Centerline Construction, With Stephen Bauman

hi everybody steve bauman here the video that you're going to be watching right now is an excerpt from a centerline construction workshop that i gave exclusively for my patreon subscribers so please enjoy the next 20 minutes and if you're interested in watching the entire video it's going to be available on my patreon page for a limited time only and as always if you enjoy the content on this channel please remember to like and subscribe and turn on notifications so that every time i put out new content you're in the know this centerline construction concept starts from a place that is essentially abstract we're not going to be talking about in terms of the way that i'm blocking these things in anything that you can see with your eyes it's an abstraction it's something intellectual that does make its way into our drawing but not always in a way that is represented by a value or a feature or or something like this right it's something that we're kind of thinking about and meditating on and using to kind of understand what we are seeing visually so that is the basis if you're confused about what the center line is this center line this classic center line that we see that runs down the the face it's not something visible it's something conceptual now we are seeing these uh these three heads they were my kind of quick sketch heads from a previous tutorial and we're actually going to start a little bit before this but we're going to kind of segue into talking about this drawing because basically we're looking at a head from different perspectives what we're trying to do is to understand the head as a kind of three-dimensional structure and we're trying to be able to conceptualize it in a three-dimensional space and i want to start out with like this most basic idea right we've all seen like if we've ever taken any kind of portraiture course with any portraiture teacher of any kind of reputation the first thing they will do is draw some ovoid like this and say that the head is kind of like this this egg shape right and usually that would be kind of accompanied by some kind of uh concept of a light source kind of hitting that form right and this is the way that we understand like the first simplification of the head now what usually comes after this right is some idea of a center line the center line works basically because faces right are symmetrical and because they're symmetrical then the center line can tell us something but let's imagine that we have actually drawn that there is a line actually on this egg shape and let's say that that egg shape turns to the right effectively what will happen to that center line is that it will echo the form of the egg shape as it turns so now through that center line i've established that this shape is not flat this shape has volume and as it turns so is revealed like a different aspect of its surface right so if we have one side and then two sides we see less of side number two as the form turns to the right so we talked about how the head is essentially symmetrical right every time we find something on one side we're going to find it on the other side the ears the eyes the outside corners of the mouth uh the external orbital epiphysis you know these bottom edges of the frontal bone um really everything that we find uh within the head is going to be arranged in in exactly this way and that is once again the basis upon which this center line idea starts so uh looking at our guy down here we split the forehead we we split the kind of lower half of the face below the nose right down the center and even the nose itself we can just toss the center line across that as well and we've separated those two sides and we're going to do the same thing uh up here on this guy um and we're going to go through and you can actually see it's kind of funny look at these drawings you can actually see in places where i've left behind some uh some little echo of that that center line that i that i use when i kind of block these in um so just interesting to uh consider there that uh watching this whole tutorial as well would would also kind of reveal to you some of the practicalities of that now notice that here right we have of course the nose the model and the nose is projecting outward from that front plane of the face which if we view it from the side right if we look at the head from the side we're going to have something that looks roughly like like this now this contour line here that that we're looking at right in the front of the face is actually essentially the center line if we kind of turn that head around to the right that would be running right through here um as it stands in in a profile it sits all the way at the edge but then of course we have the nose that kind of projects outward from that so when we're looking at the head from the front that means that that center line effectively just kind of stays where it is but if we're looking at it in three quarter we have a kind of a choice to make we can either draw the head independently right or draw the center line independently of the uh of the nose that's projecting outward or we can use the center line to further elaborate a little bit on the the actual movement of form along the center line now since we already have like a drawing to look at here i think you know maybe it it wants us to to kind of account for that that movement of form uh but for me i think that i want to consider this first from the most basic perspective so let's go right through the nose and i'm going to do the same thing through here i'm not going to consider the nose i'm really just going to look at the orientation of the center line from there what i think is kind of most interesting actually is to start to look at how the features line up along that center line so essentially and this is maybe going to be a um i don't know if there's a challenging one to to establish but i think to the uninitiated right when you say that the head is essentially symmetrical uh i think that we start to to consider well wait a minute i know that i've seen like those you know pictures online of people for whom like you you take a picture of them and they kind of flip one side uh to kind of mirror the other side and then it looks like a totally different person um because nobody's face is actually symmetrical while by the way that's totally true that we are not perfectly symmetrical i would just say that we are probably uh 90 symmetrical 95 symmetrical um just in the same way that that even though individual people look very different from each other we also in one sense look very much the same right each of us has kind of cheekbones on either side each of us has uh ears on either side there's so many things about our heads and our faces that are so much in common uh that even though the nuances may change uh right like the shapes of the eyes and things there is so much that that is similar i say all of this to kind of get to the point which is when we're early on in the drawing mapping out the symmetry of the face is a big part of kind of establishing you know an accurate basis in your drawing right the ears on a head should be roughly similar heights especially if we're starting from a place and