I drew 100 HEADS in 10 DAYS - How I Draw Heads

hey guys Alicia here and welcome to another video before we get started I want to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video as many of you already knows Skillshare is an online learning community for creators and they currently have over 25,000 classes in drawing painting design business and so much more Premium Membership gives you unlimited access to all of these classes so you can join the communities that are right for you so whether you're looking to fuel your curiosity build your creativity or develop an actual career there's almost definitely something for you on this platform and Skillshare annual membership is also really affordable at just under $10 a month so if you'd like to join more than 7 million creators on Skillshare and give it a try for free for 2 months the first 500 people to sign up via the link down in the description can have access to premium membership for free for 2 months over the last couple weeks I have been drawing lots and lots and lots of heads you may have heard of the 100 heads challenge or the hash tag meds 100 heads started by Achmed eldery who has an amazing YouTube channel here and he basically put forth this challenge to draw ten heads a day for ten days and I did it I completed the challenge and I thought it would be a really really awesome opportunity to talk to you guys about my process and how I drew these heads and my overall experience with how things changed over the course of ten days and what I learned so the first head I want to show you here and I'm gonna try to show this to you a bit more in real time at least part of it this was a warm-up head and this is the very first thing that I want to talk about as something that's very very important when you're drawing anything but also when you're drawing heads you got to give yourself time to warm up so when I'm first getting started I'm allowing myself to just get my hands moving and get my brain thinking because the first few sketches are almost guaranteed to be not great my lines are kind of squiggly and unsure and I'm ray I'm pretty heavily on my reference instead of allowing myself to stylize at this point so you get lots of scratchy lines and going over the same place over and over again and that's just part of the warming up process at least that's what I found and as I continued on by the time I got to like the tenth head in a day I was feeling much looser and you guys will get to see that a little bit later as far as my actual process for drawing heads I always start with the largest shapes first so you'll notice that I did the outline of the head and the neck and guidin have got all of that together and you may have heard this relation before but I try to think of sketching as being like sculpting so if I was sculpting this head out of clay I would just take giant chunks of clay and slap them all together to try to get a vaguely head like shape and that's how I always start when I'm drawing the head as well so I want to get the overall gesture the overall silhouette of the head down first before I go in and start carving out the details just like you would with sculpting so I'm not going to take a little piece of clay and build an eye and then build another eye and then try to fit it on to something slightly larger that would be the head I always want to start with my biggest shapes and work into smaller details as I was going through this challenge I started noticing that I would easily spend twenty to thirty minutes on each head and that was just way way way too much time so I started to set a five minute timer so that I could have my timer and my reference up at the same time so my heads did get less detailed over the course of the challenge and I'll show you some of the ones from the beginning later on but it was actually really helpful in the beginning that five minutes felt like no time at all and there were definitely some heads where my timer would start beeping and I was only halfway through the drawing and I had to finish it so it took a little bit longer anyway but by the time we got to the end of the challenge I was kind of sitting around when it was getting close to the five minute mark going hmm what else can I add what else do we want to do because I was just becoming more confident and more sure of what I wanted hopefully you can see a little bit of a difference in this sketch here this was maybe my eighth sketch of the day on the same day as the one I showed you before and I was allowing myself basically I was loosening up and I wasn't stressing about making it perfect as much so I was trying to get a general resemblance to the reference but I was also looking at stylistic choices so angles and shapes that I found appealing and you can really see the difference here from one side of the page to the other where my lines were just more confident and my mark-making was just more sure [Music] I really wanted to experiment with painting a few heads so I used my watercolor sketchbook to draw out some characters these are not from the Pinterest board that occupy created for the challenge some of these are characters that belong to my friends who have amazing stories and some of these are characters of my own that I haven't drawn in a really long time so it was really cool to take what I had learned from this challenge and apply it to characters that mean a lot to me on the topic of painting these heads I had been doing sort of watercolor splash backgrounds on each page as I finished it but I thought it would be cool to paint at least one of them I didn't want to paint all of them because I thought that that would add a lot of time to the overall project but I thought it would be fun to share at least one painting with you guys and the ideas and techniques I was using for sketching translated really well into painting also so when I start going in with color to paint this little face I'm thinking more about values so the light areas and the dark areas that I am about what color is this eye what color is their hair what color is this other part of the face and by thinking about things in terms of light and color relationships I was able to get something that I was much happier with and by color relationships I mean areas that are warmer or cooler than others and this is really what allows you to create fun and different and experimental color palettes is by going I want this area to be warmer or cooler than this other area and then it doesn't matter as much what color you're using I was able to put little bits of green on his face because I knew that those were slightly cooler spots and it was really fun to manipulate those [Music] I also wanted to show you a bit of this other sketch which is a great example of what a warmed up sketch looks like and really this whole page I had probably done the other 8 sketches that you saw previously on the same day and by this point I was just feeling so much more comfortable with the overall process I was allowing myself to include fewer details and just focus on the things that were important my lines were more fluid things were coming out much easier and it was a bit more stylized and to be honest once I got to around 80 heads or so it was finally starting to make sense which hopefully doesn't sound discouraging I was really amazed by how much I was able to learn and improve in 10 short days and really just drawing intentionally and trying to learn trying to get better and trying to kind of find how I wanted to portray these heads ended up being so crucial and so very important and by the time we got to the end I was just enjoying it so much more I wasn't thinking about the heads I had to draw that day and thinking oh my gosh it's gonna take me so long I was excited because I had new things to learn and new things to explore and new things to try and do and as I'm showing you the last few heads here you can tell that things were getting pretty simplified I was only making lines that were important I wasn't hatching away and scratching at my paper going I'm not really sure what I want to do I wasn't thinking on the paper which is usually what happens when you have lots of scratchy scratchy lines I was just making decisions on the paper of course it wouldn't be fair if I didn't show you all 100 of the heads so starting from the beginning you can kind of see how the day's progressed for me it was actually really exciting early on in the challenge because there are a lot of sculptures included in the collection of references I wasn't really excited about drawing all of these grumpy old men at first because Achmed apparently loves them so he included a lot of grumpy old men sculptures but they ended up being the ones that taught me the most because the lighting was so much more dramatic on those references and I was able to really focus on getting the darkest parts where they were supposed to be and working out my values and thinking about where the light was coming from and I really needed that structure early on so by the time we got to close it to the end of the challenge and they were more photographs with ambient light where there isn't really a lot of super dark areas I was able to tackle those sketches so much more effectively because I had focused on more dramatic lighting earlier on I hope this video has been helpful and somewhat inspiring to you guys it's definitely been an incredible learning experience for me and I'm so glad that I did it if you guys have any questions or comments or if you have tried this challenge yourself please do let me know down in the comments I cannot wait to hear from you you can see all of these pages in more detail over on my Instagram account if you're interested in checking out Skillshare and any of their amazing head drawing classes check out the link down in the description and I will see you all next time bye guys [Music] you

Channel: arleebean

Views: 115,950

Keywords: 100 heads challenge, drawing, how to draw heads, sketch, sketchbook, portrait, #meds100heads

Id: zKwqGvjPE2I

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019