What is the best way to draw a portrait?

in this video I'm going to talk to you about two different styles of lock-in that I think are really really important if you're eventually going to become a really great portrait artist the first one is a visual style it focuses on the organization of Shadow and light in using those flat 2D shapes to help you design your portrait the second one is a structural style it emphasizes everything that the first one doesn't we're talking here about how to create a three-dimensional wireframe of your portrait that will help you get proportions and the structure of the head as accurate as possible as quickly as possible all the clips that you're going to see in this video are taken from a course that I've developed called the block-in course right now my personal website is a pre-sale going on and you can get the block-in course for 20 off the course itself comes out on January 1st if you want to be the first one to get it this course is designed to give you everything that you need to know and to practice about the first and most important stage in a drawing the Block in so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to start to take my first stab at the overall kind of shape of his head and I'm going to do that by looking at the Contours of his face and his head overall rather than than maybe looking at some of the structural conceptual landmarks that are taking place there right so let's bring out initially the light shape of his face versus the darkness of his hair this will be the first like big sort of shape dichotomy that we'll Express here let's take the overall width of the face and let's compare that to the height so it goes a little bit over well quite a bit over one sort of uh Central length and we have kind of an overage out here let's take a measurement also on our source image and try and see what we find in terms of that height now I'm finding that I think mine is too wide next thing I want to know is what is the height of the nose a lot of different ways I can go about doing that let's see what is an interesting way to take a measurement for that let's go from the chin to the bottom edge of the nose where the the bottom plane of the Nose meets the front plane of the face right let's see how many of those fit into the height of the face overall so if I'm looking on my source image I have on my source image a little bit under three times so this is my theory of where the nose is and I find that I've made the nose probably a little bit low I need to raise that up slightly one of the first things I want to do start to indicate the Shadow and light pattern within the face one of the first things that that becomes interesting there is this major Shadow Edge that defines essentially the front plane of the cheek presses the side plane of the cheek right that's going from zygomatic bone down across the mandible from essentially the zygomatic bone at the edge of the face here just about to the widest point of the chin or we have another angle break after that we can see that the edge of the frontal bone the edge of the forehead is taking care of in a way defining that shadow shape at the at the edge of the forehead for us right we have the height of the brow Ridge here at its highest point remember that shadow shape it's tilting downward and inward as we go towards the uh the vertical Center Line of the face and I'm going to go ahead and just take a shot in the dark at what the edge of the shadow of the nose is but what we're going to do is we are going to push forward I'm going to give myself just a little bit of value inside of this enough so that I can say the light shape will be apparent we can go through now and make all sorts of changes um and that is what I'm intended upon doing now I'm going to go through and actually just start to take measurements for all of these lengths let's see you know for instance you know how does this edge of the forehead here how does that relate to the the edge of the light shape of the cheek you know as I kind of take that measurement I find that probably this one this edge of the cheek needs to be further in a little bit to the left let's move on to the shape up here try and make some sense of it right now it's a kind of a large shape full of kind of like broken angles and things what I try to do is kind of separate it into groups so if we look at this side on the left here you see like coming down from the light shape it's a kind of angle that that kind of comes out here that I can use to to create one distinct shape on the side of the head so at least gets me to a place where I have like a semi-accountable shape I also noticed that that like through here probably we have another kind of movement of hair that kind of comes down so we have one two three and then maybe four by this point in the drawing I have made some massive changes to the placement of the features the character of the shapes the designs of the gesture of the Contours of the hair and the face everything at this moment of the drawing should still be up for grabs in terms of improving and changing this stage represents the fundamental building blocks from a design perspective and even a composition perspective for everything that will come after this is y of course the blocking stage is so incredibly important now that we've wrapped up the second section of the visual approach to Portrait drawing we're going to shift gears and move into the structural section meaning that we're going to be changing our Focus from how the model looks to actually what three-dimensional forms make up the model that we're drawing it's at this point I want to quite immediately get out of my my flat 2D world right when we want to talk about structure we talk about how to get into that 3D World and one of the easiest ways that we can do that you know all of you have seen at some point you know you've seen a me or some other you know drawing teacher has drawn a kind of an oval shape like this and put a center line into it as soon as you put in that Center Line right kind of gives you the idea that there's kind of volume to this sphere that it's not a flat oval that's actually a volumetric form let's talk about that Center Line and finding out kind of exactly where that is because it is the first of two kind of major pieces that I want to uh that I want