11 Levels of Drawing Yourself: Easy to Complex | WIRED

hi i'm tm davey i'm an artist living in bushwick new york i teach at the school of visual arts and i've been challenged to create a self-portrait in 11 levels of increasing complexity we're not worried about photo likeness in these levels but we'll be working from a mirror we're interested in the way our mind perceives the sense of volumes of the head the sense of light as it plays across time good bad none of that matters here this is about discovery i'm defining complexity as the layers of thinking that help us to build observational truths that are necessary for a picture that just somehow feels right this is my interpretation the challenge every level has infinite amount of space to branch off and discover things that maybe haven't been discovered level one solar head the solar head it emerged on the walls of caves the solar head is a circle two eyes and a mouth if you were to ask a three-year-old to draw a person they'd most likely start with the shape of a head this is an instinctual archetypal structure your child will arrive at the solar head at some point just out of the pure curiosity to reflect themselves as soon as that child begins to see the difference between one person's nose and another one person's eyes and the next we're entering the next level level two identifying features at level two language can be a guide when you understand that an eye has eyelashes there is often a will to put those eyelashes in the drawing as soon as we move away from the solar circle we are playing this game of diversity this game of character people tend to get frustrated when their language is greater than their feeling of reality in the drawing but this is just a matter of practice with a different shape of eyes i might become a visitor to south park or an adorable anime figure but while these worlds are endless some simple structures of reality might seem to be hiding from me level three volumes and proportion the points of proportion on the human head exist really in the basic structure of the human skull this is skelly aka mr bones the truth of the human skull is that yes the top of the skull might be circular but attached to the bottom of the skull is the bone of the jaw this bone of the jaw tends to have a sort of one two three angularity this is me as a disney character you'll notice this method of circle and jaw in the drawings of disney cartoons it is a simple but slightly more complex way of understanding what it is that we're trying to get to we're beginning with three basic points of proportion the top of the forehead to the line of the eyebrow the line of the eyebrow then down to underneath the nose underneath the nose to the bottom of the chin there is a subtle proportionate difference between those three spaces that will allow a sense of personhood of individuality to the subject that you're drawing and in this case yourself so what we're putting on the page is the circle of the base of the skull the general character of the planes of a person's jaw and then we're finding the proportionate markings that might get us immediately to a sense of structure and likeness level four planes of the head the planes of the head build on the structure we just discussed but what we're looking for is to create more three-dimensionality from that structure first we have to consider the anatomy of the skull often the human head can be simplified into a side a transition plane and a center we often think of the forehead as being a flat plane but if you really look at it in three dimensions what you'll discover is that there is really a transitional plane on the side from the temple moving towards the middle of the forehead and then a plane that is more flat than round at the center plane of the forehead so side transition center transition side the cheeks themselves are not this sort of round form that we often think that they are the cheeks have a a lot of of three-dimensional direction moving backwards across the skull and connecting the forward plane of our chin all the way back to nearly the base the back of our skull what you'll find is that the planes of the mouth are often going to look like a mr potato head lips so we're not just drawing the mouth as we think of it the lips and the teeth what we're really drawing is the structure underlying the mouth the orbicularis oris the muscle group some people refer to it as really the muzzle shape of the mouth but i find that a bit disquieting the orbicularis oris the mouth has a side and a middle and if you can understand the side in the middle and the side in the middle and you can understand it also as having a angularity you begin to understand the lips sit outwards from the jaw structure in a three-dimensional set of planes we somehow know that these structures differentiate us and we like that differentiation often one of the common mistakes that people make at this stage is that they will draw the eyeball or the eye as too big for the socket or too small for the socket because they are thinking of the eye as being a symbol of the face rather than being a part of an underlying structure as something that sits into a bone and muscular form if you look at comic book heroes most of them many of them are really just perfect examples of the planes of the head there's not much more to them except a slight variation of proportion and maybe a little bit of character in some of the features or in the colors of their suits what you'll notice is that their underlying drawing is really just the set of angles that are determined here and if you've ever wondered how comic artists are able to draw in three dimensions so fluidly and have it still seem like there is a certain kind of