Draw Face Proportions Correctly With This Simple Trick

Hi , I'm Darryl Tank .

I wanted to take just a few minutes and give you a very visual demonstration of what I'm talking about .

When I mention a center line , when you're drawing a face or your portrait , I often refer to a center line and some of you have probably asked me uh what I'm talking about .

And so I not only want to clarify that but to help you look for it .

And I thought if I could point it out in a very vivid way , it would help you start looking for it and establishing it in your reference .

And as you draw , so let me go ahead and put a line right down the center of my face and it won't be perfect , but I think it'll help illustrate the point .

So if we can start visualizing a center line , when we're establishing the proportion of the face , it is going to help us see how symmetrical our faces are , whether there's more showing on one side or another , most of us aren't perfectly symmetrical .

And this will help us notice the things that are a little different on each side and it is also going to help us uh establish and understand perspective a little bit for shortening depth .

We're going to start seeing those things happen because we're going to notice how the line that I've just established down the middle of my face starts conforming .

When I turn my head to the side , as you see , it starts following , conforming to the contours of my face , it goes up and over the nose and into the , where the fil trim is and there's the center of my lip on the top and the center of my lip on the bottom .

One of the things that I think is very important for us to notice when we turn our face from the middle to the side is how much of the face we see over here .

If nothing is obstructing our view , we see all the way .

In fact , we see the ear when I have my ear , my head turned this way , I don't see the ear at all over here .

So you wouldn't want to try to stick an ear on there .

It just wouldn't look right .

And our minds understand these things if we can not uh throw in a conflict and do something completely different than is proper or is , is uh in real life .

So as you see , I have this whole side of my face , but over here , I have very little showing .

In fact , if I turn my face all the way or even more , I start completely , uh uh blocking the view of even the side of my cheek .

You'll notice what happens with my eye too as we see it pretty well .

Uh , uh , evened up on both sides to the uh tear duct and how much of the distance there is between my eyeball and my iris and my pupil from the center as we move this way , we start even seeing part of the eye blocked .

And if I move far enough , I'm going to see quite a bit of my eye disappear behind the bridge of my nose .

So this is going to make the side of my mouth over here much shorter because we're establishing where that center line is .

And we're going to see much more of the mouth here .

We're gonna see very little if any of my nose on this other side and we're gonna see the whole thing here .

This also helps us understand where we need to put a clean edge .

Because when we have a clean edge , it's we're showing what goes around and out of our sight .

And instead of putting a contour there , we can start showing some tremendous dimension in our pictures .

So I hope that establishing this little demonstration with this center line , it helps you start looking for it , not only in your reference , but as you construct your drawing so that you can uh you know , have better proportion and perspective in your pictures .

So I will have another demonstration here in a few days .

And uh I want you to look for that and take advantage again of the things that are over on five pencil method dot com .

There's a lot of free tutorials , the free lessons and things that I hope will help you be able to draw what you see .

So , let's meet again in a few days .