Sketches

I've been sticking to a sketching routine recently: every day I draw at least once face.

Faces are different for me than any other kind of drawing. Somewhere in the process the face looks real enough for me to recognize it as a human being, if it's a good drawing. About 30% of what I draw looks like a face to me. Facial recognition does seem to be a pretty innate, brain-region specific thing, though I'm not one to guess about neuroscience.

Faces are an unforgiving subject. If I'm drawing a boat or a seaplane or some plants, there's room for whimsy. A quirky rendering might be intentional or impressionistic. A poorly rendered face though just looks bad to me.

I've been following the Loomis Method for a lot of this. Facial proportions are pretty unintuitive: the eyes are really, that low? The method is very paint-by-numbers, but has helped with some beginner mistakes.

Morpho books have also been helpful for understanding how to draw an ear and a hand. I need to put more time into following those: they can be pretty intimidating at first.

I'm amazed by how changing small details dramatically shifts the personality of faces. Adding a single line under one eye can make a person look really tired, tilting an eye can change their expression dramatically. It's definitely some emotional sensitivity wiring that's on most of the time (and mine, I suspect, is weaker than most people's, my ability to read emotions is very bad) but being able to dial in different settings and see how I react to my own drawing is pretty interesting.

Going to attempt to stick with this for another few months, or maybe a year. It's not great so far, but fun to work on.