realistic depiction there it's because they've just learned the planes of the head well enough that they can imagine it in three dimensions and the structure is advanced enough that it convinces us of a more elaborate reality and in some ways i might as well be wearing a cape there is a feeling of this reality as having a heroic structure that is not exactly what we're seeing when we're looking in the mirror and the trick now is going to be always looking for these angles and yet always looking for even a more observable truth level five the blocking as i've been drawing the planes of the head i've been drawing this kind of frontal symbolic set of of of planes blocking in the head is really just remembering and forgetting that we have angles and straight lines that might give us a sense of structure i want to encourage if you're following me along that you find a place that you can look at your page and look at the mirror without moving too much because we're trying to find is a way of getting back to looking and looking without having to do too much shifting around if my head is tilted like this i know already yes i'm looking for one two three four but what i'm trying to tune into now is the blocking that angle angle angle angle angle this specific angle i can just sort of mark it out on my page in long fluid gestural marks that are straight and angular in some ways i like to think of it as really drawing the space around the face or their placeholders it's like telling somebody the directions before they actually go on the journey you're giving yourself a map of what the face is going to be doing on a basic undifferentiated level this is your opportunity to measure in the mirror using the tip of your pencil and the slide of your of your thumb you're going to put the tip of the pencil at the top of your forehead you're going to move your thumb down so that it is now at your brow and you're going to just use that same measurement and compare top of the brow to the nose and nose to the chin and you're going to assess what the subtle differences are between those proportions and now you're going to take the tip of your pencil and move your thumb to assess the same differences in your drawing the most common mistakes when we're blocking in our head is that even if the angle of the eyes is like this we just somehow want it to be like this if the head is turned a little bit like this rather than seeing that this proportion is going to be much bigger than this proportion of the opposite side of the face the back plane of the cheek is disappearing around the side that we can no longer see we will somehow just will that cheek to be apparent in the drawing we'll want those eyes to be the same size so that we just don't want this eye to be bigger and closer and more prominent on the face i would challenge you to draw van gogh's self-portrait in a straw hat from 1887. notice how much the eyes are on a tilt how close that nose really is to the side of the face and my guess is your first try you'll level out those eyes you'll bring that nose to the middle but try it and see [Music] wow jordan really picked up on the displacement of that right eye the way that it sort of set below she might have dropped it a little bit too low and if we notice she's also doing a slightly common mistake where she's just maybe bringing the eyes a little bit even more towards the middle of the face that idea of the head being turned and the features moving all the way to the side of the face that's something very difficult to get but she she's doing a great job i have to say jason did what we were maybe expecting just a little bit bringing the eyes more level than the van ghost tilt lucy got a different feeling in that van gogh that i really like but that leveling's in there if we can notice it the brow is more horizontal pama did a good job of keeping van gogh's head feeling like it's turned in that central form sarah is really bringing that nose more towards the middle sarah's really bringing that eyes and making them more central in the face so that they take up really the same amount of space in relationship to the middle of the head it really uh takes us even further back towards that solar head in a way even though there is a all of these sort of centerings and levelings and shifts of the drawing there is still by the fact that we know what van gogh looks like recognizability in sarah's work look for these places where you are centering where you are leveling where you're creating some sort of symmetry that may not exist in actual observation if you keep making smaller and smaller observations in block in you can really achieve a fairly high degree of realism i'm going to copy it over in a much lighter tone so you can see how the blocking can be a sort of map of structure and i'm going to begin now with the next level level six contour as the head turns away from the line of sight there is an edge that edge can be traced and we call that line the contour this contour is a way of really expressing the subtleties of shape the instinct at this point is to start with a kind of scratchy mark we think that maybe we're going to get it more right if we make scratchy nervous marks we can allow for our pencil to flow and be marvelously attuned to what it is that we're observing now this takes practice when we look at a beautiful eye we don't see a hundred nervous marks we see ah the rhythm of the eye this elegant flow most people instinctually because of our symbolic values will go oh i gotta draw the eyes now move across the face allow yourself to observe around the face explore the way your eye might move so that you might move from the ear and down through a jaw and then up to a brow and down through a