Paint with meee! (Face Proportion) (Patreon)

Hi my frens!!!! For this month's Patreon tutorial, I'm gonna talk about face proportions or how I position the facial parts to match my reference pictures!

One of the tricks on how to make your painting/drawing look like the reference picture is positioning the facial parts correctly. If you know how to do it, even if your painting/drawing is stylized, it'll still look similar to your ref pic! This is my finished painting, and as you can see, even though it's not exactly the same as the original picture, you can still see the similarities.

 I've seen a lot of guides, you know, those with like the 1/3-1/3-1/3 thing they put on the faces, and like exact measurements as to where you should put the facial parts? Thing is, I don't think it works for ALL faces  because you kno we've all got different positioning of the face parts so just learning how to do it one way is not convenient at all.  

Soooo, here's some simple tips I wanna share with u guys on how I do face proportions without those measurements!!!!! 

First of all, having a reference picture is EXTREMELY HELPFUL. VERY. SUPER HELPFUL.

Then, make a draft/sketch. Mark the facial positions.

1. I usually work from top to bottom and I always start with making a draft of the whole face shape, just so I have an enclosed area where I could position all the facial parts. Most of the times, i start with the forehead then the eyes, which is my landmark or my reference point. from there, i will start painting the other parts, the nose the mouth, ears and the face shape.

2. Now that i've painted the eyes, making it my reference point means im gonna match the postioning of all the other parts to the position of the eyes. for example, to paint the nose, i'll just look which part of the eye touches the side of the nose if i were to draw a line. so here, based on the line, it touches the side of the nose is the tear duct part. so that's where im gonna put it the sides of the nose!

3. Same goes with the lips! Based on the ref pic, if you make a line, the end of the lips touches the sides of the pupil. So that's where you're gonna mark where the end of your lips are!

4. For the ears, it's just below the eyebrows and the earlobe is just above the nostrils.

Soooo basically, that's what I mean by using a reference point to assign the positions of the other facial parts.

After marking where you need to put the facial parts, how are you gonna start painting/drawing it???

One of the most important and most helpful tips I've learned is that you can literally draw or paint anything if you make it into simpler shapes!

For example, she's clearly got a box/square face shape and below you could add an upside down triangle for her chin. Then just adjust the top of her head to make it rounder, annnnd tadaa you have an accurate face shape!

Her lips and eyes are basically almond shape and her nose is a  triangle.

Now that you have those simpler shapes on your canvas and you know where to position those parts, that's when you can work on the details! Details of the face parts will be for another tutorial hehe

Also! Be mindful of the spaces! Even though you've got all the positioning, you still have to draw the space around and between those facial parts. You have to really focus and match the spaces, like how wide is the space between her eyes, between the sides of her face and the tip of her eyes/eyebrows, etc. If you're using acrylic, it's super easy to adjust stuff like this because you can just add another layer to correct the mistakes. But if you're using another medium you better sketch it first!

Another method here, which I haven't tried yet is the Grid method! You basically just draw a grid on the reference picture and draw the exact same grid on your canvas. Then you just start copying what's on each grid of the ref pic to the same grid on your canvas. This method is probably the best if you want to draw realistically.

Another option, should be your last resort coz I don't really like this, issss tracing. Maybe you could try it for practice, but I don't think it could help you hone your skills if you rely on tracing.

Soooo that's it! Hope you guys got a lil something out of it and I hope my method makes sense! hehe Next month will probably gonna be about shadows and lighting orrr another paint with me seshhhh! 

(also, how's the quality? I used the new camera I bought but I guess the video editing app I use makes the quality oogly.)