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

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.

On Beady Eyes: A Discovery (And some babbling)

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 Bug Eyes (And Not Bug Eyes)

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.