Facial recognition 


This was a 5-minute diversion at work today. (At least it seemed like only 5 minutes to me. I have been known to lose my sense of time when I start to draw. It’s one of the reasons I do it.)

I started with an effort to draw a nice set of lips. Notice the shading of the top lip in contrast to the sparse lines on the bottom. When I first drew the lips, I closed out the bottom lips. They looked fake and had no life to them. So, I erased the bottom lines that connected the bottom lip with the line between the lips on the left and right. That made it look more natural.

I also added some contour lines to the bottom lip to give it a round, 3-dimensional feel.

Once that was done, I added the eyes and the nose. Then I played with the hair. Notice how I closed out the hair shapes? They are essentially curved triangles. Too often I get stuck thinking of hair as a bunch of parallel lines instead of textured shapes that have volume. Here I was looking to get that shape that represents clumps of hair.

I’m only marginally happy with the shapes of the hair here. It’s a little too clumpy for what I was going for.

After I added the hair I did some work on the cheek and shape of the face. It was interesting to see how the shape of the face could change the feeling of the face. Lower cheek bulge and rounder chin felt heavy and feminine.

A higher cheek bone with a straighter line to the chin feels more masculine.

The lips fit more naturally into a wider face. Once I narrowed the face, it took on a more masculine feel and the lips started to look a little out of proportion, or a little more like Mic Jager.

I then added the head band and erased the hair that was there. Notice the way the circles for stones get more  oblong as they go around the head.

It was, as I said, a fun, 5-minute diversion from work.