nose we're not worrying yet about light and shadow what we're really worrying about is the forms that feel like outside edges this is one of the great joys of portraiture for me i have never encountered a face that wasn't a pleasure to draw the contours have defined the outside edge but internally we may feel that there is a certain flatness that we do not feel when we are observing our faces from life that brings us to the next level level seven light and shadow the thing that we are trying to understand is where does shadow begin and where does it end what we're trying to first think about is what is the light source and where is it hitting our faces because our our heads are not linear block ins there is a contour that will describe the edge of that shadow and if you squint your eyes at your face in that mirror as it's being hit by a single source you'll see a shape that just appears just a little bit clearer and that's the shape that we're going to map in now we are still in some ways looking for a contour but this contour is no longer on the outside edges there is a terminator line where the light can just no longer hit it's like thinking like andy warhol we're just trying to create the most basic tones to give us the illusion of a kind of simplified poster like reality pop part is really this game right here another thing to consider what's the angle of your light source the main point of my light source is somewhere around a 45 degree angle now the light source can be moved and you're free to move it wherever you want in caravaggio's self-portrait as bacchus you'll notice the light source is a little bit more from above in most of frida kahlo's portraits she's illuminating herself with a light source but she's almost hiding it which is the same for a lot of the flash photography that is used as a reference for warhol's pictures to finish this level all we're going to do is put in an average not the darkest element of the shadow not the lightest element of the shadow just a kind of middle so we're coloring it in in a sense in the next level we're going to be drawing more nuanced information across this so we want the line to be sort of tight in classical terms we are beginning the chiaroscuro the effect of light and shadow across observable reality it feels like we are under a very bright light that is a little bleached out like there is not this understanding of all of the other planes that exist in the light that brings us to the next level how do we get to all of the volumes as the light is moving across our face level eight highlights and accents so as we are continuing the path of light and shadow and developing akira skuro we are going to find the most reflective points of light and the most obvious points of dark the highlights are where the forms of the face and anything really are being hit most directly by the light source the accents are those points that are so deep inside the shadow that there is no bounced light no room light no other light able to reach them take a look at this value scale within our human vision we have a range from white to black value is every gradient in between there is an infinite number of values in terms of major steps between values different systems say you can cleanly see 10 11 20 steps of value the value scale that i learned is the same number system that is used in the month cell system zero is black the absence of light no light 10 the peak volume is white by creating a set of steps you're beginning to train the eye to see the nuanced differences between values every color skin will reflect in different ways but almost every complexion will have a point that can reflect the light source in a way that reaches our bright value and as we go to the other end of the spectrum our shadows will exist near the bottom and already at this stage there is a feeling of a certain kind of finish level 9 gradients and value at this point we are really carving out structure through the use of light and shadow since we have our highlights in some ways we can begin to just follow the white as it diminishes as it gets darker and darker and darker up into that shadow line now the point to remember is it's never going to be as dark in the light as it is in the shadow so the tendency as we look at around the highlights is to see much darker values but if we keep squinting our eyes we can start to see it in relationship so it might be useful actually to begin with the halftones that gradient just the softening edge between the light and the shadow now suddenly the face is no longer this kind of marvel comic or this feeling of posterized reality it becomes a softer reality from there now we have the tone of our halftone and the tone of our highlight the rest is a journey of discovery about smaller forms as you discover the point on the highlight on the cheek as it moves away you are finding the careful discovery of really what is the shape of that cheek how does it get darker this is the joy of advanced drawing this is where we get to say ah this nose is very complex there is a complexity to life that unfolds in these nuanced discoveries of value if we're careful when we take our time at this level we can create a drawing that is what most people would consider finished but at this point as you're looking in the mirror and you're looking to your page there is a pretty glaring difference and the difference is simple your face has color and the drawing does not level 10 establishing a flesh tone color really has three basic principles it has value it has hue and it has saturation the relative chromatic strength of that color so that this orange is a very chromatic orange orange can lean a little bit yellow it can lean a little bit red so when we