and let's not kind of forget this where we actually have nothing on the paper right here we have heads to look at and so it's a little bit easy for us to take for granted that the head is symmetrical but when we have nothing on the paper uh it's i think it's very interesting to start to kind of establish that uh in the first place so after we do that i'm going to do that kind of on each of these uh features or each of these portraits mostly because i want to indicate to you that all of these lines are kind of connected to each other in the sense that everything should tilt roughly along the same axis so for instance if i have uh these this set of brow ridges here tilting along one axis and then i tilt the mouth along a totally different axis and the nostrils on a totally different axis i'm going to have a head that doesn't really uh literally line up or figuratively line up uh for that matter as well so that's what we're kind of trying to uh avoid or what we're trying to establish um in this kind of basis for the drawing right now procedurally speaking uh as soon as i um as soon as i think about kind of blocking in the head i do want to get the kind of basic proportions from top to bottom and side to side so you know giving yourself some kind of like you know circular vague circular ovoid shape uh for the head i think is really useful and very uh very advisable um when you're talking about kind of uh blocking the head like i said for the sake of an explanation you can kind of you know want to talk a little bit about the arrangement of some of the features before we actually do that um but we will also probably get to like kind of starting one of these from scratch as well and um and the choices that you're going to take to do that but for now let's talk about how these drawings kind of conform to that idea so now i have my features my my eyes the outside corners and let's kind of actually mark a few things because in a way working with center lines uh and and working with horizontal axises uh axes i think is the right way to pronounce it it does depend upon where you're looking at i think about these kind of anchor points right and usually i'm looking for things that i can see on both sides of the model so here right we have that actually you know what let me switch to another colors i feel like we're not really seeing this green all that well that's better so here we have the outside corner of the eye right that is a landmark that i can see on both sides of the face so then very useful for me i talked a little bit about the frontal bone and there's this really complicated name for this area the external orbital hypothesis you don't need to know that but you know if we all touch our eye sockets you know just uh at that upper outer corner uh we can kind of feel this little bony ridge that happens there that bony ridge of course is going to be something symmetrical that we can rely upon the outside corners of the mouth also symmetrically constructed the wings of the nose as well symmetrically constructed so all of these different areas for me are chosen not at random usually they line up with some useful anatomical feature now you can improvise that and and i think there's going to be important thing in in kind of talking about all of this that i'm going to show you the way that i that i do this i might do it differently you know three times out of five i might you know depending on the pose you know i might choose something different like i don't really uh see the external orbital hypothesis here i mean i do see the top edges of the uh of the eye sockets for instance i see that here as well but like i said maybe there's some features that outside corner of the eye for instance on this guy down here on the right we don't see that very clearly so i wouldn't really choose that as a point of emphasis in terms of establishing symmetry but let's go back to our our guy in the middle here and i'm going to switch back to um to some red so that we can see this pretty well the next thing that i want to get to actually is to start to arrange some of the features that correspond to the center line so basically i'm looking for structures of the head that correspond or connect to the center line of the head so here we have the glabella right it's this downward facing plane that sits just between the eye sockets uh we also have uh a bit of a kind of downward facing plane here just below the the lower lip and in addition to that uh eventually we have um and let's let's go ahead i was going to try and stay totally simple but let's go ahead and get a little bit more complex i'm going to start to indicate also the way that the planes of the nose uh emanate outward or push outward from the front plane of the face right because uh it's going to be kind of interesting because another feature that i tend to like connect quite strongly to is that bottom plane of the nose and the way that that relates to the center line so i have like these three different kind of features that i'm kind of connecting to that center line eventually this is part of a strategy that gets us from the center line out to the more disparate features of the head now eventually this becomes something that that helps us really to kind of show the three-dimensionality of the head and maybe let's get to another place where that's really interesting um as soon as i just correct my center line here i'm a perfectionist uh um as always i have to like make sure it's perfect but let's also look at ways that these structures and features kind of reveal themselves to us right so i drew this kind of um line on the left hand side of the face and now i want to kind of re-examine that right because what we see along that line is a series of angle breaks right so we have this angle break that's happening right here at the edge of the face along the front aspect or front feature of the zygomatic bone right the cheek bone well if i look for that here and then i look for that on the other side by the way you know i have such a self-consciousness about the arrows that i draw i want them to be perfect but they never are but that's life if we look for the zygomatic bone on the other side we find that there's this highlight that hits here if we kind of look at that that contour again we could say that really that there is a kind of symmetry expressing itself uh also through that section of the head so that we understand that that angle that we see over here is also going to be represented on this side once again that symmetry kind of coming into play and so because of that i can kind of start to establish a kind of uh um in a way like a second contour within the face right so i know that starts to sound complicated but essentially what we're trying to do um is we're trying to just like we did with like for instance the outside corners of the mouth i looked for one here i found another one there if i find a feature along the contour i'm going to try and find that in the interior of the head as well so that should be lined up essentially symmetrical also to the uh to the contour so that begins to um really get to kind of the the heart of where this process kind of moves forward which is to say that this center line at its inception is like this flat and