Your Face is Pretty

Late Night Philosophy on Pretty

2011-12-01T03:10:00.000-08:00

I don't think Pretty is in the eye of the beholder. I think it's everywhere else.
I no longer think we have a predisposition to any certain kind of Pretty. I think we train ourselves to find it in certain places.
For instance, say you woke up one morning, opened your cupboard and found a cookie. And it's really super tasty. You open another cupboard and find another cookie. If you wanted to find a third cookie, where would you look? In the oven? NO. We don't need to go looking weird places like that for cookies! Cookies live in cupboards!
But there are only so many cupboards, and cookies are so good. So you go looking in places that look like cupboards; cabinets and armories. Pretty soon, you've got a constant flow of cookies from every piece of hinged wooden furniture in the house. But only that. You're little sister gets her cookies from under mattresses and squishy cloth things, how stupid is that? Right... ?

THERE ARE COOKIES EVERYWHERE! EAT THEM ALL!

The Raccoon Eye Effect

2011-02-19T21:50:00.000-08:00

Raccoon eye: when the makeup designed to widen the eye fails, and instead, you look like a beady eyed raccoon. I attempted to demonstrate the horrible affliction that plagues many of our young people today. I hypothesized that if the eyeliner surrounding the eye had total height that was as great as the eye opening itself, that the Raccoon Effect would show itself.

But now that I've drawn it, I'm not so sure. Can I ask you all out there a favor? Will you tell me which rectangle looks bigger?

Four Questions I Wish Could be Answered Without Excessive Study

2011-01-20T02:30:00.000-08:00

Assumption Will Kill Your Portraits, and Destroy Your Soul

2011-01-03T03:19:00.000-08:00

The second you think you know better than what your eyes tell you, that's the second your mature and manly prince starts looking like all those flouncy anime chicks he's been eying.

(The irony is that my own habits made this illustration nearly impossible to draw.)

That's the second you start drawing a profile nose on your 3/4 veiw picture.

That's the second you start drawing stupid eyes with stupid things on them that don't exist.

We have assumptions about what looks good, the way things are supposed to be, and our own abilities.

One of the first, and easiest assumptions to break when we start drawing, is our color choice. The ocean isn't always blue, leaves aren't always green, and faces aren't always pink.

The world isn't made out of homogeneous masses of self-illuminating pigment.
It's a mess of opaque and semi-transparent layers that can be lit by an infinite array of different colors.

I think this assumption was cured around seventh grade after that Chuck Close assignment. I liked that self portrait. Though it doesn't look like me at all.

Something awful happens when I like what I've drawn.

Instead of picking it apart and finding what's wrong, like I would with a bad image, I simply call it good and internalize everything I just did.

I've picked up some really bad habits, just by liking my own work.

I drew the following in high school. At first blush, I had trouble with flat noses. You can see this in a lot of my stuff. If you look a bit longer, you can see that I'm just desperate to line things up like things are at a "normal" front view.

I remember drawing this in class, I was trying to "bring more light into his eyes". This ultimately meant that his eyes aren't as tired.

Also telling, there's no hair on his arm. Whether this was a choice, or an oversight, it was no doubt influenced by the fact that the men (or man, as the case was) who I found attractive, wasn't hairy.

I have a theory that we all carry around a personal impression of what the average face looks like. By this, we measure what we think is possible, or matches our feelings about some one.

We all tend to like these generic, average faces better.
Conversely, when we find some one more attractive, we see them as more average than they are.

So we draw them that way. Then we get confused if it doesn't look like them.

I found this picture of Sharky--Gareth Bale--while googling images of him. It intrigues me.
If we look back at the original study of what makes Sharky look like Sharky, how many of those characteristics has she put in here?

How many of Bale's characteristics fit this generic, "attractive" architype?

How much of Bale has been distorted?

Pretend A. that you trust me and B. that I just told you Bale looks generic, can you trick your eye into making him look more like Mr. Attractive up there?

The moral of the story is, if you're having trouble with a picture, give yourself a rest. It's not your eyes that need it, it's just that your judgmental smart-ass brain needs to shut the hell up.

Symptoms of a Chronic Assumption Infection (CAI) include over generalized statements like ",I totally figured out how to draw eyes"; frustration with unusual subjects; and receiving neutral or negative responses to images the artist feels positively about.

If you or some one you, or some one you care about has been affected by CAI, ask your doctor about Humility. Used as directed with a regimen of Actually Trying, you too can regularly feel like an idiot but ultimately be far better.

I Cheat Towards the Pretty

2010-11-29T16:23:00.000-08:00

A few years back, I refused to do digital art at all. I considered it "cheating".
After all, "the materials don't make the artist", right? Or at least they shouldn't. I resented the praise that digital artists got for "smooth lines" and all that shiny crap you can do so easily with a computer and tablet.

I didn't download gimp until I felt really good about pixels.

(Some weird thing for a pixel site I was active on)

I refused to get a tablet until I knew I could work with the touchpad on my laptop.

("The Last Great Touchpad Project")

I denied myself use of pressure sensitivity, a undo/redo button, by using that silly little paint program on facebook.

But I've realized that in the end, no one cares about the process but me. My job is to serve the end result, and find The Pretty.
I can make more, and better pictures if I use the tools I have.

So let's draw a weird-ass baby!

First, I make a trace a little map for myself. I've used gridding before, but I have problems keeping things feeling three dimensional that way.

Then I create a new document, and start blocking in general areas of color and shadow, using the original as a reference.

Then I spend a million years layering, and relayering, until the form is solid enough to remove the lines.

That's when the real cheating starts.
I've gotten to the point where my free hand sketch will almost line up with the original anyway. But why go through the trouble? I know I can do it, so at this point, I just overlay the drawing with the original and fix all the proportions from there.

At some point, I get distracted by some amusing detail. At which I switch to my tiny brush and detail it. It takes about an hour for every 100x100px box I detail. Slightly less for eyes.

I'm not going to finish this baby because it break my number one rule in my art: the painting has to be better than the reference. Otherwise, I'd be a super cheat and just take pictures. ;)

Why Gareth Bale looks like a Shark

2010-11-15T14:56:00.000-08:00

If you're a football aficionado, you're probably familiar with the "Gareth Bale/Monkey" theory.
Though fairly accurate as far as proportions go, it's also completely uninteresting to me.

According to the internet, if you wear glasses, have a low brow, stick out ears, a larger nose, a shorter nose, thin lips, or have ever opened your mouth in public, you look like a monkey.

So what? Humans are built nearly the same as monkeys anyway.

