Taking my motivation and goals from last week, I decided to place my focus on getting better at understanding eyes and how to draw them. This pursuit led to me finding HOW TO EYE by shuen_art. This is a great short video that covered the different parts of the eye, how to shade, color (not worrying about that right now), and other useful information. After watching the video I did a few practice pages trying to outline and get a feel for drawing the eye leading to the following page:
Lookin
g at this page, I always laugh at the head in the middle as I placed the eye waaaay to far to the left creating a cyclops looking monster. I wont make that mistake again anytime soon. In this page I tried to get different expressions with the eye, trying to get happy, sad, and bored expressions and tried to draw the eye from the front and the side. Though the drawings are simpler, I do enjoy how the practice page turned out, and I definitely feel like I understand how to draw eyes better.
Alongside practicing the eyes, I found I had a tendency to only draw the side-profile of a person or a person facing straight ahead. these drawings always felt a bit flat to me so I wanted to try drawing a person’s head at different angles. Two videos helped me a lot with this goal: How I Finally Got Good at Drawing the Face – 3 Tips that took me out of Beginner Hell by Oridays, and How to Draw a Semi-Realistic Portrait with Simple Method by Chommang_drawing (my current favorite drawing youtuber). Chommang’s video was nice as it felt like a direct continuation of the method for drawing heads that I was learning and provided a simple outline to follow, but it was still hard for me to envision what a person’s head should look
like from different angles. This is where Oridays’ videos comes in. Oridays introduced to me a ‘box method’ (see image), which works by trapping the head you have drawn into a box, and by rotating the box the head should rotate the same amount. Referencing my perspective and shape practice back in my early weeks made it a lot easier as I had an easier time drawing a box from different perspectives than trying to imagine a human head facing different directions. Combining the two helps me get what I feel to be a more properly oriented head by using the box at an angle, then fitting the head template inside.
The last part I attempted to make an attempt at was making better looking hair for my drawings. At first I used How to Draw Hair by Chommang_drawing, but felt that what he was doing was too complex and confusing. Remembering how Oridays made a simple method and explanation for head perspective I searched his chanel to see if he also had a hair tutorial and found How I Got Good at Drawing Hair – 5 Tips that Changed Everything. The first tip provided me with a very nice diagram on how the split the head up into different sections, and what type of hair fits in those sections. Knowing how to divide the hair up made it a lot easier to tackle and even though I didn’t practice hair too much this week, I still felt a large improvement just from this small bit of knowledge.
Combining all that I learned and practiced I attempted to make a head that 1. was facing a slight angle (chose up towards the right), 2. had decent looking hair that wasn’t a buzz cut, and 3. had decent eyes. Below is the image I drew at the end of the week to gauge my progress:
Looking at it, I have multiple notes (as seen by the scribbles and writing) such as the neck feels too long, the eyes seem slightly out of line (or the glasses change sizes for the right vs left eye), the nose and mouth feel like they are too far apart, etc. However, looking back to what I was drawing last week I am satisfied with the progress I have made.