Facing the Worst

A couple of posts ago I said I was too sick to draw anything.  This was true (at least I was too sick to draw anything and enjoy doing it), and to a degree it still is, but I've managed to get together the motivation to do a few small things.  One of those things was to pick an image that I not only would like to draw, but that I would like to draw on an occasional basis, and use it as a measure of my progression.  I picked an image, gave myself an hour to draw it, and set to work.

So, not terrible, but not particularly great either, especially when compare to the source image:

Nice portrait right?  I deliberately left out the hand and arm in order to concentrate on the face, I also deliberately added to the back of the head where this image was cropped off.  These things are not the issue with the sketch above.


Incidentally, I had no idea where I found this image (the un-cropped image turned up in a search for various portraits), but doing a search for the name of the file reveals the woman to be Nephania, a Swiss model and photographer.  From the other images that came of that search I gather she's got this goth/fetish/burlesque thing going on, so this is actually a remarkably normal looking photograph of her.  She's quite striking, and also a challenging to draw.  Now I know who she is I should probably get permission to use the image on the blog (since it'll turn up again), but for now I'm going to assume she won't just stumble across it and get upset at me for making a mess of her portrait.

Anyway, about making a mess of it.  There are some basic rules of proportion that, while I knew them consciously I had apparently forgotten about subconsciously because as soon as the time was up I sat back and knew what was wrong with it.

One of the rules is that (in profile) the distance from the back of the eye to the chin is also the distance from the back of the eye to the back of the ear (or close enough to make no real odds).  Another is that the eyes lie almost exactly half way up the head; pull out some tape and measure it if you're not an artist and don't believe me, or just look at the following picture:

See? The red lines radiating from the back of the eye are all the same length.  It's not a perfect match in the photograph as she has her head turned ever so slightly, so the visual distance from the ear to the eye (which I drew the line for first) are slightly reduced, meaning the lines don't quite meet the top of her head and bottom of her chin, but are about the same distance from the top and bottom, which I hope illustrates the point.

In the sketch though it's all miles off: The lower line matches her chin exactly, but the upper line is a long way from the top of her head, and the line to the ear overshoots by quite a bit.  In other words the proportions are all out of whack.  Not a good start.  There are other issues with the drawing, but the proportional ones are major enough that they're difficult to see.  The best way to sort that out is to fix the proportions.

Here I've used some digital jiggery pokery to make the proportions of the sketch match those of the photograph (I've also scaled in the left half of her face to the right of the image as those were messed up too). As a result you can see a big difference between this and the original sketch (on the right).  You can also see there is still a big difference between the re-proportioned image and the original photo; at least I hope you can.  Don't sweat the details, just ask yourself "Does this look like her?" The answer should be "Not really."

So from this I can see that there are some major issues with many of her features. The eyes are quite close, but the eyebrows, nose and mouth all suffer from being the wrong size and the wrong shape. Certainly I need to work on this sort of thing more. Amazingly the ear is an almost exact match for the one in the picture; apparently I'm quite good at ears, this is why it's the thumbnail for the post.

As I've said before I'll be revisiting this photograph later to get a handle on how much I've improved.  Not so soon or so regularly that I end up really good at drawing her face purely through familiarity; but enough to gauge my progression over the next year or so.