Myself, my first thought when I saw him was "Shark". My friend agreed, and demanded that I study this further.

I began by mapping out our two subjects.

The first, a young 21-year-old welsh human.
The second, a fearsome great-white-shark, of indeterminate age and gender.

The similarities are striking, right?

Okay, so it's not as pronounced as monkey is.

Here's Bale, reduced down to a cartoon. Just enough to keep him looking like himself.
This is what I know about him.

1. There's a weird dip between his cheekbones and brows from front and 3/4 veiws.

2. This is partly due to his low, heavy brow line.

3. There's just barely enough room for an eye-width between his eyes.

4. At rest, his mouth is of average size, as near as I can figure (the corners fall under mid-eye). But when we look at it with the rest of his face (the narrower back part of his jaw, his tiny nose, his small close-set eyes to name a few) it sure does seem massive, doesn't it? I guess he has a narrow face or something.

5. We can fit a hole eye-height between the bottom of his nose, and the top of his upper lip.

6. The form of the muscles around the mouth is huge. It makes crazy lumps.

Additionally, it's worth noting that he has a jutting jaw to the front, and his neck is super thick.

What happens if we measure these things on a shark?

1. Although the sharks eye sockets are formed differently, which kind of destroys any brow line, the shape is still present. At least to me. This kind of thing is like cloud watching: I'm like "Oh look! That one looks like a shark!" and maybe you think it looks like a duffle bag.

2. Sharks don't have to shade their eyes from the sun, so they don't have little bony crests up there like we do. Also, they don't have eyebrows.

3. This time, we can fit many, many eye-widths in. Bale doesn't have Shark-ish eyes, that's for sure.

4. Massive mouth of doom. No lips to speak of. Also, this shark has dimples like Bale. Aw...

5. From some angles, shark noses look huge. From others, they're humorously tiny pointy bits. Bale looks more like a Shark as viewed from below. Just before it devours you.

6. Massive mouth of doom requires massive muscles.

Four out of six. That's not bad.

The moral of the story: His mouth takes up too much room and his head is lumpy.

And he gets bonus points for his giant muscled neck that would allow him to glide through the water with minimal drag.

(Dear Mr. Bale, sharks are awesome. You're face is awesome. You're awesome.)

My Noses Keep Falling Off

2010-10-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between drawing the eyes and drawing the mouth, I always lose my way. I just can't connect the mouth to the nose properly.
These are some scribbles of the stuff that's been going through my head lately.
The gray is symbolic of my lack of insight into the situation. The noses symbolize that I like noses a lot.

People on the Bus Rock my Poor, Uninformed World Pt. 2

2010-10-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

People on the Bus Rock my Poor, Uninformed World

2010-10-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

It never occurs to me that proportions like this happen. I think that's pretty lame.

The Life and Times of a Solitary Arm Fuzzy (And how he found his shadow)

2010-06-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

This is not a story about a face. This is a story of friendship and joining together! A story of light, and shadow! A story of the rise and fall of arm fuzzies!

Barry was a hair. He was dark and tapered, just like a hair should be. He grew up out of a funny little crater, just like a hair should. He even got light highlights and dark shadows on his body, just like a fuzzy should

But Barry had a problem. Barry had no shadow.

Barry was pretty sure he was supposed to have a shadow. Doesn't everybody?

Barry knew that an object's shadow was defined by the direction of the light and the angle of the surface the shadow is cast on.

Barry plead with the universe "Why! Why don't I have a shadow?!"

"HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Said the Evil Force of Diffusion ", I scatter light, and blur shadows!"

Barry gasped ",You blurred my shadow to death?! Oh! If only I were larger so I could defeat you!"

Suddenly, a great, chill wind blew and all Barry's friend rose, and stood beside him. Each cast their own, small and blurry shadow. Together, they made a slightly larger, reasonably visible shadow.

"Huzzah!" said Barry "I have a shadow!"

The End

(A) When I started drawing.
(B) When I got bored of hair and hair shadowing.
(C) When I realized it was ridiculous to try to illustrate something that I just figured out is nearly invisible anyway.

Moral: Diffusion doesn't give a rat's ass how big you are, it'll blur your shadow just the same. If that means the shadow no longer shows up, too bad. Diffusion has no patience for weakness.

Yep, I've been doing that all wrong. I've been carefully edging far too many, far too tiny shadows.

The Evolution of the Face Map: Part 2, 3d Puzzles, A WIP

2010-05-31T12:06:00.001-07:00

Where were we... oh yes. I finished up the stupid flat way of seeing things and moved on to bigger and better things.

It's like this, when I want to draw a face, I have to make the picture in my head before I draw it. I used to do this by lining up two dimensional shapes like tan-grams, but now it's like building models out of foam.

I start by making a kind of contour drawing of the forms I know and how they fit together on that face: a map.

The shapes that I mark out are fairly consistent, and only getting more so as I practice.

They bear a resemblance to the points marked out by facial research groups.

Have you ever looked at the faces made by those programs? They're often hideous and make no sense. I think their models neglect the third dimension and facial structure. (You all know giving people creepily tiny chins is more attractive, right?)

I have a bad habit, starting with that dumb circle. I don't like circles, they don't leave any lines on the page to help me with depth of field. I like boxes and intersecting lines much better.

I tend to mark in the forhead or brow line next these days. From there is easier to sketch in the trapezoidal prism of the bridge of the nose.

I know I should be putting that curved line that shows the center of the face first, but I never think of it until I've already failed at the nose a couple times.

The base of the chin has to come next.

Next is the marking out of the cheeks and eyebags.
Depending on the day, I might mark the top, crest, or bottom of the cheekbones. I haven't figured out which is the most useful yet. As long as I remember which one I'm marking, it's all good.

Especially on the right side, hopefully you can see some fancy parallel curves (wow, I thought I made that up) happening.

Recognizing curves that are parallel, or the amount by which they are not parallel helps define form.

It's one of those things you have to practice.

Here, the line-age is about to get complicated, so let's turn Chris into a mexican wrestler so you can see what I'm doing.

If you've got a good eye, you can see the shapes I've got below the nose don't quite fit together right below the nose.
If you've got a poor eye, I'll just tell you. I have trouble lining things up below the nose.

List! Everything I just marked out up there:

- The dome of the forehead is marked in pink, and the temples in yellow

- Nose-turning-into-forehead-triangley-bit, in yellow

- Two halfs of the eye socket in purple and green, with that little triangle bit I like so much (discussed already Here)

- Sides of the face, under the cheekbone, in green.

