I've Always Loved Drawing People And Especially Portraits. Your Art Is So Inspiring! Do You Have Any

I've always loved drawing people and especially portraits. Your art is so inspiring! Do you have any advice on drawing portraits with accurate proportion? What aspects are the most important in portraits, do you think? And what are good exercises? I'm sorry for bombarding you with so many questions! :3

Thank you! There’s one thing about drawing portraits that I don’t think I’ve ever touched on, and it’s the technique of constraining features. Basically, it becomes easier and more intuitive to rotate the face in 3D space once your mind grasps exactly where the features are located and, furthermore, where they can’t be located.

I use a weird double trapezoid shape that I’ve depicted below in red to keep track of facial feature placement every single time I draw a face. It follows the top of the eyebrows, touches the corner of the eye, traces down to the corner of the lips, and finally ends at the bottom of the lips.

The shape of the constraint will change depending on the person’s features, and it works for every angle of the head. For me it really internalized where each part of the face was, as well as where it started and ended. It kinda helps moderate your drawings; i.e., you’ll stop drawing features that are wildly misplaced or off-sized. I don’t literally draw this shape out every time I draw a face, but I see it in my mind’s eye 100% of the time.

If you’re still learning proportions, a good exercise is to grab pictures of people and trace this shape over them (either digitally or with a marker or something) to get an idea of what realistic constraints looks like. Then go back to studying faces, and constantly check your drawing by tracing along the eyebrows and down to the bottom of the lips to make sure that things aren’t off (e.g., the constraint isn’t terribly asymmetric). It takes a while to get used to, but it might help you get a good feel for portraiture.

There’s one other unrelated thing I like to do with faces, and if you’ve seen a lot of my pics you’ve already picked up on it. If you kinda add some shading to the area on the cheek just below the eye and down to the nose, I think it adds a decent amount of depth to a face. Don’t go overboard of course but there’s another little tip that could be of use.

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Some advice for if you’re having trouble drawing hands proportionally, for basic pictures–

Put your own hand on your face, with the heel of your palm on your chin. Pay attention to the overall width, and where your fingertips and knuckles are. Then draw a rough outline of the hand over the face you’re drawing, and match the proportions to yours. You can adjust up or down a bit from there if you feel the need, but that should be a good base visual.

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aether1984

6 years ago

Do any of the mods have tips for drawing a full body in side view? I always get it wrong

There’s a really good side view breakdown in Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy book, however I can’t find it! I did my best to emulate what I know.

If you already have the front view down, it’s a simple thing of translating the proportions over to the side view. One thing that helps me construct the body is using boxes to construct the head, ribs, and pelvis. The shoulder usually sits with bias towards the back, unless the person is slouching or their shoulders are raised in tenseness. I would recommend studying the bone structure of this if you really want an analytical sense of how it works!

Do Any Of The Mods Have Tips For Drawing A Full Body In Side View? I Always Get It Wrong

-Mod Future (ko-fi)

skin color ref because some of yall non-black poc and whites keep fucking up as if yall don’t know there’s other shades of brown when u racebend for woke points or something

(non-black artists please reblog)

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aether1984

4 years ago

How To Draw Native People: A Tutorial/Reference Guide

How to Draw Native People: a Tutorial/Reference Guide

As requested, here is a basic guide for how to draw Indigenous peoples (mostly focused on North America)! Also please note that this is not an exhaustive list of Native American phenotypes/features, and more like an intro on very common features that can be found in us, and even then, not altogether at once on a single person’s face. I highly encourage the use of references and care taken into research when drawing. I may do a part 2 that goes slightly more into depth, but for now, enjoy part one.

Resouces:

How to draw Native Skin tutorial (don’t draw us red!)

List of Native American Celebrities, which include their tribe(s) and home country, with 1,250 names, to use for your referencing pleasure

How to draw black people by Peachdeluxe, & Black hair in depth by misslaney for mixed black Natives

How to draw Asian People, a guide by Chuwenjie, for mixed Asian Natives AND because it includes a lovely tutorial on monolid eyes, a shared feature of Native people

get drawin!!

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aether1984

5 years ago