to solve what I'm going to do is I'm going to look for this area on Nick's head right so just at the outer edge of the orbital cavity right if you all touch your orbital cavity you have this little bony protrusion right here at the outer edge of your eye socket right that's essentially the bottom edge of the frontal bone and that kind of comes down and just touches also the zygomatic bone which is forming also another part of the The Edge or the side of the eye socket eventually what's going to happen is this vertical axis here is going to be turned like this so we're going to have the edge of the frontal bone and the temporal line we're going to have the zygomatic bone and we're going to come down here essentially to the the edge of the chin so we're going to have this kind of zigzag shape and that is going to be reflected also across the cube so what I've done at this point is pretty much defined the front plane versus the beginning of the side plane let's talk about that zygomatic bone and this angle break in particular right because zygomatic bone leads to a kind of a meet up with the temporal bone which is the section of the skull that is at the side of the head together they form the zygomatic Arch now the zygomatic Arch goes essentially from the zygomatic bone here to your ear hole which is called the external auditory meatus right the psychomatic arch lands on the occipital bone just above that ear hole right as you can kind of take a look at Nick here and you kind of get an idea if we go from the back of the eye socket to the location of the external auditory meatus now why is this interesting because this is not actually a flat plane if we look at the head from the front you'll find that the zygomatic Arch here is in a way the widest part of the face right now the widest part of the skull is back here the parietal eminences uh but the widest part of the face is here so above that above the zygomatic Arch there's a tilt inward below the zygomatic Arch there's also a tilt inward so this plane at the side here is not flat it has an away an arc to it an outward facing Arc I want to start to indicate things like the shape of the glabella right now the glabella through here is this Keystone shape that I mentioned in between the eye sockets it is a steep downturning plane perhaps not quite as steep as the eye sockets but it turns down before we get to the top plane of the nose it tapers inward right to a shorter plane break at its base let's go to this moment and kind of map out a value-based concept of what this head looks like in space keeping in mind this idea of the the block here what we do find is a pretty reliable lighting truth or or concept at play right if the light is coming from the left hand side those planes which are facing right as the right side of the nose is will tend to be darker if that light source is coming from above we're also going to find that those planes which are facing downward are going to tend to be a little bit darker and if you know a little bit about the underlying bony structure then you can combine together the clues that you see on the surface with some of the relationships that you know about I happen to know that the top edge of the zygomatic Arch essentially points pretty much to a space just above that ear hole so if I know where the ear hole is and I know nominally where the angle break between the front plane and the zygomatic bone in the side plane is I can discover that through value I can discover that through what I can see of the ear and I can create a version of that Arch that kind of fits into this head not just any head but but specifically the the head that I'm drawing here all these other things are the same if we can find the eye socket right we can look at the upper outer edge of that eye socket usually somewhere in that neighborhood we can find a distinct value shift that is going to show us where not only the the edge of the frontal bone is but where that temporal line is kind of beginning now that you've learned a little bit about each of these Styles let's talk about the pros and cons of each approach the visual style of blocking is great because it emphasizes what you can literally see on your subject how the light hits your eye in this way it allows you to mimic a very simple version of what your subject actually looks like which makes it very easy to compare in terms of accuracy or inaccuracy now there are also some drawbacks to the visual approach first of all it's a relatively flat way to represent your subject which is three-dimensional now as representational artists we understand that the flatness of the paper is the first thing that we need to escape and if we only use two-dimensional shapes of dark and light to represent our subject we're going to have a hard time escaping that flat surface this is why the next stage of your study in the blocking course is a structural approach everything about this second approach emphasizes the three-dimensional qualities of your subject and of reality in general using simple wireframes to establish the volume of your your portrait applying value to it then becomes a much easier problem one other drawback of the visual style is that it requires that you always have a solid reference to work from if you're somebody who wants to eventually learn how to work from your imagination it's going to be absolutely necessary to you to study some structural style of approach to drawing eventually you might find yourself asking which one of these block-in Styles is the best approach for me to take this is why the third and final section in the blocking course is what I call the hybrid style of blocking we take everything good from the visual style and everything good from the structural style and combine them together to create a block in that is both visually satisfying and structurally sound if you want to learn about this stuff in incredibly great depth the block-in course will be available on my personal website come January 1st you can follow the link in the description of this video to get there and of course there is a 20 off pre-sale going on right now that you can take advantage of before January 1st

Channel: Stephen Bauman

Views: 83,773

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

Id: J9te8gL30Dw

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 25 2022