Multimedia or watercolor paper is the best and can hold up to a lot of water and paint and blending without bleeding. Does it bleed? Not really–but admittedly, the paper has a lot to do with it. I can paint in watercolors on top of it, and I can paint in acrylics on top of it. I also get asked a lot about the supplies I use, and that’s what I love so much about ballpoint pen: it’s NOT fancy. So by all means, study the face, study facial musculature, and study drawing proportions of the face and body. There’s something relaxing to me in not creating something photorealistic. It’s fun to see if you can piece a face together little by little, piece by piece. But to me, that’s the fun of the process. The question is when is distortion TOO much? There are times, to be sure, that it just doesn’t work, and I toss it and throw it away. See the eyes there in the bottom right drawing? A little shading in there helps straighten them up a bit… For example, the chin in the first picture below juts out more than I’d like, so some shading below it (as in the reference) helps it blend in more in the second photo below.Įven still, I find my proportions are always quite wonky–with the eyes I draw, one is almost always unintentionally larger than the other….but to me, that’s okay. Often, just a few little tweaks make a big difference. Knowing the rules and then playing with them, I think, is what gives something your own personality, your own style. Those are helpful guidelines, but as I say, I play off them, I don’t use them as law. And the corner of the mouth usually falls where the middle of the eye is. The edge of the nose usually lines up with the inner corner of the eye, so somewhere around there is where it goes. Since she has glasses on in this one, I like fit to the eye in that space the way I see it, the way it measures up to that space, and sort of gauge where the other eye is from there. But once you know them, I find that the fun comes in just drawing it as it comes. There are many ways to calculate proportions of the face, some of which are admittedly VERY helpful. I start with a photo for reference, but I make changes as I see fit, and sometimes mix several reference photos to combine. So absolute realism is NOT what I strive for. I don’t WANT it to look exactly like the photo–that’s what photos are for. The thing is, my goal is not photorealism. People often ask if I use references, and to that, I say HECK YES.
Barb is from the show Stranger Things, and I like her because I was a lot like her at one point in my life, I think (geeky and sweet…and apparently not popular enough to warrant a complete town-wide search). Will it make it? Is it going to survive? Or will we lose it to a scribble, right there on the drawing page? Sometimes I think of it as resuscitating a dying patient.
I won’t give you instructions, really, as there is plenty of that out there (and practice is the best art tool) but more walking through what the process is for me, so you can see that it’s not always a basket of lovely, sweet-smelling perfectly-drawn roses. Recently, while doodling a little, it struck me how often I nearly crumple and toss away my idea completely, and thought I’d walk through the process of how I draw a face.
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