Think in Three Dimensions

One thing that many artists seem to do is to draw differing angles of one given thing. This skill can come in handy if you'd like to draw a comic strip, illustrate a story, or maybe even become an animator — I'm obviously no expert, but these are my educated guesses of possible possibilities. In any case, as an aspiring drawer person, I'd like to try to draw different perspectives. Let's start with a circle.

On my first try I got too excited and drew eyes, ears, and a mouth. Let's take a step back and return to the circle (or ellipse, rather). The lines that cross are something I've seen being used before, but it turns out they do more than just look nice, they definitely helped me see the face in three dimensions (think sphere). Matching facial features between different renditions of the same face becomes easier by using the lines as guides for where the features should go. For example, the ears are in a similar position in both heads. I used the lines as guidance. I ended this progression with an outline of the hair line. Moving along...

Adding the rest of the hair, it already begins to look like a final version. I drew it once more to eliminate the outline of the face across the head. The shading turned out sort of cool, but it's simply dark at all the points in the hair and fades to light moving away from the points. I added a nose, eyebrows, and a little line under the mouth line. In the end, it turned out alright. And I got to practice my ellipses and kept working towards having a steady hand. Let's try a different angle.

I think one lesson to take from trying a second angle is to imagine you are drawing the exact same person in the same moment in time (expression, general shapes), but looking from a different angle. I find it easier to think about three dimensions this way, instead of thinking you remained still, and the person you are drawing spun slightly. On the last sketch in the line I added some shading under the nose and mouth, like I think an actual face would have. 

Here's what the profile looked like to me, and how I drew it. Turned out looking pretty much like I wanted it to look like. I added a bump to the original ellipse for the nose, and flushed it with the top of the face in the final try. The shading on the back of the head makes it look a bit grim I think. Interesting. Let's look at that last sketch again.

I'm noticing here that this isn't really how heads work. Jawlines usually reach towards the ear. I didn't really draw a jawline. Would that make the face too thin? I'll give it a try.

This is a pretty rough sketch after looking at a couple of examples online, but I just wanted to visualize how a jawline could work. I think this was enough to prove to me that drawing it that way would look way better, and also a tad more realistic. I ultimately would like to learn to draw more realistically as well, so let me try this a little more seriously.

Not bad. The neck is a lot wider than I am used to, but it allows it to work well, giving the head proper shape. The proportions are still somewhat off I think. The nose could be lower, and the chin and mouth need more shape. But a little bit of shade on the neck from the head made it look a ton more realistic to me. I like that a lot. Gotta try one a little bigger where I can play around with shading. Leggo.

Woah. That looks sweet. A lot of it could be better, but I think it turned out pretty well for what I was expecting. Shading under the jaw, hairline, a bit under the eye, inside the ear. I have to do proper research on shading, but it made this guy look awesome. Let's try a front view. Same deal, he isn't moving, I am moving around him. Think in three dimensions.

Neat-o. The chin is smaller than his profile version, and the ears aren't properly aligned either. I will probably try to draw the two different angles next to each other in the future so that things align better. I didn't try different eyes either, stuck with what I'm used to. Eyes and hands are probably what I'll try next. Otherwise though, I'm pretty proud of myself. It took quite a bit of erasing to get the proportions right but that and thinking a bit about the shading made this guy look pretty bad ass. I even tried to give him a little stubble. Bad. Ass.

As an ending remark to this post, it's amazing how much I learn and figure out on my own from plain old repetition, and then seeing the drawings again on the computer screen when updating this blog. A lot of what I write are thoughts that come to me while I'm writing. It's crazy what the mind can do, so be sure to do a lot of repetitions of anything you'd like to improve on. If it seems to be working for me, then it can definitely work for you.

Thanks for the motivation and kind words, reddit!