- Third eyebag shown in pink.

- Nasal labial folds in green.

- Boney nose bridge in green.

- Ball of nose in blue.

- Mouth cone in pink.

- Upper lip planes in green and pink.

- Lumpy bits that make up the lower lip, in blue.

- Chin ball in green.

It's a work in progress.

The Evolution of the Face Map: Part 1, Overcomplicating Ed Emberley

2010-05-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

(I have no excuse anymore! I have way too many discoveries that I've failed to post while my life was a bowl of nasty rotten curry. It sucked for a while, but now I need to get over it.)

In the beginning, Ed Emberly taught me to draw an Aligator.
In case you're not familiar with Ed and his drawing books Here. I used to draw out of his books all the time as a kid. He's a genius, and he's influenced the way I think about drawing at the most basic level.
You can see that best when I first sketch out a picture.

When I first sat down to try to draw people proper I would set up my reproduction kind of like this:

I'd start with the old divided up ball thing. This is the "easy" way people say to do it. (They're crazy.)
I've found that if I start with a frame that doesn't really look like the person I want, the final is far less likely to work. Or at the very least, it's going to give me shit all through the process. I had hoped never to share the following image.

For the good of the masses, Alfi's terrifying fail demons have been released! Agh.
As you can see. His facial features are floating around unpleasantly through the versions. I know I marked them out, just like people say to. Technically my fault, I know. But still... that can't be the best way for a beginner to mark up the page. It leaves too many variables and relies on visualizing skills that a beginner just doesn't have.

Chopped up circles can be all sorts of shapes. I know, faces do too, whatever. But if you're looking for a certain face, what good is a framework that shifts around so freely?

It's kind of like alligators. They'll bite your face off. No. You can make a variety of different kinds of alligators, just by shifting the sizes of a few of the shapes Emberley gave us.

And the chopped up circle thing isn't even half as specific as an alligator! At least with alligators, we know for sure that the point bits of the tail shape have to connect to the point bits of the rectangle body, right? All we know about that jaw-ish shape is that it ends somewhere.

Ok, there are tricks to make that work right. Tricks that are mostly eyeballing ratios of sizes and angles and other things that I couldn't do two years ago.

I'd then mark out the eye sockets, assuming that they'd be the darkest area. Which isn't always true, because of lighting. More problems. Though it did help me visualize...

After that, I'd start marking out simple geometric shapes in the shadows and highlights.

I used geometric shapes at first so I could see exactly how things lined up. It was useful then, as I didn't have the eyeballing skills to line it up the way I do now.

My poor brain would have imploded trying to see all those weird curvy lines.

I think maybe it's like fractals. Shapes within shapes, you know? I can use curvy lines now because I break them down automatically.

Art is a lot of hand/eye coordination. But I think the eye is the more important half*. Or at least, the more difficult. Everything else is just shipping your brain fruit out to the masses.

Join us next time as Alfi explains exactly what she's doing with all those weird-ass curvy lines nowadays. For reals! And it's not going to take three months either!

Ps, don't go telling me your Brain Fruit is awesome, and your fruit pickers suck. They're squishy, and no amount of preservatives will get squishy fruits from Cuba to Cali.

Sorry, I'm making a lot of assumptions there. Some people actually do have crappy workers. But most likely,: SQUISHY. The end.

(*Politically Correct Police! Blind people still conceptualize space, and Art around like the rest of us.)

Appease the God of Proportions: Using bitty bits of face for measurement

2010-02-15T21:42:00.000-08:00

The eyes are an awfully important part of the face. If they're off, people will notice and the god of proportions will smite you.

So how do you keep them from floating out of their sockets and killing you in your sleep? You nail them down with the parts of the face you never knew you cared about.

There's a nice little pizza slice of a plane that has always helped me link the shape of the orbit to the corner of the eye. Its shape varies a lot, but that makes it easier to find the differences in the face I'm looking at.

The first point of interest is at the corner of the eye. (A)

The upper line of the plane (B) is a place where the orbit looks like it sort of folds. The curve of this line depends on the amount of fat in the upper upper eyelid.

The lower line (C) may be less obvious, depending on the face. Being a place where a lot of action happens in facial personality land, it might be cut off by lower lid eyebags, or wrinkles. I just call as I see it per face.

The final, outer line (D) goes along the rim of the orbit. After this line, there's a big drop off into the side of the head.

Measuring the shape and angles of this plane against that of any other consistent shapes I see on the face (irises are always good for measuring against) makes it easier for me to place eyes proper.

Bowls of Soul and Whatever (Shiny things make people happy)

2010-02-12T15:18:00.000-08:00

More bowls today!

Bowls are good for catching souls, apparently. That's what they say when I successfully perform shiny on an eye in realism. No offense to those who believe in that sort of thing, I find that puzzling. Eyes aren't a window to the soul, they're shiny balls of jelly. No one says anything about soul when there is no shiny. Which is not to say that shiny is the only thing you need to make "soul".

Did I ever mention that I hate manga?

The direction we're looking with our eyes is a strong kind of body language. There isn't a set of rules for what looking in a particular direction means. It's all in the context of expression and whatever else is going on.

The amount of white showing also plays a part in recognizing the intensity of an emotion.

I hate it, but eyes suck focus in pictures, and therefor need to be shaded and shinied properly.

Shiny is basically drawing in two layers. The iris is a concave bowl. The cornea is convex and is mostly invisible, except for reflections of the space around it, and distortions of anything behind or beneath it.

The iris is a shallow bowl, with a little raised part in the middle around the pupil. like a chips and dip platter. There's a kind of weird drop off out of the white jelly part into the iris. Depending on the light and the specific eye shape, that can make for a darker outline.

Ignore the cornea (the clear jelly over the top), it's invisible. What's not invisible are the reflections it shows across its surface. Brighter things, lamps and windows and explosions are more likely to cover the image of the iris. Where there are shadows, from eyelashes or other things, the reflections won't show.

The iris may be visually displaced by the cornea. I don't think it's that big of a deal unless we're looking from the side.

The shiny happens with hair, sweat, even within the layers of skin. When drawing layers of objects with low opacity, remember that you're not actually drawing one layer over another, you're NOT drawing the light spots of each layer.

Unless you've got Photoshop and you can cheat like me.

Potential Cure for your Ear Phobia

2010-02-01T16:35:00.001-08:00

If you're the average person, you avoid ears like the guy on the bus with the tight pants and his legs spread too wide. They're arbitrary, awkward things to draw.

Never fear! I'm here to provide the proverbial spandex bus guy with proverbial Levis!

