Drawing heads

A coworker asked how I drew heads. I never got the chance to demonstrate, so I thought I'd make a post about it!

1. Draw a shape. Doesn't have to be a circle, although I'll usually use those for female heads and rectangles for male heads. Not always though!

2. Draw your guidelines. This will be instrumental in determining where to draw the other parts of facial anatomy. If you start off drawing a "piece," like an eye or mouth, you'll end up with a really well-drawn eye, a really well-drawn mouth, and so on, but the whole face will look terrible; you have to build up.

3. I usually go for eyes first since they'll dictate more about the face than anything else.

4. Adding more facial features.

5. Sculpted the face a little more (the cheek especially), and added neck and shoulders so it's not just a floating head.

6. Hair. Rad has a good tutorial on the "hair shell gap" if you want to learn from a much better professional.

7. There's more steps between the previous and this one, but it was mostly minutiae. Here's the finished product with color and a little bit of shading.

Hope it wasn't too predictable!

Moon diagram

I made an astronomy diagram in Flash and put it on YouTube! Check it out:



It's still in progress. One thing I'll fix are the POV lines of the Earth and the Moon (as though someone's standing on either, looking at the other), which were washing out in the compression. Here's a pic of how it looks in a better quality:

CAD Silhouettes

So the two characters on the left are supposed to be analogues of the two main characters in CAD, in order to illustrate the importance of good silhouettes and varied character structures (which CAD lacks on all accounts). Then I thought for fun I'd draw a girl to add some balance and spontaneity to the otherwise dour composition. Only after coloring did I realize in a twisted way I had drawn an analogue of another character from the comic, who also has red hair that obscurs one eye. I swear that's not what I started off to do!

(it doesn't help my claim for originality when an earlier version of the skinny was character was essentially Jamie from Megas XLR:

D'oh. I feel like Elaine ripping off that Ziggy comic.

Another installation of CAD: Fixed

Nothing inspires me to art like shitty feminine poses.

This is what happens when you scoff at life drawing. I'm not kidding- the original artist, Tim Buckley, has made no secret that he never wanted to draw from life. I'm paraphrasing here, but his stance was essentially, "Why should I draw real people? I want to draw cartoons!"

And that's the result. If you don't know basic anatomy/proportions you have no idea what to exaggerate, and the result is a hideous cavewoman.