“Facing” Frustration

Before reading week, I had a desire to try drawing heads and faces, and maybe make some attempts at body poses and postures. However, right at the start of reading week my family and I caught COVID and being sick completely killed my desire to do anything let alone practice drawing. I got better around February 25th, but being behind on assignments for multiple classes my art practice took a hit and was limited to me either tracing faces or trying to imitate by sight. Amongst the practice I did I decided to try drawing Ganondorf from the videogame series The Legend Of Zelda. More specifically Ganondorf from Wind Waker and Tears of The Kingdom. Below are some of the practice sketches I did compared to the reference drawings.

There were three main things I noticed while trying to draw heads and faces. First, noses were unnecessarily hard to get right. They always felt either too big, too crooked, too small, not right, and were incredibly frustrating to deal especially when trying to freehand them or draw a face facing forward. Eyes were similarly frustrating as they felt like they needed to be positioned according to both the nose (which I was also struggling with), and their size needed to be an appropriate proportion to the face and it’s shape as well. Both the nose and the eyes just never felt like they were right when compared to what I was hoping to get. The last major annoyance I found was that much like real life, the hair never looked how I wanted it too. It was either too flat looking, too spiky, too much of a receding hairline, etc. These were nice frustrations to notice, as now whenever I watch a cartoon with my little brother, or look at animations done by artists I try to pause and figure out how they solved these issues, and what I could learn from them. Regarding the body I put on the far left image, I felt happy with it at the time even though I fully acknowledge the proportions are all off.

Filled with a lot of things I wanted to improve on I felt quite overwhelmed but watching The Best Way To Practice Drawing, a video by Goblish, I was introduced to the concept of a “low info diet” which states that “the less information your brain is consuming, the more bandwidth it has to focus on essential tasks” (1:43). Or to put it in more simple terms: focus on only one thing at a time and improve on that one specific thing. Having heard this I decided to place my focus on learning how to draw a proper face’s shape. No need to focus on the eyes, nose, hair, or anything else, just the face’s shape. The main video I used to practice this was 頭部のワイヤーを描く練習 : Drawing practice Head by Akihito Yoshitomi. And to be honest, I’m really struggling to understand the structure of a face, but this video has been a great help in seeing how to use shapes create a frame for a face. Its a bit of a long process, but seeing it slowly transform feels nice. While I’m not comfortable enough to start drawing on top of the frame, getting the frames to a satisfactory level is good enough for this week. Below are a few sample faces I attempted.