Ears are designed to funnel.

They're set up in a spiral pattern. A really lumpy pattern, but still. Medical people call these the "helix" and "antihelix". I usually call them "those swirly thingies", but I'll defer to the official terms for sanity.

Remember, these are funnels. They go in. So even with all this lumpiness, they're still basically shaped/shaded like bowls. (Don't forget, light direction shifts.)

TEETH: A short lesson for the anatomically illiterate internet

2010-01-28T16:27:00.000-08:00

What our fancy-pants posters at I-Am-Bored.com have to say about this:

"That's not real, we shouldn`t be able to see the tops of his bottom teeth or the bottoms of his top teeth."

"First of all, it's a chick. Secondly, it`s fake as hell....the teeth are WAY too far down compared to where the lips are."

Hold the press, internets. I know it's hard to think while rubbing down your ego, but your stupidity is showing.

I was going to talk about something else, but this picture is too good of an opportunity to talk about the only part of our skeleton we see on a day to day basis. This picture is so awsome.

I'm not here to argue whether or not it's real (it totally is though), nor do I care what gender the person is (it's a chick), I just need to set the record straight with the teeth.

To address the first point.

There is such a thing as a relaxed jaw. This crazy thing happens when you open your mouth. Your teeth separate.

Couple that with the fact that lips are centered over the upper teeth. If you poke your fingers between your lips right now, it will hit your upper teeth. If you open your mouth, you'll notice that the lower lip covers the lower teeth with room to spare.

So let's get this straight.
The line between the lips would sit here-ish naturally.

But it's being pushed up by this plastic thingy.

And she let her jaw go slack a little, revealing more of the pointy parts of her teeth.

Then she got this crazy clear plastic thingermabob in it. The end. There's no reason to photoshop something that's totally plausible and easy to do (if you happen you have a massive hole in your lower lip.)

The Postulate of LipsAreDisgusting

2010-01-25T18:57:00.003-08:00

I don't understand how lips have become a symbol of beauty. It's just a slimy, swollen orifice. I can't help but think of other parts of the body that function similarly, in a backwards sort of way, and think ", Holy Batmobile, I don't want that on my face."

Demystifying them makes them easier to draw, though. It's like looking at Tyra Banks without make-up for the first time. (For those of you like me, Tyra Banks is... well hell, I don't know what she's around for either. Nevermind.)

It's story time with your Auntie Alfi!
(Old school, because my tablet's being nasty to me today.)

Once upon a time, in my head, the mouth was just like any other part of the face, except stretched over this cone shape made by the teeth.

One day, the Magic Mouth Gnome came with his Magic Machete...

...and cut a gash through the fat and muscle for us to shove food through.

Unfortunately, the Mouth Gnome forgot to clean inbetween people, and so the wounds got infected. That's why our lips are still poofy and pinky and wrinkled and gross.

The end.

The moral is that lips are only bent up planes and not to be feared.

Join us next time when Auntie Alfi tells her findings on the planes of the upper lip and lower nose.

Why parts of your face aren't important (The Theory of General Indicators and Face Quirks)

2010-01-18T13:20:00.000-08:00

And the day was MONDAY and thus, there was a post. And henceforth was there always a post on MONDAY. Amen.

I put what makes your face look like your face into two categories:

"General indicators" (Fig. 1 on the left), which includes very little more than head shape, hairline, eye socket shape and maybe nose length but the juries still out on that one

and "Facial quirks" which is all those weird little specifics like bug eyes, snub noses, rabitty mouths and those intense lines that Willem DaFoe gets all across his cheeks. (Fig. 1 on the right. There are some indicators left in the quirks picture, they're hard to draw by themselves, it looks too weird).

Quirks are the parts they use on South Park to make celebrities.

The less important ones may be little more than an interesting plane or two, or a weird bump, or a freckle.

General indicators are the parts that they say matter more in art classes. These are the parts that they attempt to describe in every single how-to portrait book ever. Mostly they kind of fail.

I prefer to make people look absolutely like themselves. So I use just about everything I can find in a face. But this isn't entirely necessary to making some one look like themselves. That's why caricatures work. The trick is figuring out which indicators and quirks are important. I'm coming to realize that this list isn't set in stone though. The mind is a weird thing, it doesn't always weigh the features the same way.

If your friend is standing across a big field and you recognize them, you're using the general indicators, because that's what you can see.

But supposing you re-meet some one you met very briefly some time ago. If you ever remember looking at them at all, most likely, the part you remember is just going to be some quirk you glommed onto.

So sometimes when we're drawing, we can just forget about some parts of the face.

Just because a part of the face isn't important, doesn't mean you're allowed to get it wrong. Wrong looking features detract from the familiarity.

No. Bad. Very bad.

What you need is a completely neutral filler feature.

A good neutral filler is more symbolic than literal. Like South Park. I've been watching too much South Park lately.

They have a certain kind of eye they use on just about every one, so it become so normal you look at it and say "oh, that's an eye. Um... cool." And then you move on and recognize the character by some other quirk or indicator.

Generalizing is touchy stuff because not every one sees the same way, but this is the general idea of it.

Ps. Happy Martin Luther King Day. Peace and love y'all.

Pps. Skin color is a quirk. That's because lighting changes skin tone as much as genetics. The shading just ends up a little different with dark skin. We're all built more or less the same.

Random Thought of the Day

2009-12-12T17:28:00.000-08:00

I don't have the time to put together a full blown babble-fest today. So here's a piece of face I'm fond of.

Also. Irises are shaped like bowls. The end.

Wrinkles, Crinkles, Fault Lines and Fabric: Good ways for thinking about signs of age

2009-12-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

And thus the day was Friday! And henceforth was there ever a post every Friday. Yea. Merrily.

See some simlarities up there? Maybe? A little?

So here's a thought I had a while back (as in, when bloody blogger is going to say I made this post. Silly computer). Check out these three pictures. Lots of crinkles and wrinkles. I've revised my definitions of those two terms in the past few weeks. I've used them interchangeably up until now, but I'm confusing myself.

Henceforth, "crinkles" are impermanent folds and "wrinkles" are the cracks and crevices that happen to skin that crinkles a lot. With age or just genetic um... there are scientific words to put here. It's like fetuses know they're going to want to bend their fingers a lot so they make wrinkles right from the get go.

I think about skin like fabric and stone a lot. I was thinking back on some things I've learned about geology and sewing and I thought "well gee, if we've taken it this far, maybe I can stretch that analogy even further." Funny thing is that it totally worked, and it's totally useful.

