Alright, so you've decided to
draw a concept sketch of a character, or possibly a fighter
sprite of some sort, or maybe a character status portrait for
an RPG. Well, what happens when your characters face doesn't
look... well, human? Hey, lets face it, it happens! You're drawing
a face and you can tell something is wrong with it, but you
just cant put your finger on it. You speculate what might be
wrong with it. You adjust a line here, move the eyes a little,
redraw the nose... and voila! "Oh no, it looks worse than
ever", you think to yourself. A lot of people run into
a major roadblock when drawing a face; sometimes they just aren't
really sure how the bone structure of the face is configured.
Fortunately there are certain measurements you can use to help
you block out the proportions of the head and what facial feature
should lie in what location. However, before we get into specifics,
it is important to note that anime style faces, in most cases,
do not have a realistic facial proportion. Since the anime drawing
style is becoming more of a mainstream style, I feel it is important
to note some of their similarities and differences. Ill elaborate
on this in just a little bit, but first I want to discuss the
basics of an accurate facial layout. The best way to illustrate
this is... well, by pictures. So let us take a look.
The illustration
on the left is a frontal view of a male face (not shaded all
the way). On the right is somewhat of an angled view of a completely
different face. There are also red lines through each face (which
I'm sure you've noticed by now). What are they for? Basically,
they are guidelines to help the artist place the features, such
as eyes, nose and mouth, in the proper places. Some of the red
lines may seem self explanatory, but there are a lot of subtle
tricks and measurements that can be implemented by using the
red lines as a guide. Let us get started then. The first feature
we shall discuss is eye placement. As you might have guessed,
the horizontal red line segmenting the head into hemispheres
denotes the position of the eyes. Before you start yelling,
"Thank you, captain obvious" at your monitor, notice
the exact placement of the line in comparison to the chin line
and the very top of the cranium. The reason I mentioned the
eye line splitting the head into hemispheres is because it does
just that, it splits the head into two equal parts. This means
that for 99% of the people on planet earth, you can locate their
eyes just about in the center of their head. What we do need
to point out is that the eyes are in the center of the head,
NOT the center of the face. The face can be defined as the distance
between the chin line and the hairline, while the head includes
the portion of the head covered by the hair. Also, the distance
between both eyes can be measured by an 'eye length'. This means
that if you were to draw a human face with a row of three eyes,
then removing the middle eye would allocate a proportional amount
of space to draw in the bridge of the nose. The eye brow is
also an important feature that is easy to overlook. If you were
to strip your face of skin and muscle and tissue to get a better
look at your skull, you would have two large holes in your skull
approximately where your eyes would be located. The eye brow
helps to define the upper outline of your eye sockets and shapes
out the structure of the skull in the process. Just to make
sure that I haven't totally confused you, here is an example
illustrating the eye and eyebrow proportions (denoted by red)
in relation to the eye sockets of the skull (denoted by black).
I hope that isn't
as scary of an example as it appears to be. Illustrations of
empty eye sockets tend to do that. Now that we have the basic
layout for the eyes determined, let us block out the next feature,
the nose. The top of the bridge of the nose has a tiny space
on either side reserved for your tear ducts, but after that
you can count on the bridge of your nose to be formed by the
exact space between both of your eyes. This is going to be the
skinniest section of the nose, as noses tend to widen as they
travel towards the mouth. As far as the length of the nose,
you can pretty much draw a line separating the eye line and
the chin line into two equal sections, and reserve the top section
for the length of your nose. The same technique applies to determine
the center line of the mouth. Split the distance from the nose
line to the chin line in half, and that line can represent where
the crease of your mouth should go. The ear length can be unique
depending on the size of a person's earlobe, but you can assume
the ear to start at the brow line and end at the nose line.
Once you have drawn the basic outline of your face, there are
a few helpful checks you can perform along the way in order
to make sure that you are not straying from your guides. Not
only do you have to check to make sure that a specific feature
is placed correctly according to your guidelines, but you also
have to reference them in accordance to your other facial features.
For instance, you may have your eyes in the center of the head
with the correct spacing between them, but they might be too
wide in reference to the nose and mouth. Same theory applies
to the lips, it is easy to make them too wide in reference to
the nose and eyes. You can use your guidelines to determine
that the edge of your mouth should line up with the inner edge
of the iris. These subtle checks and balances are key in order
to maintain a well established and proportional face.
One last issue that is important to discuss is face symmetry.
Why is this important? Facial symmetry plays a large role in
your subconscious mind in deciding whether a particular face
is ugly or attractive. Its true, if you were to draw a center
line down the middle of the face of the most attractive person
you can think of, I will bet you that they have near perfect
facial symmetry. Take a look at this illustration.
If this face were
a piece of paper, you could pretty much fold it in half, and
the two sides would match up. The more precise symmetry your
face has, the better your chances are of achieving a 'handsome'
or 'cute' character. You also have to keep in mind the differences
between male and female features and bone structure, for instance
a male face is obviously not going to look attractive on a female
body, but you get the idea. If you're having a lot of trouble
getting a face to be symmetrical, try doing only half a face,
and then copy, paste and mirror the one side to form the other
side of the face. Then from there you can do minor detail work
in order to make it look unique. Note that the aforementioned
trick only applies to face forward mug shots.