abstract thing but i think it quite quickly if you follow it if you start kind of looking into it it quite quickly leads you into a place where you're understanding three-dimensional structure even if you're getting kind of further along in a drawing we are placing the features you know and i get asked about this actually sometimes when i'm explaining this this subject you know is it something that you use all the time or don't you get like to a point where you kind of stop using it because you already know how to draw well no i mean i think that even when i'm quite advanced that i know what i'm doing and i'm really far along in a drawing i'm still kind of looking at it from this perspective i still have this kind of wireframe in my mind and i have a really great and embarrassing metaphor that i like to use to describe how i see things it actually doesn't really differ too much from what we're seeing on the screen right now but if any of you are and i'm i know i'm not that old yet so i know this reference should still land but if you remember watching the original terminator movie there were scenes shot from like behind the terminator's eyes right so you're seeing what he's seeing and then he would like look around the room and he would uh he would look around the room and he would like center on somebody and you would see this kind of like wireframe develop over his over their face while he was analyzing kind of who they are and what they looked like that was his way of like understanding or recognizing those people it's a lot like that even if i'm looking at the person such as they are and i'm looking at the model such as it is in my mind i'm kind of searching for these reference points always but let's start out let's actually start this one out really as if we were kind of making a drawing of it so in a sense like the center line is actually the probably not the first thing i would actually put into a drawing i'd first probably go for the kind of general overall shape of the head then quite immediately after that i would kind of get into the center line so it is something that kind of happens a little bit progressively um and i don't usually stick to like you know perfectly straight lines uh or anything when i'm um uh when i'm working so there'll be some arc there'll be some sense of gesture inside of them as well so now that i have my kind of general skull shape and i've got my center line you see i usually like focus it kind of on the face but the reality is it should also go all the way to the the kind of the back of the of the head as well um so kind of going up the forehead and kind of eventually disappearing around the back of the head so immediately after that from uh just an efficacy standpoint uh i would start with the um i would start going for the uh the brow ridge and i would probably start to also consider like where the cheekbone is this contour on the left would be like among the first things that i would start to change because it kind of sets up the basis for like the major planes of the face which is to say i need to know that the eye sockets are like kind of set back from the kind of upward facing plane to the forehead for instance and then also obviously the cheekbone uh and and the the shape of this contour kind of influence uh influences us to want to understand like where this kind of major plane shift is as well so this would be you know reasonably um a kind of version of a head that i would that i would block in right so it looks something like this probably i think i got maybe the the the back edge of the skull i kind of put that a little bit too far uh too far forward uh and then of course like that that zygomatic arch would be something i would be uh i would be thinking about as well again it's hidden on this side it's a little bit further kind of around the back of the model so we don't really see it there but this is that kind of three-quarter portrait that i was describing so let's put the glabella in as well the glabella really is just this kind of keystone shaped plane that that runs uh through that that section of the center line um we've established already a few places where anatomically things line up and let me take also this green so we can kind of mark those so the outer kind of bottom edges of the frontal bone are one place where we find a kind of corresponding relationship in between the skull uh and this kind of centerline concept the zygomatic bones uh that are that are uh making themselves evident in one way or another uh here and here on each side of the face in the lower half of the face as you can see it's mostly like kind of fatty tissue that is kind of expressing itself like the um we both we have these uh kind of muscular nodes here at the outer edges of the mouth um and you can see how the the contour is actually influenced by that and how the the values over here are going to be influenced by that as well not something skeletal um obviously the the soft tissue is is not present here so we don't really see the muscles kind of coming down from the zygomatic bone attaching to that node and that node going across the uh the lips and so on not so much until we get down to say the uh the chin do we have like another area where the center line is kind of um being or sorry representing a series of planes that are kind of more observable on the uh on the surface so uh when we get down to here we have the uh the kind of top plane of the of the chin uh which lines up effectively what with what is called the uh the mental protuberance or the mental process and it speaks to that sense that you know there is an improvisation here uh you know the more you know about the skull and i was talking um earlier in the the process i was talking about how the more that you know about the skull actually the more that you can reveal in this process and i think this is one of those instances you can really kind of drill down right if we have the kind of the breadth of the subject up here you can really drill down with anatomy and get to kind of some really deep places in terms of understanding this this really simple tool like we started out right talking about kind of an egg shape and how the center line could help you to indicate that the egg shape was turned away from you in one direction or the other now we're getting into like showing the highlights on the cheekbones because we understand the symmetrical structure of the skull as it is being kind of indicated by the center line and how that affects our kind of modeling and rendering of form uh in a place like i said that is so advanced um and so much past the uh the kind of block in stage hello again i just want to say at the end of this video thank you so much for watching and please remember to like and subscribe and if you're interested in in-depth portraiture tutorials whether in drawing or in oil paint you can follow this link and it'll take you directly to my patreon page where you can access something like a hundred plus hours of tutorial content for five or ten dollars a month

Channel: Stephen Bauman

Views: 66,595

Keywords: Bauman, Stephen Bauman, Bauman art, Painting Tutorials, Learn to Paint, Painting Tips

Id: nVEFRZuf70M

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020