Things I used fabric-y thoughts for:

The folds around the knees, the fingers and toes, and the 20-something male under-neck poof (It's adorable ps). You know, foldy things.

Also, cheeks and forehead crinkles. Gathery things.

Fabric-y thoughts I didn't think to think:

What happens when you forget to do laundry and have to wear that size-five-years-ago t-shirt to work? I mean, after the blood sweat and tears that goes into folding your shoulders down enough to get your arms into the sleeves. You start seeing these crinkles running parallel to the direction of the tension. When there's not enough skin to cover your insides or enough satin to cover your secret pre-nuptial tummy bulge you get these parallel crinkles.

I wish I had a better reference of what's happening to the skin at a smaller lever there. All the little lines are stretching out the same way.

Fabric is good for thinking about crinkles, because it makes hills and valleys and folds. Remember, an active and impermanent crinkle is more roundy than a wrinkle.

I used rocky thoughts for:

Wrinkles of the long and canyonish kind. I like thinking of them as larger than they are because it reminds me to shade them properly.
And also small texture-y wrinkles of the tediousish kind. The kind you see on the back of one's hand remind me a lot of rock.

Faulty thoughts that I didn't think to think:

So the cool part is when you start thinking of these lines and wrinkles and breaks in the skin in terms of the motion of force. Just like they do with fault lines.

Compression is the folding and gathering of fabric, while tension is the same motion that causes the tiny-shirt/yelling wrinkles.

But in geology land, they also talk about shearing.

Shearing makes up for those magical wrinkles the happen when the poofier parts of the face start falling down. The deepening of the nasal fold (that dark fold that happens when you smile or sneer or cry) as one ages is mostly caused by a shearing action between the cheeks and the mouth area. Actually, I'm not going to say mostly just yet. It's probably different on different people. I'll get back to you on that.

I have to go draw some one now. So: THE END.

On Beady Eyes: A Discovery (And some babbling)

2009-12-11T01:36:00.000-08:00

From left to right, Leonard Nemoy, Chris Urbanowicz and Clancy Brown. Beady eyes, bug eyes and sunken bug eyes with a low brow variation. Nemoy and Brown are in crazy character makeup. Chris just naturally looks like this.

Have you ever looked at Leonard Nemoy's eyes? They're insane! I didn't know that eyes like his were possible!

See, in my world, there have always been three basic kinds of eyes. Bug eyes, squint eyes and almond eyes. These are just beyond me.

I've been fascinated by bug eyes in particular for a while now. B and C are both examples of really lovely bug eyes. Bugginess happens for a variety of reasons, but the result is basically the same in the end.
You can tell eyes are buggy because more of the whites show, and the the ball shapes the eyelids. And the eyes will probably look like they're kind of popping out of they're head. I highly suggest drawing bug eyes for would be portrait artists. They will drive you up the wall and into the woods, but after that, they'll force you to shade and visualize 3d forms. You can see the curve of the face clearly with bug eyes, because they stick out. Also they're adorable.

B, Chris Urbanowicz of the band "Editors". He's a near perfect example of bug-eyes that look like they're popping out of the skull. (I only know one other person with better ones, but I don't have a picture, nor permission to use it.) I think it's fairly clear why this happens, now that I can see his head next to these two other lovelies. Basically, my theory is that his head is just friggen tiny, so there's just not room in his little roundy head for his eyeballs. Eyeballs are more or less the same size on any one. He's looking down a little, so that makes it look a little smaller too. But still. Brown looks like he could eat him for lunch.

Then again, Clancy Brown has a Huge head. It's not by chance that he was repeatedly cast as monsters and villains in the 80s. So why does he have bug eyes? (Note, he's got some eye make up on that's playing up the shape of his eyes. It's hard to find good refs of this guy. Rest assured, they really are buggy.) My theory is this, his head is big, and therefor, so are his eye sockets. The "orbital fat pad"-- that's the padding in the eye socket around the eyeball-- isn't thick enough, so the area surrounding the eye sinks in. This reveals more of the eyeball. So the end result is the same.

The moral of this story is that Leonard Nemoy has like... reverse bug eyes! Look at how much white is showing compared to these other guys! Chris shows more white on one eye, than Nemoy has on both eyes combined. And there is so little sign of the eyeball on the underlid. Look how flat that is. You see that on squint eyes, but squint eyes only look smaller because the upper-upper eyelid--the part between the upper lid and the brows-- covers the outer sides of the eyes. Like Brown's in a way. But his do that because his brow is really low, they're not real squint eyes.

Anyway! The way of the beady eyes has been revealed to me and I am intrigued! I can't figure out why an eye would arrange itself that way. Not yet...

On Wrinkles

2009-12-09T15:51:00.000-08:00

This picture this is cut from is a little messed up. In my defense, my reference was a mess. It's Tom. Oh course. He's smiling. He's twenty-eight now. He's getting little crinkles every where. I can honestly only make educated guesses as to where they are exactly, not having seen him up close with my own eyes.

Wrinkles happen where skin is repeated stressed. So when you look at this picture of Tom's eyes all crinkling up, you can kind of tell where the wrinkles are going to happen. Under the eyebags and down the cheeks.

Yesterday I was looking at my boyfriend's face and there was this crazy fucking eye crinkle running parallel to the pull of the zygomatic major (the smiling muscle).

Shown in figure 7: Not my boyfriend.
So, kind of right across that red line there.

Kinda like this. Except that I can't draw him from memory yet, so this is just a kinda generic eye... Actually, he is pretty generic. Enough of that. That's not the point.
The direction of the wrinkles and crinkles I would expect are marked in red. They make sense. Like gathering fabric, it's obvious the skin would fold there every time he smiled, or squinted or poofed his cheeks out. (The ones right under the eye make sense too. That's the squinting muscle action.) But why in the name of all things Pretty would there be a wrinkle running across the cheek like that?

I stared at him for literally a half an hour before I glanced at my hands and realized how obvious it was.

I forgot, there are two kinds of wrinkles. I call them folded and stretched wrinkles in my head. Because one, (A) happens by being squished all the time. Either by something like the bending of a finger, or the gathering of a smiling cheek. The skin folds in on itself. (B) The other happens because the skin gets stretched by some action. The cheeks ball up when one smiles, they have to stretch horizontally. So when that muscle action stops, the skin falls in on itself. It's like the reverse of the first kind. When the skin isn't being pulled out tight, and stretched, it falls in on itself. Like trying to put a king sized bedspread on a queen sized matress, yeah? There's extra material. And then a really big guy sleeps on it, and all the extra fabric gets pressed into permanent wrinkles. Or like the big guy himself. He's got some spare gut, and it folds into itself. See?

