Hi I'm Lillian Gray, South African fine artist and this lesson is all about how to draw years.
Let's just admitted ears actually looks super weird, they look fumbled up and made me think of
a crumpled up cloth, or maybe a cauliflower. We tend to think of ears a super random,
and I've seen many artists simply drawing little squiggles to depict them, a great cop-out. In this
lesson I will show you how to make sense of ears with an easy drawing technique. One you can use to
either draw ears from memory or from a reference. First let's just understand what ears are meant
to do. The outer ear called the Concha catches sound waves and channels them into the narrow
passage called the ear canal. This is why the Concha pushes the ear out at the top, the Concha
pushes the ear away from the head at the back and not at the front. Therefore the face of the ear
is a bit slanted. The Concha also pushes the air out more at the top than at the bottom. This also
gives the ear a slant from the front. Placing the ear on the head. As artists we need to know
where to place the ears correctly on the head when drawing the portrait. From the front your ears are
in line with your brow line and your nose. This only applies to adults and not children and the
elderly. More on this later! When drawing the ear on the side of the head, the ears remains in line
with a brow line and the length of the nose. You will notice that ears starts where the jaw stops,
at the central horizontal line. The ear is not in line with the center line, it is tilted away from
the center line. If you draw the head using the Loomis method, the ear is located in the lower
quadrant of the circle. Ears also tend to help us determine the tilt of the head. When the head
is tilted down the ears move up when the head is tilted up the ears move down. Use the ears
to help you determine the axis of your portrait before you start drawing all the facial features.
The ear in basic shapes. Now that we know where to place the ear on the head, we move on to make
sense of all the creases in the ear. A super easy way to break it down is to think of the number
9 and the letter Y. Do you see the resemblance? Remembering this number and a letter is a helpful
way to not only simplify ears but also to draw them from memory. Now let's take a closer look
at the structure of the ear to analyze the fold in the ear even more. The outer area is called
the helix. The evil twin of the helix is called the anti helix and this is our Y. The little knob
protecting the air tunnel is called the Tragus and his evil twin is called the anti tragus. See,
those are easy to remember. Just bear in mind two sets of twins. Then there is the ear notch
that looks like a keyhole, and the lobe that we usually pierce. Ears come in many shapes and sizes
and people's conchae and helixes really determine how far the ear protrudes from the skull, or how
big they look. We also get various lobes. There is the hanging lobe known as the free lobe or the
attached lobe. Regardless of your subject matter, you always need to determine the direction of your
light source when doing art. When the light source is coming from the general right hand top corner,
light tends to falls on the ear like this: The top of the helix is lit, as well as the bulge
of the anti helix and anti tragus. This casts dark shadows on these areas. The darkest value
usually indicates the entrance to the ear tunnel. When shading the ear be aware of the contours,
the little indents and the bulges. This usually helps me a lot and determining which edge of the
helix, the anti helix and anti Targa's catches the light, and which edge is cast in shadow.
As an artist you also need to be aware of how ears change through the different stages of
life. Babies have the cutest little ears and to me they look like they are made out of icing sugar,
so cute and petite. But then we start to grow up. Bones stop growing after puberty and muscles and
fat cells also stop dividing, but cartilage, that plastic-like stuff in ears and noses. Cartilage
continues to grow until the day you die. Not only does cartilage grow but the earlobes elongate from
gravity and that makes your ears look even larger. I've seen some old men with massive noses and
long droopy ears. For exercise number one, I'd like you to familiarize yourself with the basic
shapes of the ear. Practice the 9y technique and see if you can add the shading as well.
For exercise number two, I'd like you to draw ears from various angles. See if you
can determine the head's main axis by looking at the ears. That's it for this lesson and I
hope you guys now know how to approach this complicated little cauliflowers. Be sure to
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