By Request--Fisheye aids!

Here are those "globe grids" for five point and four point fisheye. Rememeber that four-point is the more complex of the two, as it involves what are essentially three partial globe grids staggered across each other.
These are from Creative Layout, by Joko et al. 

JH

ILLUSTRATION CONTEST!

Chuck Pyle sent this one along. Could be a nice opportunity...
LINK

JH

"New Very Awesome" Comics Job

So, so impressive when people who post a job listing can't write and proofread. But contrary to the prevailing pattern, this guy says he's paying:

Posted Date: 3/15/2011  

Major:   Illustration
Title:      SUPER HERO COMIC ARTIST NEEDED
Key Skills: Penciling, Inking, Painting, Lettering

Job Description:
New very awesome esoteric group of projects that has lots of potential
and has financial backing.
Looking for artist with the same likes as Todd McFarlane and Dale
Keown (Spawn, The Darkness/Pitt). Love their attention to detail and
style.
Looking to create 3-6 issues of a new type of comic character. Very
very niche but huge potential concept. IMAGE comics connections for
publishing and production. Email for NDA and more info along with your
resume, references if possible and examples of work
Project will start with you as indie contractor and move to fulltime.

Job Qualifications:
-CREATIVE & INVENTIVE. 

-We want someone who is daring with imagery and wants to be cutting
edge in the next style and concepts.
-Love comics and have a passion for comics.
-Good at taking ideas and branching off the original but staying true
to the aesthetic.
-Able to be HIGHY PRIVATE AND DISCREET.
-Prompt
-Ahead of schedule
-Laugh at pressure and due dates.
-Discipline and committed

Pay is based per page as is for any comic book artist.

Pay Range:  Negotiable
How To Apply:
Email Resume, Company Website


Location of Job:      San Diego (but work from home is possible)
Length of Position:      TBD
Contact Information:
Company Name:    TYME 2 SHYNE ARTISTIC STUDIOS LLC.
Address:        3515 Morena Blvd.
              San Diego, CA 92117
Contact Name:    Gerald Venditti
Contact Phone:   Contact me (JH) for phone number
Fax Number:     
Email Address: 
Website:        http://www.t2sartisticstudios.com
Company Profile:
A new company looking to create a team of extraordinary artistic
individuals in the entertainment industry.

More information available upon request and with a signed and initialed
Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Cashing the Check of Fisheye

The first photo shows a realtor's use of a wide angle lens, perhaps in a vain effort to make a tiny bathroom appear bigger. Note the slight curving of straight lines near the edges of the photo. Fisheye in action, in a very minor way. Note also the distortion of the squares of the tile floor at the bottom, similar to what we get if we extend a grid too close to the viewer and pass the Station Point.

The second photo shows another example of slight fish-eye-ness in a normal wide-angle picture. Look at the curving of the line above the store name.

 Next, an audacious and impressive use of a slight upshot in a fisheye context. The dropped horizon sags justly. Though much informed by fisheye photography, this is a intuitive, freehand approach to perspective, not a technically correct one--but no worse for it. Quite the opposite. I think it's terrific.

Here's a rough for a work-in-progress on a women-in-prison project I'm calling "Women in Prison." It's a WIP WIP. OK not really--it's just a doodle I did for the blog to show the use of fisheye in an indoor setting, and to remind young women of the perils of suburban piracy.

Note that in fisheye all the perspective is forced, comic-book style. That means that apparent scale differences, like between foreground and deeper objects, such the ladies' heads, are maximized. Note as well that our view of the standing woman goes from a decisive down-view of her feet, to a unequivocal upshot of her head. Objects in fisheye are closer than they appear.

(The green projection lines running back to the DVP--not shown--bow outward, away from the center of vision, and that has the effect, I believe, of accelerating the diminution of the floor tiles.)

Here finally below, as promised, the "globe grid" used to make five-point fisheye drawings, presented both singly and in a form for doing multi thumbnails. The center point is a VP and there are VPs at 12, 3, 6, and 9.  I am not posting the globe grid for the maddeningly complex four-point perspective (Yes, four-point is more complicated than 5- , oddly.) although I will if you ask me purty-like.
JH

Time Capsule

This is going to be of interest mostly to my fellow old-timers.