I have a theory that there might be a difference in shape and line quality between these two types. It certainly looks that way from looking at my knuckles (I left the photo all huge like so you can examine that if you like). But hand crinkles are there from birth, so that might be kind of different. I'm not sure.

If that is the case, the implications would be fantastic. It would mean having the ability to look at the different kind of wrinkles on a face and determine with far more accuracy, how and where it moves. Wow. That would be like Christmas in July good. Hopefully I can figure that one out.

I need to get a pair of dark glasses or something so I can stare at people without them seeing. ;)

Work for Today: Tom in Green

2009-12-08T00:41:00.000-08:00

The pressure of trying to make sense is keeping me from posting. So instead of writing anything serious, here's what I've been working on. It's a strait forward project. Pulled a frame of Tom Smith from a youtube video and I just started painting it. Don't ask me why it's green. It's just what I was feeling.

There isn't usually two of him. The background's still boring and I wanted to show how much I did in five hours. The one on the left is the newer one. Also, photobucket killed some of my precious pixels.

The biggest real change is (B) the shading of the crinkles on his forehead onto the temple. I did this to round out his head. Also because that's just the way it works. Forehead crinkles are just like small gathers in a stiff fabric.

On a smaller lever (A) the gathers work in a similar way. I've been noticing these small wrinkles. They're spidery and short. They're not deap enough to really show up in a youtube video shot, they take on more or less the same lightness as the surrounding plane of skin.

(C) It's difficult to draw hair. Because it's smaller than a pixel wide. Part of what I'm learning, is that letting parts of my strokes stay wide and transparent will actually imply a single hair, rising up. Also with hair, less is more. Except when it's not. Sometimes *coughMangacough* less is just less. And it looks like a spiky killer umbrella. Fucking stupid. Sorry, it's getting late. Also, sometimes there are weird shadows on a reference photo that I don't get and it turns out they're shadows of hairs that, for whatever reason, don't show up. Like stray eyebrow hairs and eyelashes. This is very confusing. But also a lot of fun.

(E) The upper-upper eyelid. Tom's got an interesting one. It's kind of taut and it makes a little bowl where the inner corner of his eye meets his nose. Research indicates that there is absolutely no good reason for this. Apparently, the fixed portion of the face only has a limited influence on where soft parts of the face connect. Sometimes, flesh just decides to do shit for lulz. This idea makes my eyes twitch. I want to beleive that if all this is connected, it's all got a reason for doing what it's doing.
Anywho! This area got all stretched out into a nice even arch by his expression, which made it rewarding and um... "tasty" to draw.

(F) I think I'm not alone in my "flat face" trouble. It's hard to make things look 3d. I have this old, bad habit. Some one once told me that using shadows was like pushing parts of the picture back into the page. This was very useful for a time... but it's really not now. The light is coming from stage left-ish here (stage left as in the actor's left, I'm a booth technician these days. So his left), so really, to make his cheek look like it was facing the left more, I had to make it brighter. Not darker. Notice how I colored in little elongated circles. I'm past the point of initial shading, so I use this time of fine tuning to detail, as well as fix planes. The trick is to pretend that you're painting on a 3d surface. Then it's only natural for your strokes to follow the shape of that surface.

(G) This discovery really deserves a post of it's own. I was so excited when I realized that this highlight was actually a foggy reflection of his upper eyelid in his upper-upper eyelid. I think I'll say more on that later.

(H) You can't see that well in this low-res picture, but there are three layers of texturing in there. At least. Probably more. The first is a blurry brush for big lumps in the skin. The second was a sharp, 3 pixel brush in a goldish pink. Those are the flatter portions of skin. Then there's a 1 pixel brush layer for pores and other small imperfections. On Tom, there's a fair amount of super tiny crinkling in this area. Which means a bit more 1 px work than other parts of the face. Skin doesn't have the same texture everywhere. We abuse it differently per piece of face.

(I) Tom is tired. He's got intense second tier eyebags today. Forgive the crappy photobucket edit. I labeled it wrong and I'm being lazy. They rest pretty much right over the orbit.

(J) This is an interesting shadow, that I need to talk about later.

(K) When I was in second grade I twirled baton. I was staring at the gym floor one day and I noticed that where the light hit the floor, the scratches in the floor that were most perpendicular to the rays of light got lit up. That is, it made a circular pattern on the floor. Skin does a very similar thing. Except not scratchs, lumps.

(L) Yeah, I was really happy about that area of texturing.

(M) The front plane of Tom's face is kind of pinkish. You can probably see that. You can see a little of his right side down the side there in dark green. It's hard to draw things at that angle. I really have to work hard to remember to think of it as a nice round wall extending away from me. The texturing on this wall is minimal and distorted, blurred. Or it should be. I haven't quite succeeded yet.

(N) There are an awful lot of planes meeting up right here. It's tricky. Also I think there's a bit of scarring there on Tom. I've got to watch out for that, it makes the light catch in an odd way some times.

(O) A lot of what I do is find these tiny variations in value and color. This set of planes is varied in an attempt to show the rounded shape of his upper lip. His lips are pursed a little ( (P) muscle "orbicularis oris") so it's more round than usual. That last dark green section is quite important in definining that. It's the same effect as the side of his face. In fact, those planes are at a similar angle. Planes at similar angles will pick up light in a similar way. As long as there isn't another plane casting another shadow. I've messed that one up plenty.

This last picture isn't useful to try to explain in words right now. There's far too much going on that I can sort of reproduce, but not necessarily explain.

OH! It's that chin thing again! Except with fuzzies covering the part I was looking at before.

A Discovery: The notation of the orbit.

2009-10-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

After the first sketch of the general shape of the head, the orbits (fig 1) and dark areas inside are the first thing I mark (fig 2).So I was scribbling around the other day and I happened to finish off the shading in the orbit with a little line down the side where the nose was going to be. And I liked it. That's pretty much the sum of the discovery. (fig 3) That if I make this little line to mark the side of the nose I have a lot easier time seeing where the eyes are supposed to go in the grand scheme of things. See, I have this problem, I repeatedly make my eyes too small, too far apart, and crazy crooked. I think keeping better track of the nose, and the relationship of the eye to it, will help.

Keeping proportions straight is just a matter of constantly checking on how each piece of face relates to another. I say 'just' like it's a simple thing. It's like rubbing your tummy, scratching your head and riding your bike with your pants down at your ankles (no, I'm not illustrating that). It's not just eye to nose, it's the pieces of face in between the parts we usually think about that really... connect everything. The spaces between the features are as much, or more important than the features themselves.

