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

(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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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.