I found some notes I made at a comic convention I went to in New York City in the summer of 1975. It was in a hotel attached to Grand Central Station and put on on by a VIP of early comics fandom named Phil Seuling. I saw a panel with Steve Gerber, Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, and Berni (not yet Bernie) Wrightson. Al Milgrom too? I can't remember. Thirty-six years ago.....

Jim Starlin, asked about comic books as literature, said that "in 25 years, I think comics will be right up there with Reader's Digest." (A magazine not revered for literary merit.)

Someone asked the panel about all the killing in comics. Chaykin said, "I'm non-violent; I love violence. Movement is beautiful." The violence in his work, Chaykin said, was not about carnage, but action, motion.

Berni Wrightson on Jack Kirby: "His drawing doesn't do much for me." But he praised Kirby for great storytelling. Chaykin echoed Wrightson on that point, but added that he didn't think he personally had learned much of anything from Kirby.

("King" Kirby at this stage was an admired and imitated old pro, if not quite as revered as he became later when I think his age spurred people to consider his place in the pantheon of comics artists.)

In contrast, Starlin said, "everything I learned about storytelling, I learned from Kirby... and Ditko."

Starlin, who was very popular at this point because of his work on Warlock and Captain Marvel, was asked by an audience member for advice on getting into comics, said "Practice, and plan on a hard time." The comics business was in a serious slump at this point and Starlin was probably speaking for a lot of industry insiders when he said it was going to get worse.

With shocking candor, Wrightson, who was also very hot at this point, said that he was only making $2000-$10,000 a year.  I suppose this would be like making $10,000 to $50,000 now. One of the panelists said the average monthly book was only making $500 in profit a month. Who knows if there's any basis for this figure. But comics only cost about a quarter at this point and the cost of paper was rising. Television continued its decades-long erosion of comics sales. Videogames didn't exist yet though and many, many titles were selling hundreds of thousands of copies an issue, a level of sales that on a printed monthly book will probably never be attained again.

I didn't write this down, but I seem to remember Chaykin, ever quotable and provocative, taking pains to explain that pro artists weren't really into comics the way we fans were. He got his free copies from Marvel and DC each month and gave them away to kids in his neighborhood.

JH


Apologies for any misquoting or inaccurate paraphrasing. I was 17!

Lesson Learned--Yeah, RIGHT!

I promised this guy Chris Mills I'd do a pinup of his character of his character Gravedigger. I knew what I wanted to do, something a la Robert McGinnis, with a sleazy early-60s vibe. I kept sketching figures but the resulting compositions were boring. I soon regretted promising to do it.

After sporadic hours of fruitless sketching, I fi-i-i-nally tried practicing what I always preach to you guys: thumbnailing. That gave me the first things that looked like they might become satisfying drawings.

But I still couldn't get the characters to believably cohabit the space. So once again in desperation I tried what I woulda told you guys to do and what I shoulda done from the start:

I.e., perspective: I carefully checked the figure heights against each other and the background, using projection. I think I like it! This is the resulting rough, tones added in Photoshop, as you can probably tell.

JH

Facial Structure Exercise

Here's the pics I want you guys to select from. Pick one. Please be sure you draw your face from a different ANGLE.
And here is a blog entry that shows the difference between doing this stuff well, and doing what comes naturally.

http://ill193.blogspot.com/2010/02/those-wee-facial-offsets.html

See you Tuesday!

JH

Amusedom.com

Here's a very international site that touches on things that we're all interested in: Comics, illustration, digital illustration, gaming, caricature, etc. What's more, it has a workable way of letting readers sample and buy digital comics ($.99 to $1.50). It's free to join and can be a place to display your art, like conceptart.org a more professional deviantart.

(To my surprise, I found posted in the Comics section a book I'd colored with the more-than-able aid of a young Jeremy Saliba and Julian Meyer several years back. "Chrissie Claus," if you must know.)

