2: Still stiff, but the drawing on the right is starting to loosen up
3: 1st drawing to begin to approach what I am striving for
4: Starting to get there, but I see lots of mistakes when I compare the drawings to the photos this way
Drawing real humans is a lot harder than drawing cartoon characters out of simple shapes (like that's not obvious)I especially struggle with being able to see the subtle tilts in the head positions.
Translating those positions into 3 dimensional space is not what I was born to do.
I don't know why anyone would want to try animating this kind of thing, but it's good to study. The results of trying to animate humans never looks worth the effort.
Slowly but surely, some of this is starting to make sense to me. I'm beginning to see the logic in how hair styles form around heads and how gravity affects them - depending on their length and the style of the cut.
I'm having some trouble with the faces though. The way these are lit, it's hard to see the shadows that might reveal the subtle planes in the faces. Instead, I just see wide areas of flesh color between the features of the eyes, nose and mouth. This tends to make the features look like they are floating in space. Just like animated humans.
I'd probably learn more drawing ugly faces.
Things I've gleaned so far:
1: Longer hair is generally tighter at the top of the head and wider at the ends. Because it's lighter at the bottom. Hair at the top is being pulled down by the weight at the bottom.
In shorter hair cuts, the hair tends to spring up at the top, presumably because hair has some upward motion to it when it's not being pulled by stronger gravitation.
2: Asian heads:
So far I'm observing that they have wide and large cheekbones, small mouths and chins
Their lower faces give the illusion that they are longer than their upper faces (above the eyes)
The tops of the bridges of their noses are lower than what I would have expected.
Their eyes seem wider apart than what I'm used to drawing. Although maybe it's that us white people have close set beady eyes and too tall noses. Maybe we look like baboons to people of other lands.
All this could be illusory though because I am looking at models, rather than average people. I also think that these models might have been chosen because they tend to conform to western standards of beauty.
I would need to draw tons of people before I would swear to these generalities.
