Hi, my name is Chris Legaspi. I'm a professional movie poster artist,
author, and instructor and today, we're going to talk about how to design heads for movie posters.
I've been working in industry now for several years. Some of my more notable projects include
Deadpool, Shaft, Birds of Prey, and you might be wondering, does this still exist? Well, I was
thinking the exact same thing and yes, it does. In fact, one of the greatest movie poster artist ever
is still alive and working today, Drew Struzan, still doing hand-drawn, hand-ilstrated movie
posters and what's more in demand besides the actual finished poster is all the concept and
design work that goes into every finished poster and that's what we're going to focus on today.
Now, you might be wondering "Why design? Why is design important? I just want to draw Tom Cruise,
why is design important?" Well, in this business, every movie poster has to really
grab your attention and design is the main tool to do that and for artists, we're required to be
not only very, very good be able to draw faces and characters very, very well but we also have
to be very, very fast. It's a high demand business and design for me is the main tool
to do that because not only it helps me to be fast but also to be accurate and get that
killer likeness and really that's our main responsibilities as artists.
We have to get the likeness and we have to communicate the story and the feeling
of our movie. Design is simply the ability to organize shapes and when we're doing
heads and faces for movie posters, there's really three main shapes that I look at. First,
it's the primary shape, the secondary shapes, and then the smaller detail shapes.
So, the major shapes are things like the outline, the silhouette, and the contour.
That's really important. Things like head type, we want to make sure we get that to look and feel
like our character, our actor. Secondary shapes are things like planar shapes, the
shape of your eye socket, and maybe a little bit underside of your nose, the nose itself could be
a big secondary shapes and also the shape of the hair relative to the shape of the face
and things like costume pieces. So, those are the big secondary shapes.
And finally, the detail shapes. So, these are the smaller shapes and these are specifically
shapes of value that I look for. Light and dark, specifically things that tend to be
very dark naturally like for example, the the eyebrow, your pupil, the shadow under your nose,
underside of your lips.
So all of these together can help
us create the full picture of the portrait that we're trying to draw.
Now I'm going to demonstrate these ideas and show you how to put all these shapes together.
So, when you're choosing references for this exercise or you're choosing actors,
start with faces that have very obvious head type. You know,
you want ones that have clear sharp rectangular clearly round. You know, make it easier
for yourself at the beginning and then you can get into other faces and actors and characters that
have more subtle features but in the beginning when you're first learning and training your eye,
start with head types and head shapes that are very obvious and very clear.
Okay, we're going to begin with the major shape so, that is the outer shape also known as the
silhouette or the contour. So, this will help me sort of not only define the character or the actor
but also the 2D space. And then once I have the major silhouette, then I go for the
head type - this is what you're seeing here. And the head type is basically in this case it's a
front view so that's the general shape of his face and his head type is quite rectangular and long.
Now that I have the major shapes, now I'm going to go for the secondary shapes and to me that's
some of the more major plane, so the side plane - like defining the side plane, the cheek there
and the plains of the eye socket. That's a really important plain for likeness and just overall
structure of head drawing and obviously things like the nose and also the mouth.
So, gotta be mindful of the shape of the mouth, the thickness, and its plains as well.
Okay, the last set of shapes that I need to define are the detail shapes. So, to get the detail
shapes, I look for the light and dark shapes, the high contrast shapes. So, these are typically be
the eyebrow, the pupil, the shadow under your eyelid creates a dark shadow but also
a unique shape that helps with the likeness and then of course the nostrils and the small
shadow shapes like where the nostrils meet the face and then obviously, I can refine the shape
of the lips in this case specifically the top lip because that's also plain and then also some
of the smaller dark shapes at the side of the lips and then the underplane of the lower lip.
So basically, their features and parts of the features that create light and dark shapes as
well. Okay, I got all of my important shapes defined. Now, I'm just going to continue to
bring up the drawing. I'm going to start by filling in my shapes with the tone. Really,
I'm starting to begin the finishing process. So, this starts with adding light and dark shapes,
filling in the dark shapes in this case and adding the gradual things like the half tones,
the transition tones, starting to show form as well but the most important thing I want to start
is clearly define what's light and what's dark - a very simple light and dark value pattern at first.
Obviously, I also want to make sure that the detail shapes which were the
dark shapes that I called out, they're clearly defined in this case.
And here I'm using a prismacolor black pencil. So this is a softer pencil so it gets a little
bit darker. Most of my tones are blocked in and they're reading well. I feel pretty good about
the likeness. And now I'm just going to continue to refine the lighting and the shading really just
take this drawing to a nice finish and make it a sketch that could be used for a poster comp.
Okay, now it's your turn. So, to help you improve these skills, here's some homework
exercise I recommend. First, before you do every exercise, do some warm ups. So, just
sketch some head types and head shapes and you can exaggerate and play with them just to
get yourself warmed up and then, learn to train your eye to see the outer shape,
the silhouette. Remember, that's the most important foundation of our drawing.
So, study the contour. You don't have to grow any detail. You don't have to do any finish drawing
and I recommend doing them fairly small so you can do a lot. You can jump on like a Pinterest
page or a folder of your own reference that has a bunch of faces, a bunch of actors or characters
and just start to practice and see - get a good head type first and exaggerate and get
the nuance and character of each one and the third exercise is what I call poster vision.
So, this is where you start to get into the detail shapes. So, once you become familiar
with doing the outer shape, the outline, and the silhouette and getting a good head type,
now, you want to come in and start doing the detail shape. So, these will be the light
and dark shapes, mostly things like the brow, the eyebrow, the little shadow under the nose.
You can start to get a little bit more specific and again, don't worry too much about the detail.
Just learn to train your eye first. Make them very simple, only black and white. No need to do
full-finish drawing or any shading. Again, this will just help you to see these detail shapes
and then be able to describe them on paper and don't forget to share your work. Use the
#Proko or #headdesign. We'll be able to see your work online and that's all for this
video. I want to thank you for watching. I look forward to seeing your work online real soon.