Drawing Heads And Faces: Cheekbones

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.

Hi Fer! I simply love your blog and tutorials so much, but I was wondering on how you draw masculine bodies? My drawings have been female and slender men, and when I try... it just doesn't look right. So any tips can be really helpful because I want to try and draw different body shapes. Thank you so much! <3

easiest thing is probably to widen the shoulders and up the muscle mass! it really helps to study anatomy so you know which areas to exaggerate. a more muscular/masculine person will have a more defined sternocleidomastoid (in blue) and bigger traps (green); basically a thicker neck. playing with the shoulder to hip ratio will help as well. i guess if you want a super manly man just make him look like a dorito

I'm sorry to ask- But You're Really Good At Drawing Art- do you have any tips on drawing big people? i really want to figure it out to properly draw some ocs-

thank you very much, and i’d love to share!

the way i see it, the best way to go about it is to imagine the person you’re drawing being divided into blocks like those little wooden posing figures

i don’t usually plan out a whole character this way, though a good amount of people probably do, but it’s the easiest way to remember where everything goes, anatomy-wise

all you have to do to get varied body types is change the sizes of the blocks, this goes for any body type your going for not just fat ones

And, of course it’s good to remember where fat or muscle collects on a body like the chest, stomach, biceps, thighs, neck and cheeks (this isn’t any kind of Strict Guideline tho, it’s art do whatever you want)

the most important thing is Use Reference, really look at bodies to figure out how they work, if this doesn’t help as much as it should, making your own observations will most likely help you figure out your Own way of doing it

i WAS gonna link some tutorials that helped me when i was still figuring this stuff out but i can’t find Either of them to save my Life so, hope this helps some

how do you do torsos?

[full pic here] 

it’s not anatomically accurate but this is basically how i do torso

do you have any advice on how to draw armor?? please im dying

yeas <3 so right off the bat i think its important to state but my like. basis from drawing armor is almost completely off of my history of drawing soulsborne characters...... i have a disease, but anywyas yea. i highly recommend it for explorations of interesting yet accurate armor design :-) my favorite designs are from 2 and demons, and i steal a lot of inspiration from their concept art. i simply think it should be ok to take how you draw/view armor or something like that from something else. armor is goofy just draw whatever looks cool.

how i draw armor is basically separating it into sections to focus on .. 

heres a lionel fr ref. layering is really important i think. i usually just kinda mix up what exactly i have fr each bit but uhhh that works.

from there its just shoving random metal, a cape, and some other doohickeys on top. i recommend looking at either preexisting armor or video game/tv show/what have you armor designs you like and just taking bits from it to make your own :-) 

for gauntlets and the like i usually just simplify it to the point of pointing out where the knuckles are. theyre pretty simple to just shove shit on top of to mkae fancier but theyre super basic. sabbatons too you can get away with just showing where the foot will bend cus they got sooo many segments. think worms. worm shoes. 

other than that. if u dont wanna draw a bit just shove a cape on top. i promise no one will notice. people will think its cool. capes always improve a design. i draw every single character with armor with a cape so i dont have to draw it sometimes. or so i just have to draw hints of it. its fine cheating is epic. 

uhhh thats kinda all my off the top of my head tips i hope any of them help feel free to ask more specific shit im not good at teaching shit like this :pensive: 

Love your artwork!! :) as a professional illustrator, would you tell me some advice on developing potrait? im always mess up when it comes to potrait drawing. i really dont know how artist like you can be so precise in developing value for face. Thank you very much :)

Hello  and Thank You :)

The first thing if You want to do portraits is to know anatomy. Start with learning what is under the skin and understand how it affects the face. When You got that covered You must know how face is structured. That will give You the knowledge how to light head. Head is a cube-like object. (yea! NOT sphere!) On face we have other little cube-like object (nose).  

A great exercise is to find photos of a face and draw structure lines over it.

Example:

You see clearly now? The structure of a nose, where cheeks are, forehead etc.

After doing this You will be able to create the face from a memory using these helping lines.

Like here. This is Michael Hampton exercise:

You see how everything fits thanks to the structure lines?

Drawing a face requires TONS of practice. Find thousand photo references and practice.

Understand the anatomy and face structure first. It’s basic.That would be the things I would recommend for everyone who start drawing faces :)

I hope it helps a little!

I finally reached 5000 followers *quietly cheers* and @strongity asked me a day before that happened to maybe do a tutorial thing on eyes and anatomy… So I did my best. I have kind of moved past using methods to draw (like using boxes to create shapes), just because I’m so used to drawing people. It kind of became a tips thing rather than a step by step guide, but hopefully it will help some of you!

Please share this!!!!! As you resident vitiligan and fellow artist I am here to educate people on how to properly create a character with vitiligo and other things to keep in mind about the disorder.

Only 1% of the entire world’s population has vitiligo but I see so many artists making characters with it when they sometimes don’t even know what vitiligo is and pass it off as “skin pigmentation”. Like— what does that even mean??? XD

It’s not an aesthetic and it won’t get you “diversity points” so stop romanticizing vitiligo!

our kid is asking me for help to learn how to draw eyes. i started putting a 'short tutorial' together for him and its now nine pages long and im not even done everything i wanted to say yet.

ive never really made a tutorial before, do you guys have anything more you think i could show him how to do? im planning on getting into eyebrows, eye expressions, and maybe the proportions of the eye in the human face...?

Figuring out some tiefling stuff so here I share. Make some tieflings they’re great.