I also "discovered" a couple new artists I admire. Chief among them is Corrado Mastantuono. This guy is incredible! He can do beautifully stylized bigfoot/funny animal stuff as well as virtuoso realistic work. Europe's ability to generate awesome talents who go totally unheralded in the US is astonishing. It is comforting to think that in the coming years, I will increasingly have my own good taste and the internet to thank for my exposure to great artists from the world over, rather than the army of visually illiterate post-collegiate yutzes who edit comics in this country standing as gatekeepers.

And there's Damien Dunn, A skilled digital and pencil artist who does eye-grabbing caricature (See his awesome Jimi Hendrix in the scrolling art on the homepage). He's only in his mid-20s. Ya ask me, he oughta be a little more careful about covering his digital tracks--a lot of his pictures seem to start with his applying the Photoshop Liquify tools to photos. Which is fine. If he didn't have a good eye for creating the distortion, he wouldn't be such a good caricaturist. But sometimes you can spot bits of a piece that are clearly unadulterated parts of the original photo, which casts all his work in a slightly curdled light. But it is fun as hell to look at.

I'll bet there are a lot more great artists to be discovered there, alongside familiar greats like Dave Johnson, for example. It reminds me of the earlier days of flickr.com, when it was still chiefly for pro-level photos and not a digital shoebox for people to hold their drinking pictures in. (Your five fat girlfriends drunk in Senor Frog's, 2005? Fuck, yeah! Load 'em all up!).

JH

Pitch Basket!!

For those of you who don't want to do either a pet project pitch or pro samples, here are synopses of the various available original pitches. If you choose one, I will contact the writer to re-secure their permission, and find out if they have any interest in working with you on it, giving feedback.

Short Hand -- A young man with psychic powers has Progeria (sp?), a disease which makes you look 70 at age 17. The original "old soul," he helps the police solve crimes. Dialogue-driven, its script is mainly that,  running to 10 pp. so far. Very sharp writing.
Capers -- (for kids) three kids find a crash-landed alien ship. The dying pilot gives them amulets that transform each into superheroes that are adult superhero versions of themselves. Their first villain: Two headed crime-boss One-Man Mob. In plot form (Marvel-style), with some early visual development. Would make a good animated series.
Quantum Sue -- Humorous sci-fi with a Jewish female lead. She forms a team drawn from different dimensions to preserve earth life from a marauding agent of universal destruction, ala Galactus.
Human Conspiracy -- A tongue-in-cheek genre-bender; adventure, detective, s-f, western all in one. Full Script.
Brain Suckers of Venus--Humorous retro sci-fi -- full scr.
Null and Boyd -- Bloody, gruesome crime saga set in Boston with a central character who feels no pain, little emotion and should by rights be dead. In full novella form currently.
Andy's War -- AW is the story of a man named Andrew Tillman who has the ability to read the history of people and objects. He's a young African-American guy. Set in Vietnam. Concise full script, currently running to 9 pp., but expandable to a series pitch.
Tiger Moth -- the NYPD, breaking up a gun-running operation, discovers at its center a human with odd powers (superhuman fighting skills, flame touch, rapid healing). She say she's 30,000 years old and the Mother of Man. She takes on a shadowy cult called the Brotherhood which has for centuries been close to the seats of power, manipulating world events for its own gain. She is determined to defeat them, via means fair and foul. Set mostly in NYC -- Exists only as a pitch at present. This is one that a student might have a great role in shaping, esp.visually.
Lizard Planet --Goofy Sci-fi. Space Travelers from the Bronx colonize a distant planet, civilizing the sentient lizards there. full script
Worlds of Blood -- Bloody military adventure with an alternate-earths twist. Full of cataclysm and genocides across several worlds which intersect suddenly. Some of those worlds are semi-familiar, some bizarre and s-f-ish. Robert Kennedy is President of an alternate Earth and is a central character. This is a sprawling thing, like The Ultimates, and calls for an artist with cinematic sensibility and strong design skills.
Lust Among the Ruins -- Frazettaesque space fantasy with robots, mutants, sexy lead characters. Currently exists only as plot for a 7-pp.comic-book story. You and the writer could discuss what elements to keep for an ongoing series.

