and make that more precise, or leave it rather loose like this. If it’s going to be colored you can get away with very little actual indication of hair. In animation you have to define the shapes in a solid way, but as just a single drawing you can get away with a lot.

  4. I noticed that a lot of your heads are pretty much the same head. Most places on the net that ‘teach’ how to draw heads use something like this. They line the eyes, nose, mouth and ears up with each other like this. It’s great for learning basic proportions, but it can lead to frustration later once you realize that you’re basically drawing the same heads over and over, or you’ll get frustrated trying to draw a character who has non-standard proportions because it won’t feel right to draw things like that. #5 basically breaks all of these rules, tho it’s a pretty odd head shape, I’ll admit. forcing all your heads to line up to these proportions is a hard habit to break, because the first thing you’ll want to do in a drawing is get that head shape and all teh measurements in. Forcing yourself to not do that can be hard. It’s good for realistic characters, or for doing studies of real-life heads and people, but you’ll find plenty of examples in anime and any other form of cartooning of characters that break these rules.

Also notice the eyebrows form one smooth line through the head. This is good for flow, tho this exact eyebrow pose (One up and one down exactly like this) is used a lot… probably far too often. If you get a chance any time, check out any number of the modern US animation studios posters or marketing images used to market films like Shreck, Incredibles etc… this exact eyebrow pose will be seen in most of them. it’s supposed to be a pose that shows how much ‘attitude’ the character has, but it ends up looking to me more like the character is either really confused or has a bad case of gas. but the single-line-eyebrow-pose method is generally a good way to get a quick facial expression. Again, it’s just a guideline, not supposed to be a precise line.

  1. I’ll probably go into more detail on this, I’m not really the best at drawing hair. One common early problem people have is that they find their hair looks more like a helmet or a toupe or something… not like it’s actually growing out of a person’s head. The two most common reasons for that are:
    A) Using a solid line to outline the hair and
    B) not defining a point or points on the head from which the hair grows.
    Using overlapping lines, broken lines on the hair (where several lines that do not actually touch are used) and having many lines look like they are radiating from one point on the head are very useful ways of getting flow in the hair and making it look more natural. Also, even in anime where hair is very very spikey, you can usually notice that the hair spikes that start going up will curve slightly downward. This is meant to represent gravity, and even if you don’t notice it specifically, your brain tells you that it makes sense that gravity would pull down on the hair, and thus it feels more ‘real’ to you.

I can probably whip up some more tomorrow night… i work tomorrow, so i don’t normally do any working on my other crap on the days i work… gives me a few hours to just goof off and relax a wee bit. I’ll hit on noses and side-views and do some better hair. Mostly i just wanted to point out that you could probably stand to loosen up your linework a bit. If it’s sketching there’s no reason for it to be clean at all. Get messy. :smiley:

Ok, did another one more specific to what you requested, hair and eyes. Didn’t really do any nose stuff, I might hit that later on :stuck_out_tongue:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v611/Squiggly_P/doodles/Drawing_Diagram_002.jpg

The top three drawings indicate the hairline. The first thing you have to figure out about hair is to decide where exactly on the head it is. If you really lightly pencil in the hairline it helps to keep track of that. The left face is looking straight ahead, so the top of the hairline is towards the top of the head, and it’s fairly flat, maybe dipping down a teeny bit. The middle one is looking down, and as a result you can better see the real shape of the hairline on the head… It dips down and the whole hairline is lower on the head. The right-most image has the face looking up, and you can see that the hairline is all but gone. When a character is looking up like this you may see the hair, but probably wouldn’t see too much more than bangs. Depends on the hairstyle.

The next row down i tried to illustrate the idea of having a spot on the head where the hair flows from. These are really simple examples, tho… just a few variations of “Parted at the side”. There are as many hairstyles out there as people. One way to learn how to draw a lot of different hairstyles is to do image searches for studio photos and mugshots. You’ll find lots of examples of both really nice hairstyles and really grungy messed-up hair, and since people tend to look straight at the camera for those, it’s good practice for faces as well. One thing to keep in mind is that hair tends to clump together, so you can look for large shapes in the hair as well as paying attention to the direction it’s flowing. I’m not the greatest at hair, but I’m slowly learning :stuck_out_tongue:

The bottom stuff is an attempt to do some profile stuff. Honestly, straight-on profiles are not only difficult but also very very rare. for most illustration stuff, unless it’s vital to have a side-view of a face, it tends to look better to use a 3/4 angle. Doing image searches for mugshots can get you lots of profile images as well, which is good practice :smiley:

I tried to show basically how to make a side-view eye. One really really effective way to indicate the eye is being seen from the side is to put the pupil all the way to one side of the eye and to make it thinner - more like an elipse. This also works well for looking up and down: just put the pupil at the very top or bottom of the eye and flatten it out. I pretty much just do this for front views as well, it just makes it feel a lot more like the character is looking in that direction.

Hope this one is more helpful than the last one. Keep on drawing :smiley:

actually i don´t draw as clean as it looked. Did a lot of erasing on the first ones.
And i spend 2 month of daily training to maintain that the head look´s the same.
Thats what my goal was in the first place. So i´m rather glad that you mention it, it´s
proove that i´m not to far off this goal.

Still have a lot of trouble to get the hair right. Definetly need a lot of practice on that.
I think i know why my eyes suck in sideviews. I drew them like they are flat. Gona practice
this aswell.

thank´s for all the hint´s. Will post again when i manage to archive some nice hairdoo :eyebrowlift:.

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I don’t draw that good but here is someone that does and provides free drawing tutorials:

http://www.drawspace.com/