begin to understand here we want to think about the rainbow light contains the whole rainbow it contains red orange yellow green blue indigo if you love newton as i do and violet violet mysteriously loops back in the mind back into red we have this infinite loop of color theoretically if we can just understand that there is this scale of placement of hue it will help us in our observation of color we saw how white gradates towards shadow we can see how the flesh tone of our face might lean towards red it might lean towards yellow and it might lean all the way from a slightly reddish version of our flesh tone into a near blue or violet version of our flesh tone and the reason i'm beginning on a tone page when the pastel has a kind of loose pastelliness a kind of brokenness we don't have the effect of the white of the page always sort of bouncing through we just have a kind of neutral middle that's going to allow the color to sit in a way that feels like the color itself is the most vibrant not the spaces between now we're looking for what we think of as the color of our flesh all of us are pigmented by basically the same particles and those particles protect us from violet and blue they're trying to keep ultraviolet from destroying our dna but in the same mechanism they steal away some of the blue wavelengths so if we look at our color wheel and we take away blue we're left with yellow and red and that is essentially the two colors that make up what we think of as the average of skin and orangey some people are a little pinker some people are a little bit more yellowish but we are all not blue if we can just sort of look for where we sit in that general idea of light and dark in the average we can find what we feel is the middle of our flesh and we're going to just kind of lay that color into the average of the light and we're going to lay now the shadow tone into the average of the of the shadows i'm not digging in too much with the pastel because i don't at this point want to make it too dense of a material so that i can't draw on top of it i'm just going to give myself a color level 11 color as value we have our average skin tone what we're trying to find is where the color comes forward is more saturated where it gets redder and where it moves across that spectrum to silvery grayish greens blues and violets light is in some ways predictable red light is a very weak wavelength and so if it has to travel a far away to be reflected back to the eye through lots of pigmented flesh there might not be a chance for that red to make it out however there is a thin amount of capillaries in flesh right next to a bone that light doesn't have so much far before that bone is hard enough to help it reflect back to the eye and so we wind up getting what we think of as ruddies it ruddies is an old term the idea of rouge redness ruddy moments of red flesh and you'll find those on the edges of knuckles elbows on cheekbones the bridge of nose is you find that often right where there's a thin amount of flesh against bone if you're looking for pinkness the first place i'd say to look is look for those traditional ruddy places on the on the face blood is red but by the time that light moves through that vein it just can't make it out as red it comes out as the strong wavelength which is blue skin is complicated but if you can begin to sense where it cools where it leans into the blues or the neutral grayer values because orange and blue make a kind of gray and where it begins with red you can begin to almost notice that the face is essentially rainbows the game of pastel really is to start with that fleshy middle and to just now pick up on all of the ways the color not only gets lighter and darker but moves through the spectrum and gets stronger in the reds and maybe a grayer red or a more yellowy yellow or maybe just a little more yellow if i were to suggest that there's a mistake of observation in color it's mostly that the value of the color becomes too dark in a red rather than seeing the way that a red on the cheek needs to be a red that is light enough to exist near the lightest point we often will make it a dark red so that it flattens or distorts what we feel is the elegant form of the face i almost want to say level 12 if you want it freedom to live to discover life on your own terms these levels can really apply to any medium taking these levels into an oil painting to explore the same ideas with just a little bit more time and a little bit more freedom to layer and to correct as i go oil painting just gives a little bit more space to find and discover more nuances and more subtleties and more shifts of light and little bits of detail that emerge with the slow reveal of the process i hope to let myself as i make a picture be wowed by life be wowed by new discoveries of what's just right there moment to moment the be here now-ness of painting and at the same time maybe the ways that they bring up emotions and subtle connective thoughts that somehow i believe make their way into the picture thanks wired

Channel: WIRED

Views: 713,128

Rating: 4.9753499 out of 5

Keywords: tm davy, tm davy art, artist, art, self portrait, portraiture, portraiture easy, portraiture complex, easy drawing, how to draw a self portrait, how to draw yourself, self portrait easy, selt portrait complex, how to draw, drawing class, drawing tips, drawing a face, drawing a face techniques, face drawing techniques, tm davy sva, school of visual arts, self portrait drawing, self portrait painting, tm davy artist, wired levels, levels art, levels self portrait, wired

Id: 8T3cxSySI2Q

Length: 25min 42sec (1542 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/rawbface]

TIL my drawing skill level is about a 3.