A few of these have some early visual development work done on them. You could see or not see that material; you are certainly not bound by it.

JH

AH Spills Tricks--A Must-See

I think Adam Hughes is probably the greatest comics cover guy ever. The only serious rivals I see are Joe Kubert and some of the EC people (Wally Wood, Jack Davis), whose approaches and aims are different. Hughes keeps raising the bar.

So, unbelievably, the online art supply vendor Jerry's Artarama has on their site three videos of AH telling how he does stuff! Free! Another thing that's unbelievable is how absurdly hi-def these videos are. They could be projected onto the moon. They take a long, long time to load.

Winningly, the Master is actually detectably a bit nervous on camera (I can more than relate; I'm horrible on video, but as Winston Churchill might have said, I have much to be horrible about)-- ironic, when you consider his skills and status. (He says "refract" when he means "reflect" for instance.)

I'm still downloading the second and third, but the first, on eyes, was well worth the wait.

JH

It's Worth More Than This...

Good news from the world of publishing. Great news, really: Andrew Loomis' Figure Drawing for All It's Worth is coming back into print at the end of May! Too late to help us in this semester, but still huge.

This book is as good as it gets for a pure illustrator's guide to the figure -- as opposed to the figure-drawing-form-life discipline, which is of course related, but there are many good books on that. Loomis was an illustrator, meaning that he could work out of his head, but would use photos or models as needed  to assure a convincing result. In keeping with the aims of this class, his book stressed the principles and the feel of figure drawing so that one could learn it at a deep level, and thus work from the imagination. It is a wonderful book, as all of Loomis' were. He was without equal as an illustrator's how-to author--the perfect combination of scholarship and virtuosity.

This book has been out of print, in its original form, for many, many years. Surviving copies tend to go for about $300 or more. You can preorder it from Amazon for a super-reasonable $23.08, save a giant 42% and get Poor Old Teacher a little kickback from Amazon by clicking on the link at right!

JH

P.S.: Thanks to my good pal and fellow long-time Elvira artist Ronn Sutton for the tip.

Let's Get Started!

Welcome to Comics 2, ILL 292, Spring 2011! Please click on this link for details of the assignment and examples of thumbnails and layouts--some by the great Frank Miller! (UPDATE, 5Feb: I have cleared up the image-display issues you may have encountered earlier)

JH

Facial Expression

The fussy, glossy style doesn't really appeal to me (nor does the surfeit of false modesty), but these expression drawings are excellent, reminiscent of that guy who does Blacksad-- plus there's commendable attention to the underlying principles too.

That artist Tracy Butler begins by knocking and mocking common goofs and cliches ("Smarm Brow" indeed) is a lot more endearing to me than all that affected self-bashing.  Ladies, can ya quit this?

JH

LogoRAMA!!

Thanks for a fun semester, you guys.
WIth apologies for the prepended advertising, here's that film!

Best viewed in full screen mode!
JH

Ink on the original pencils?

art by Jack Kirby, © DC

Brittany emailed me asking me to clarify what I had said about inking on the originals. Here's my reply:

Hi, Brittany,

You can ink on your originals. It's just very important that you get good xeroxes of them first.

If you don't want to ink the originals, so that you can show both original pencils and inks side by side, then you need to get a scan of your pencils and use Photoshop to make it so that the black lines are blue. You need to have the info palette visible, with CMYK selected in the Info Palette Options. Then in the pulldown menus, select Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. Put Hue slider to the middle of the scale (not critical to hit an exact number), Saturation to 100, and Lightness to whatever level will make very darkest area is no more that 60% cyan (C). This lays down a pretty heavy blue, one that doesn't quite pick up as black on MY scanner when I scan the inks in bitmap mode (which is how inks are best scanned). You would want to go a lot lighter to get the look, for example, of the inking-exercise boards with the waves, trees and so on that Mick Gray does for his kids. The original will look cleaner if you go for that lighter blue too. But you do want it dark enough to see the details! And be sure to ink with your xerox of the pencils nearby.

