Perspective and Face Proportions

Working on a comprehensive critique now. (Might post tonight or tomorrow)

Please check out any of my other comprehensive critiques while you wait. There are many subjects, just look for my mowhawk zombie head.

Please post any other artwork you feel is relevant as it will help with your critique.

See you soon

Welcome

To the forums!

Make a blog and join the slog. Tell your friends - forums are pretty chill way to interact without the content demand of social media. Old school internet.

Critique Disclaimer

I want to say that I am not a manga guy. A manguy. No I am a manguy just.......never-mind.

My critique is not how your artwork is supposed to look. It is to help you find your errors and move onto the next step in your journey. My years of experience and practice has a subjective opinion attached to it - as well as my own limitations of any knowledge of popular medium like manga or anime. I am classically trained in figure drawing and illustration. So I bring what I know to help you solve some problems.

Overall Critique

And you will never have too again.

I dont know what video you are referencing but it really doesn't matter - If you already have a face drawn, drawing a cube over it in perfect geometric perspective -- over an organic object -- might help you with proportions...or MAYBE learning perspective but its still not the right way. Make it look however you want.

This practice -- I am guessing -- is probably to teach someone new the idea of a construction technique and how it can be used to have any angle you want.

Getting people to draw shapes in perspective is the idea for basic figure construction
from imagination. I say construction because there are several steps involved in having to make something out of nothing with a figure.

I would put money on it being a video about perspective and proportions for students to learn how to draw something in 3d Space. I show you in the critique below how to do that without using cubes drawing over. You just need to be able to count to five. And I know you can.

Height,
Width,
Center,
Side,
Landmarks,

Broadly speaking that is - those subjects are decided very quickly in all early stages -- at least in the world of figure drawing techniques by proko, watts atelier etc... Their examples can be found online in endless videos.

Commonly anime and manga fans do not cross paths with those figure drawing worlds - but expert anime and manga artists HAVE. Old manga drawing books, let alone social media and youtube videos - hold the most basic things secret to keep you buying more.

If you look at other videos of Marc drawing, he does not draw cubes over it to check his technique of construction - but has mastered perspective and can make height, width, center line judgement calls very quickly.

Your portraits have a clear read, are clean, and expressive. You have the skills to pay the bills. Or at least the skills to develop assets for yourself and others. Lets streamline that so you dont have to be confused adding something over top of everything to make sure it is "right" every single time.
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You made Massive improvements from your first post to your last - so your problem I dont think is perspective like I first thought it was going to be in the first post. It is more in making sure you have knowledge of the rock solid landmarks of the human skull lined up in your construction techniques for manga/anime. And I try to illustrate that below.
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open in new tab to see full image.
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maple syrup fairy - critique.jpg1536x4000 2.42 MB

Another example

Look how virgil hoo flips his canvas constantly in the beginning stages - his first head looks like this.

And final drawing is more like this.

There are five examples in the video above. In his construction technique he decides the direction of the head with cube maybe at first - but then corrects to find height, width and center of the facial feature landmarks and sideplane for the right expressive portrait.

He constantly corrects until there is nothing left to correct. That is how you find that if it is right or not - but he solved all the perspective and contours in that set up stage. Then the rest of the time he spent all his time making the face and linework look good.

That is the difference I want to show you, and tried to in the critique and this example. Your first stages spend 20 percent of your time doing 80 percent of the work (construction perspective)

Then spend the rest of your time (80 percent) making it look good.
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Thank you

For the opportunity to learn more about manga and anime and to solve a few interesting problems. I enjoyed this very much. I hope you get something out of it. I'm sorry for any misspellings or any handwriting you cannot read.

I want you to mirror your canvas more often as I think it will help you in the early stages to find those errors and change to make corrections as you go and your final will look just fine.

Best of luck.

Later tater

Hey Maple! No problemo! I'd love to try and help clear this up.

Nice resource btw! I tried to find one, and I looked it up something on archive.org but I couldn't borrow it to check more of it out. I always like looking through old manga how to drawing books and seeing what they sometimes do well, and often see what is done not well.

The method I used was a hybrid version of Loomis method from his book and Reilly method that was taught to me in school.

When I drew over you heads as an example I tried to make it over simplified to try and find some middle ground for you to see some issues that I was seeing with the hard time you would have with the execution of drawing specifically, (avoiding the not fun cube) as well as my subjective opinion on the ear (thus the disclaimer) .

The truth is this - you should try both and see which one you like doing more. I tried to make something with less parts that is easy to remember, and actually fun to draw. But I just sort of made it up to over simplify something for you to use.

Both are "right", and neither one are right. But that isn't the point I want any young artist to ever worry about. I'm more of a bake your own bread kind of person - metaphorically speaking. You are going to know what looks better, and know the right recipe.

If you choose which one you like to execute more for drawing , just use that. In my humble opinion it is going to be more fun to draw that way. I hate not having fun drawing.

I made mine up just for this tutorial - It's not the head method that I use to draw manga either. I just was trying to get you away from the cube.

Usually I divide the head vertically with hairline, brow, nose and chin as the landmarks.

Look on page 36 of Loomis drawing the head and hands how he uses this division to change the overall proportion of the face to see what I mean. he uses it evenly to make an "ideal head"

That being said - it is not what is used typically for manga right? It is a stylized version of this to get the ideal manga face. But each one can be different for each style. Shonen, Shojo, Seinen, Chibi, Gekiga...on and on.

Crilley's jawline on his face example looks way longer than yours too - but its also for males. I'd be interested if there is a difference for the female head as well. Maybe your head has child sized proportions?

Lets compare yours and Crilley's sort of loosely side by side.

So I ended up raising the ear to be more above the jawline because it looked so close, and the most familiar landmark to me was the browline.

I also remembered this.

What I want you to take away from this

I could probably go and find four more style guides to follow....
In fact you know what --- Here. I'll prove that there is no right way.
Here is one I found using just the search "manga head guidlines" on pinterest.

This first one looks like yours.

This one looks like mine I made up

Which one is right for your OC? Only you can decide. Which one does brohawx like more? The one where the ear doesn't look like its rubbing the back of the jawline. Which one is cuter? Yours and the first one in the samples I searched for. Why? Cause its more child like in proportions probably.

I want you to have fun drawing because all of these rules can really suck the fun right out of it. Making everything right for no one to catch any errors is no fun at all, and really slams the brakes on what can be a really fun and creative process.

I hope that clears things up Maple! I think you are doing an awesome job asking questions and kicking ass! Keep up the hard work.

Now go try out stuff and junk and see which one you like!!!