(Fig 4) This particular line reminds me of the relationship between the bridge of the nose (A), the eye/bridge valley where glasses rest (B), the connection of the upper-upper eyelid to the bridge of the nose (C), the nose edge of the third eyebag (D, you won't see this clearly on everybody), and the lump of the tear duct (E, something I often forget, I only just realized what I was looking at in this picture as I mapped it out again for this. Ridiculous. Thank god I figured that out, I was so confused what that lighter patch was doing).

It's all ratios and itty-bitty invisible lines with me. They say not to sweat the small stuff. But the big stuff terrifies me more anyway. I figure, if I get enough small stuff right, it'll add up to some good big stuff too. That's totally a fallacy, but it's only slightly worse than most sayings.

Today I've also been thinking about lips. (Fig 5, yes, that's the same picture.) Mostly I've been thinking that they're insane and I don't get why there would be a weird little ridge-y dip thing at the junction of the lip and face skin. What. The. Hell. I think I've almost got it, just let me sleep on it.

On Bug Eyes (And Not Bug Eyes)

2009-10-14T13:48:00.000-07:00

Photos are misleading if one isn't careful.

Fig. 1 Anton Yelchin (Chekov, for people like me who don't actually remember actor names). Borderline bug/almond eyes. Shape of eyeball is clearly shown, but an insufficient amount of white shows when his eyes are at rest. The eyes are obviously popping out of the head, but in the end, the opening of the lids is too small to warrent true bug eye status. We call this "heavy lidded". Toby Maguire (Spider-man, yeah?) is also a good example of this.

This picture is misleading because 1. he's focussed on something closer to him, so his eyes are crossed a little, which, from our angle, shows more whites and 2. you can tell he's opening his eyes more than usual because of the amount of white showing above the iris. See the pie slice of white above the iris? At rest, that's not really there.

Fig. 2 Summer Glau (that robot chick from Sarah Conner Chronicals and that creepy awesome chick from Firefly, for people like me who can't even be bothered to learn character names), kind of a similar deal. Borderline bug/squint eyes. I include all variations of the asian eye shape in with squint eyes. The shape of the eyeball still shows up fairly clearly, and there's a fair amount of white. I don't think either go far enough to warrent true bug eye status.

This picture is misleading because we assume she's looking straight at us, when she's actually looking up at us a little. This makes more white happen under the iris than usual. Also, the white is over emphasized by the dark make-up. That dirty trick goes back to the times of the Egyptians, when pharoahs would use kohl to fuck with the royal artists.

Fig 3. Chris Urbanowicz (Lead guitarist for "Editors" for peopl who aren't like me) being bug eyed and Osiris (Egyptian god, for people who are going to Egyptian hell) being a bastard, by looking up and wearing eye make-up to make his eyes look buggier. When they're obviously squinty.

To sum it all up

Bug eyes (bg s)
Round organs for the purpose of vision and light sensitivity that look like they might pop out of your head at any second.
See also: n. Buggy eyes, Bugginess adj. Bug-eyed, Buggy

Remember:

1. EyeBALLS are round. Because they're BALLS. That' super important, remember that one. EyeBALLS make the skin and stuff in front of them round too. That would be the eyelids.

BALLS.

Eyeballs are amout the size of pingpong balls in humans. This model shows this better and quicker than I can right now. I'll get to that for serious later I think.

2. The shape of the eyes, which I define as the area within the "orbit" of the eye socket, is defined by the relationship between the eyeball, the orbit, and the surrounding fat. Fun term! Orbital fat pad. The orbit can chance size and shape, there can be varying amounts of fat, distributed in various ways.

In a vague mathmatical sense, bug eyes show a large surface area of the underlying sphere, both on the eyelids (not necessarily both) and actual surface of the eyeball. I don't actually have an exact ratio. The trick is that it needs to show on both. If too much of the eyeball is covered, when you look at the person from far away, the upper eyelid will blend with the upper upper eyelid and the eye won't look stick-out enough. It'll look almondy. Or squinty. Or beady.

Which isn't bad. Pretty much no one has eyes that are in just one catagory.

So um... I really don't remember what my point was now.

The point is... eyes are hard because they move about like crazy. There's nothing stationary about the shapes I have to draw, so I have to learn to identify and visualize the underlying structure in order to extrapolate the shapes I want. Yeah?
It's like... it's like if you had a list of a million numbers and you were supposed to memorize them. Can't do it, right? But what if you know for sure that within that list of a million numbers there were strings of thousands of numbers that fell into some sort of order. So the first thousand is just counting by twos, and every third number is '5'. And then. The string of number changes every time you look at it.

So what you have to do, is learn all the underlying equations, and recognize them quickly. That's what this is.

Photos are a quick look at this long list of mysterious numbers and bug eyes are like... y=ax+b or something. I can't continue this metaphor any longer, it's eating my brain.

On Appley Cheeks

2009-09-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

I have created a blog for this mess of nearly meaningless theories of facial structure, recognition and artistic reproduction I've got floating around. A good friend suggested it. I think he's brilliant. You know what that means? Endless babbling about stuff no one in their right mind would allow me to talk about in real life! Why? Because if they let me start, endless babbling would happen!

I guess I'll jump right in with the latest and greatest discoveries. Rather, the discovery before last, because I'm not really sure what I just found on the chin (Fig. 1). Sometimes stuff like this is kind of like finding a pretty rock at the entrance to another dimension while heading out with your spunky pals to rescue your little brother from the jaws of evil. You forget all about the pretty rock until you're faced with the terrifying close-up of the jaws of evil and then the entire theater groans because they know it's that part where the annoying kid throws the pretty rock that they forgot at the monster and wins! Yeah. The chin thing. Whatever it is, it'll be useful later.

The slightly less recent discovery. I am awfully excited about "appley" cheeks. (Example in Fig. 2) It's an absurdly subtle thing and you're going to think I'm crazy. My mother says this is probably "advanced pretty".

The reason these things are so exciting to me is that they explain some of what's going down in cheek land. Cheeks are always tricky to think about. It's like orange jelly in a plastic baggy supported by a bunch of really thin rubber bands.

Our story begins with a friend of mine, who I have to apologize to first. He doesn't like the language I use to describe his face. And I'm probably going to inadvertantly insult him a dozen times before I even finish the second paragraph. Some reassurance, sir. Nothing I'm saying is a judgment on you in any way. Except that you're pretty. And ps, you're face is directly related to Justin Timberlake's. Happy?