You'll need to get it printed out on an 11x17 printer. Most can handle 2-ply bristol just fine. There is even a thick paper setting on some printers, either in the Print dialog box or on the machine itself. Such a printer is a great thing to have, and they are about a tenth the price they were several years ago.

JH

Demo of reflections set up

Oooops-- I meant to post this to my Drawing from the Imagination blog. Comics students may ignore this. 

Note that, as always with 2-point, you must have one or both VPs well outside the borders of the final composition, and neither should be more than a little bit inside the picture, ever.
The oval mirror idea I suggest in the video is not a good idea for this assignment because you have to show three objects in addition to the queen. "Dean of Perspective" Joko suggested to me once that if you draw the reflected objects in the mirror first and then use the methods in the module to place and scale the actual objects in the real world, you can eliminate any trial and error.
Sorry for the video quality. It looks much better playing on my Mac than through the Blogger interface for some reason. I think you can still follow it though.

Here's an impressive version of this assignment by a past student. Sure, it's kinda lame that the room isn't reflected in the mirror (I told you that was a common failing), but she had drawn everything else (except for the head) so beautifully that I let it pass.

This, btw, is the sort of super-competence, like Chad Weatherford's Civil War drawing last week, that entitles you to a certain amount of rule-breaking. If you're not making fairly steady A's, just do the assignment as written, please...

JH

What to watch for in clothing folds

Here are a couple new videos to help put you touch with the mechanics and aesthetics of drawing clothing folds. Then, a magnificent new illustration by the immensely talented and personable Andy Kuhn. It shows how, once you have some feel for the mechanics of folds and know how to make them follow the form, you can beautifully describe clothes just with outlines, buttons and the shadows under the rolls. Notice how nicely, in this minimalist style, the square ends of the lines serve as those "turnarounds" when a roll doubles back going into a "Y"and the shadow under it stops. Wow!


JH

Rad How-To Blog

This drawing blog, done by a guy named Rad, has got me thinking: Do I teach too much by picking on people's common misperceptions about how body parts are formed? Does that approach favor surface result too much over process and understanding? And if so, am I short-changing you guys by teaching in a more superficial way than I ought to?

Or, on the other hand, would a deeper approach prove too analytical and intensive for today's students? Too much like the year of drawing plaster casts that used to feature as a prominent and fundamental part of classical art education? (Considering that almost all drawing errors are some combination of misreading the evidence of senses and failure to deal with the implications of 3D-ness, I think more and more that art schools were on the right track a hundred years ago. My biggest knock on current students is that they want to be shown a recipe, a video tutorial, even for things that aren't cut and dried enough to work that way.)

Either way, please check out Rad's blog, which is a sublime combination of sharp-eyed analysis and a heightened feeling for not only figure drawing, but shape design and storytelling. As such, it is very useful to both illustrators and concept artists. And animators really need this stuff as they spend years moving beyond a superficial, shape-driven apprehension of the world.

You know a guy's got a lot on the ball when he's willing to show you his class notes.... Go now, go now!

JH

Costume Carnival! and Other Reminders.

Costume Carnival is this weekend, Saturday 30 Oct, 10-4 in Bradley Hall, 540 Powell. Great chance to brush up your clothed figure skills in a fun, fanciful, student-directed way.

The Comic Book Workshop is now weekly at 3 on Thursdays in 540, 1st floor, I think.

Ever wanted to be an intern at Marvel? This is your chance to find out if editors return the calls of people who work for them. For free.

Escape from Illustration Island has been going for a year now. It's a great source for tutorials and career tips for illustrators.

JH

Everything I Know

The key to drawing a thing well is having a strong feeling for its form. And the key to that is getting a workable simplification of it into your blue-pencil underdrawing. Over time you can develop and hold a simple 3D head shape, for example, in your mind, that you can draw from any angle.

The alternative is to have a conventionalized way of drawing a head for each of several angles. That may not sound bad. It worked for years for John Byrne. But it meant that his characters looked quite different when seen from the angles that Byrne didn’t draw as well, and that any two characters, seen from the same angle, looked like cousins, if not siblings.

