Ben Face Practice (Patreon)

Some rough sketches I worked on today to practice the shape of some of my faces. Used Ben as the subject. I thought it would be cool to show the steps I go through from reference to more stylized. Hope it gives some insight!

1) Gather reference photos - I usually try and use different angles of the face that I know I'll be drawing a lot of in a comic or illustration.

2) Trace-over - I break down the face into simple lines and shapes by tracing over the photo reference quickly.

3) Free-hand - I then use the trace over as a reference and practice free drawing it myself to get used to drawing the angles and proportions. This usually the hardest step for me as it brings to light my own struggles with observation. This is the part that I find to be the BEST practice.

4) Sketch-over - I draw over the free hand drawing I did with my own style, trying to keep things all in order using the under-drawing as a guide. This part is the most fun because I can kinda get looser and sillier with the work.

5) Final - add the flair of the character (such as extra hair, piercings, extra eyebrow, etc). Sometimes I edit the proportions manually here to make them a little more human-like but overall try and keep things close to the other drawings. Here I made Ben's jaw a little fatter than the references I used since he's not supposed to be super slim.

These are more detailed than I would usually make my comics (which need to be drawn a little bit simpler to keep me sane!) but it's good practice in adding things to the characters I normally wouldn't. It's also fun going off model sometimes, even if off model is actually closer to the real animal they're based on. I also learned some new things from this, especially about how I'd like to draw his hair in the future.  Altogether a fun practice session :D I want to try this with my other characters as well!

-All reference images scrounged from Google-