Good. Months ago, I confused the hell out of this friend, declaring that his cheeks were "appley" not "poofy". Or maybe the argument was against "marshmallowy"? I don't remember. Because they looked more "solid and intentional". He disagreed, pointing out that if you poked his cheek, it was indeed quite fleshy. Still, I insisted that 'appley' was a far better word for them, I just didn't know why.

(Fig. 3) 'Poofy' is a word I use for... the kind of soft look. I don't say 'fat', because that's not as specific. Fat happens on every one. Poofiness has a certain character to it. Calling a face, or piece of face fat is like describing some one by saying they're black. Tell me a cheek is poofy and I immediately have a general picture of it my head. It's sphere-ish and soft, with few (or just very fine) lines and crinkles. 'Poofy' is like a velvet waterballoon.

I use 'Marshmallowy' to describe a rather different form. When I think 'Marshmallow' I think of the sort of short cylinder shape that marshmallows are. So the general shape is more square, but when you get down to the smaller shapes within the form, things are still kind of rounded. And well... poofy on a small scale.

So when I say some one has a Marshmallow face. I mean it's square with rounded edges (As in Fig. 3, Chris' head is like this). And it might have some poof to it. If I say some one has a poofy face, it's all round.

"Appley" appeared to be something else entirely. I had the vague idea that it had something to do with the front portion of the cheeks, below the eyes. And that they looked... active. Another word without a definition. I only had the one example so I figured it would have to wait.

Weeks passed and I started to think maybe I was just delusional. That appley cheeks were only a myth that I dreamed up in an attempt to make sense of things, and then stubbornly clung to, just to be contrary. I looked for signs of appley cheeks on other people and came up empty handed. Lots of poofy cheeks. Poofy cheeks with high cheekbones might be called appley in some one else's language, but it doesn't look right to me.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I figured out why my friend reminded me of some one else sometime mid-may. (Fig. 4) I love people who remind me of other people. It almost always leads to breakthroughs. I have to work harder to find what makes both of them look different. And then the real candy is when we figure out what's similar. Because that shows what I'm looking at to recognize them.

Yeah. It's a little squiggle-bob. They look similar because of a squiggle-bob. It took me months to figure that out. I've been finding these sort of lines a lot lately. They're a good shortcut to remember a facial character. Though I don't really know what they are.

It's the pretty rock of this story. So forget about it for a paragraph or two while we find some jaws of evil to chuck it at.

Early September, I finally found another example of Appliness. I only had a moment to throw out a super quick scribble (Fig. 5) but it was enough to convince myself I wasn't batshit insane. Insane, maybe. Batshit, no.

It may not show up that well in my quick doodle, but we've also got a really similar line to the one I had not-so-recently found in both my friend, and Tom's faces. The trick is, Tom's cheeks are decidedly not appley.

Here's where sciencey happy stuff happens. So I figure, the cheekline is apparently connected to this appley cheek thing in some way. Two out of three people I've seen with that line have apple cheeks, and the third has a similarly shaped smile. Um... the smile is important because smiles are all about cheeks. So if we've got a similar shape to the cheeks when Tom smiles, and a similar line, there's got to be a similar underlying mechanism, with one or two small differences that make one "appley" on one just um... not appley. I swear this all made perfect sense in my head.

So. I summoned up my inner stalker and went on facebook. Actually, that's not the stalker-ish part. I also opened up my reference folder of 165 references of Tom Smith (Tom pictured Fig. 6). A little backstory, I've been drawing/studying this guy's face for two years. Pretty much every one in my world is described base T.

One page of scribbling, and a tech week's worth of fuzzy logic later... the important difference is that our original subject has a bigger nose. (I know a nice young man who's hating me a little right now.) Wider really, at bridge.

Looking at figure 6 and 7, you can see the two smile lines happening on Tom. The ones running from nostril past the corner of the mouth. There's a certain shape cheeks take when the "zygomatic major" is active. (That's one of two major smiling muscles.) The cheek balls up kinda under the eyes and makes a long crinkle perpendicular to the muscle itself. Like gathering fabric with a single stitch, if you're a person who sews.

The key word here is "active". I had this word in my head when describing "appely" to myself. Along with the sense that having kind of round bits in front was important. I also knew that the smile was important somehow.

So... What would it look like if a cheek had all the clues for a smile already there? Well, it would have more fat in the front, creating a roundy bit and a little dip/crease area by the nostril, similar to the smile line. Cool. Now I'm going to show you an absurdly subtle example picture. The green lines should show the contour. Hopefully. The first two floating heads are Tom with his own, narrow bridged nose. The second two are what might happen if his nasil bone randomly got wider. (And maybe a little taller too. Sorry, I don't mean to muddy the waters, I'm still learning here too.)

Mmmm.... next time I'll make a bigger example picture. (Fig 8) The point is, with a wider nose, the front area of the cheek wouldn't be as flat. The angle of the flesh that comes down off the side of the nose is softer. So the... 'height' of the cheek is a little greater under the eye. Where the smiles happen. And because it's thicker, the shadow near the nose is a little greater. Making that great faux smile line.

I'm still uncertain how this move might effect the outer portion of the cheeks. Something to remember as I keep working.

Cheekbones also play a big role in this. Because um, they're cheekbones. Obviously. I only have superficial evidence of, well, anyone's cheekbone shape. Because I don't make a habit of cutting open people's faces. Or randomly poking people in the face to see where the cheekbone ends.

Pretty much, I think the cheekbones have to be in a sort of mid way Goldilocks zone for Appley cheeks to really show. People with cheekbones that are higher will tend to get really strong triangular shapes down the side of their face, that overshadow the appliness. Morgan Freeman, back up there in Figure 2, is really close to that catagory. Not quite though.
People with cheekbones that are too low won't have the support under the apple (in the more traditional, make-up person sense of the word) of the cheek. And the cheek will collapse in a kind of William DaFoe kind of way.

Finally, there is a degree of facial fat that's required for this to work. It has to live right there near the side of the nose. The thing I'm still curious about is what makes fat want to live there over some place else? Is it the nice weather? I hear there's a nice school for fat kids in the orbital fad pad, why not there? Tis a puzzlement.

Worth noting, the portion of the cheek that gets appley is part of what I call the "third eyebag" or "third tier eyebag". Don't try to google it. I made it up. I think that's a horse of a different color for another pony ride. I've been working on translating this mess of a thought to english for the better part of two days.

Phew. That was harder than I thought it would be.