The little un-glimpsed errors that cling to our work consist almost entirely of shapes and juxtapositions from one view being misapplied to another. All learning artists are accidental Cubists. They unknowingly draw a thing from multiple directions at once.

By the way, these distortions I’m making fun of are come by honestly. These are the mistakes everybody makes in the effort to do something honorable: take what you know and adapt it to a wide variety of poses and angles. The trouble comes from trying to build your general “model” of a body part from the specific surface bits of it or one view of it rather than its actual, overall, 3D shape. What makes accomplished illustration better than amateur is the understanding is that everything in a drawing has to be defined and essentially contained by its capital-f Form.

For example, take this credible-looking drawing of a foot seen directly from the side. Then, a respectable drawing of a shoe proceeds reasonably from the first drawing’s premises. We can see the correctly observed fact that the sole of the shoe rocks up, off the floor, in front.

The trouble comes when one tries to take this flat understanding of the foot into a different view. Let’s go to, say, a more frontal view, from a higher angle--more typical of the way we usually see shoes. The need to foreshorten the foot for this view seems to call us to increase the curviness of that slight S-curve on the top edge of the original shoe. A curious innate human urge to represent the front ends of shoes as puff pastry has given the shoe a distinct echo of Mickey Mouse’s bulbous brogans. Moreover the very slight curving-upward of the sole has morphed into the entire front end of the foot’s hooking mysteriously, painfully, outward. Compared with a photo or better drawing, this is clearly disastrous, yet it is typical of what that we all do before we learn to deal with capital-F Form.

The solution what I’m calling SRSs: Simplified Rotatable Solids.

Heads!

The artist’s need to draw attractive, dimensional human heads from varying angles makes it essential to start with a simplified rotatable solid. Consider for a second the fact that few appealing, believable drawings have ever begun with a charmless, sloppy, skewed or ugly underdrawing. The need for those simple solids, starting with a headshape, should be pretty clear by now.

You can base your default starting headshape on an egg, or a simplified skull, or a sphere with jaw area added and the sides lopped off. These are all workable starts, each championed in different great how-to-draw books. I use something a little different, as you see here. There is a partial flattening of the front and side planes, as is visible by the faint squarishness of the horizontal centerline. The ears are already in place, just a little behind the vertical centerline for the side planes of the face. I can draw this from almost any angle, and still keep its proportions.

When your faces get weird-looking, when you keep having to redraw the features over and over, it’s usually because you’ve lost your artistic connection to that solid, or didn’t make it very well in the first place. Without realizing, you are likely presenting an impossible hybrid view: the different facial features are drawn as if seen from a variety of directions.  When attempting to draw difficult angles on faces, do you sometimes get the Quasimodo effect?

To fix it: Erase back to that underdrawing stage, grab your blue pencil and make that headshape work, in its simplest, cleanest form, with centerlines that really hug and define that solid. (Centerlines done in a hasty, perfunctory way are worth less than nothing). When you return to drawing the features, locate them very, very softly and vaguely at first with the blue pencil before you refine them. Remember that the eyes are pushed back a little in relation to the eyebrows, forehead and the bridge of the nose. I recommend trying drawing the nose after the eyes, so you can make sure you have the eyes placed, aligned and spaced properly. If it’s still not working, get out some photo reference of a similar view.

When we forget that the bridge of a nose can block our view of the inner corner of the far eye, or when we fear to draw an eyebrow that wraps around to the unseen far side of the head, or forget that eyebrows are mostly ahead of the eyes, we can easily create little, dead, flat zones in our drawings. And we can be slow to recognize them in our own work. One solution is dutiful, analytical attention to the visible part of the far half of the face in 3/4 view, in photos and life.

When we see a face in 3/4 view, especially in closeup, the far eye is just a little more foreshortened, a little closer to a side view. Thus it looks a tiny bit shorter, less wide across. A little of this is due to the fact that our sightline to the far eye necessarily runs a little more across the eye and a little less at it than the near eye.  A little is due to its just being farther away. These differences are greater when the viewer or camera is close up, and when the bridge of the nose is strong enough to cover a little of the far eye. Intriguingly, this is something that some of the very simplest anime and manga styles exaggerate. This gives animators the ability, even in styles of Pokemon simplicity, to draw in a way that heightens the feeling of Form, conquering 2D’s limitations. Ironically, this is something that most anime imitators totally miss, at least at first.

Try this for spacing and placing the eyes in 3/4 views:
1) In your blue-pencil underdrawing, you place that far eye first. Keep it a little shorter on its horizontal axis than you think is right. Use your judgment as to whether the eyeball breaks the contour of the face or if there is a little face showing on the far side of the eye (as with broader faces, slightly more frontal views, anime-derived styles).  Forget the nose for now. Loop in a space-keeper “third eye” right next to the far eye. Because it’s a little closer to us and a facing a little tiny bit more toward us, you make the imaginary third eye a little longer, or longer still if you want wider-set eyes or small eyes. Finally add the near eye at a size that looks natural.

2) The far corner of the far eye should be very blunted by the foreshortening of the eye opening and the sphericalness of the eyeball. In fact in some views that approach profile, that little place where the outer ends of the upper and lower lids meet may be “‘round the corner,” hidden from our sight by the eye itself. But the near corner of the near eye will be extended, displayed to our eye at nearly its full length and pointiness.  Look critically at the interrelation of the eyes and the face, make any revisions, then draw in the bridge of the nose.

3) Hold on! Don’t draw it as a line--it’s an SRS too, Picasso. Sketch it as a wedge with a flat base. “Glue” that base between the eyes, centered right on the third eye. The bridge of the nose itself will tell you whether it’s deep enough to cover some of the far eye. No need to guess. Working this way saves you from this scenario: You draw the near half of the face with confidence, but lose your way trying to cram the eye onto the bit of the face that exists on the far side of the nose.

4) Now make sure that the forehead and thus the eyebrows are a little ahead of the eyes.  The centerline of the eyebrows must be shifted toward the outside, moved out into a “wider orbit” than the plane the eyes are in. Often, very little of the far eyebrow will show and the bit that does will be foreshortened--retreating around the forehead.  (This far eyebrow is the area where people most often fall “flat,” failing to reckon with the roundness of the head. For instance, often when a character is drawn with arched eyebrows, their inner ends will be shown curving down to the nose-bridge with two identical, symmetrical curves. This is never found in nature, because of the spheroid shape of the forehead. Check any 3/4 view photo of any person ever.) Refine the nose to a natural shape.

Look for this unequal eye length in photos of 3/4-view faces. You will always see it, even when the bridge of the nose is too shallow to cover any of the far eye.

When the face is shown in extreme up-shot--as when the jaw takes on a W shape --the eyes appear to “sag” slightly at their outer ends.

Upshot or down, it is imperative to visualize eyeballs as spherical. Even though only a fraction of the eyeball is visible, the lids are shaped by it. When you do a downshot, think of the lower lids as semicircular balconies hugging that sphere of eyeball, for example.  The lines of the eye opening will only appear straight-ish where they come between your viewpoint and the core of the eye’s sphere. As they bend away from you toward the “horizon” of the eyeball, they will curve more and more, due to the progressive foreshortening imposed by the eye’s sphericity. So if you always draw the eye opening as a leaf shape, slot or oval regardless of one’s angle of view, you need to bring some direction to your approach. Check photos of faces taken from high and low angles, especially ones where the eyes are not wide open, and you will gain that necessary sense of the eyeball as a sphere.

These little site-specific heightenings of Form-awareness, by the way, are not airy-fairy extra enhancements of the existing charm of your work. Rather, they are surface telltales of a deeper insight that separates learning artists from good ones and increases charm and convincingness: an ability to draw from 3D Form. My belief is that  paying attention to the specifics, especially with checking against reality and photos, can lead gradually to a heightened awareness of the primacy of Form in general. Some jag-off fine-arts styles may trade on primitive drawing to falsely imply an authenticity of expression. But beyond that insular world, there are very few styles, including those of Power Puff Girls geometric simplicity, that are in anyway diminished by this ability.

JH