Today's critiques are gonna focus on the abstraction.
Now, for those of you new to this or you're just coming to this video and you don't know
what's going on here, the abstraction is a portrait drawing aid that I learned in art
school to do the initial lay-in or the initial sketch for a portrait or figure drawing.
And it was based off the abstraction system of Frank Reilly who used to teach way long
ago in the 20th Century.
And he broke down the figure and the head into a simple abstract version where the forms
and the planes and the features all interlock with one another.
And I found it was actually a great way to not only draw portraits and do the initial
lay-in, but actually to help me in my caricature work when I'm drawing extremely grotesquely
exaggerated faces that I want to still maintain a degree of realism and perspective and consistency
and anatomy within the caricature.
So after doing the initial rough sketch on of a caricature, I would overlay an abstraction
grid on top of the drawing or I'd draw the abstraction right on to my rough sketch to
see areas that are off, that could be improved, that where the alignment isn't quite right
because I do like the characters to have that sense of reality.
And I'm encouraging my students to do the same thing because you want to be able to
have control over your characters.
You don't want them to get away from you and just let distortions reign free.
We want to exaggerate the likeness, not succumb to accidental distortions and making stuff
too big or too crooked when we didn't intend to.
The whole idea here is to just be able to maintain control of what you're doing and
to see where you went wrong.
And the abstraction is just an aid or a tool to help you do that.
Now, the abstraction drawings, when we look at them they're going to be very mechanical-looking
and robotic.
And you usually don't even see a likeness anymore in them.
And that's not their point.
The point of the abstraction, like I said, is to help fix the structure and the construction
of the rough sketches so that the next step after the abstraction is where we'll actually
do our final drawing.
And that's where the personality and the likeness will come back into it.
So we're gonna be seeing a lot of mechanical drawings today that you will think won't have
a good likeness, but that's something we're going to be digging back out of the abstractions
in the following steps in the next lesson.
So with that, let's take a look at some recent student works and find out where they could
be improved.
Okay, here's a caricature by Sonal Prabhune who posted her work on Facebook in our caricature
group, where she's shown her original photo and drawn an abstraction over the original
rough sketch.
Okay.
And here is the work of Miguel Arguelles, who did an Emma Watson.
And it's a pretty decent, little rough sketch.
I like the likeness that's going on there.
It's not extremely exaggerated, but that's okay.
And the abstraction that Miguel has here got a little off, and it's uneven.
It's not quite matched up from side to side.
It doesn't look very symmetrical.
And again, it looks like he just used the abstraction on top of the rough sketch without
actually altering it too much, without altering the shapes or correcting anything.
So that's what we're gonna do in this one here.
So let's do my version of the abstraction on Emma Watson here.
I like how you did find the skull shape and didn't just draw the abstraction around the
outside of the hair, because we are concerned with the head construction here, and the hair
can sometimes make that a little confusing to find, but you did an okay job there.
Just keeping the lines very simple and generic, I don't wanna get involved in any of the contours
of the face just yet.
One thing that I do see right now that I can correct with the abstraction is the neck.
The neck seems like it's too far back on the head.
And I want to make it look like she's not pushing her head forward so much like as if
you have in your sketch here so I'm gonna bring this neck forward.
And we can still maintain the appearance of a thin graceful neck even if it's a little
bit thicker so you don't have to worry about that there.
We can actually lengthen it a bit if you want.
Now, it just feels like the head's sitting on the neck a little bit more naturally.
All right, let's find the centerline.
That's the next important step.
I see her head is being turned to the left just a little bit more than what you have
in your sketch so I moved the centerline of the face just a bit to mimic that angle better.
Then let's find the angles of the eyes, nose, and mouth.
It's important that all three of these lines are parallel with one another.
I see that your eyes are actually a little bit deviating from the alignment of the rest
of the face so that's one thing where we'll fix that in this abstraction.
Let's find the temple rhythm here.
And the circular rhythm of the temple really wouldn't be visible on this far side.
It might creep around just a little bit but not enough to really make a point of showing
it.
But it would be something like that, I guess.
Now, let's find the brow rhythms.
Let's bring his forehead out just a bit because it seems like I want that rhythm to be a little
bit longer on the far side here, this brow rhythm.
So stay flexible and stay critical of your drawing at every stage.
Don't get stuck just tracing your rough sketch.
Make sure you're making corrections with the abstraction.
That's what it's for.
Now, let's find the lower orbit of the eyes, the rhythms of the crease of the upper eyelids.
These things don't really have fancy names.
I'm just describing where they're at and what shapes that they're representing.
And it looks a little uneven.
Let me raise the arching line a little bit higher on the right over here.
Okay.
Now, let's find the ear-to-chin rhythm here.
So her head's tilted down just a little bit so her ears are up a bit higher than her brow,
right about there.
So I like the placement that you have her ears right now.
That's good.
So I can see here by dropping that you had a chin rhythm down on the left side of the
face here that the chin may want to end up coming out a little bit further than what's
in the initial lay-in if we want it to be even.
So we'll keep that in mind.
I'll get to that just a little bit later.
Let's find the rhythm of the underside of the cheek down to the nose, and then just
lay in in her ear on the far side really quick.
In the photo, you can't really see her ear on the far side because her head is turned
too much.
But in caricature, sometimes, we do see the ear on the far side more often because, you
know, popping them out and exaggerating their width is something kind of fun to do.
It's not totally necessary for this sketch, but the hair may end up covering it later.
We'll see.
Now, let's go ahead and draw the rhythm from the eyebrow down to the front plane of the
nose.
And remember that front plane of the nose has to come out in front of the centerline
of the face just a bit in order for it to look three-dimensional.
Now, let's draw the side planes of the nose down to the bottom.
It's gonna be one single egg-shaped or oval-shaped rhythm.
And let's find the bottom plane of the nose.
Well, right now, let's find the top of the nostril leading into the nasal labial rhythms,
front plane of the chin which interrupts the nasal labial rhythm.
And then we can see how much further past the ear-to-chin rhythm this nasal labial rhythm
goes.
I wanna make sure it matches on this side over here, then it's wrapping around the head
in perspective.
Raise this up just a little bit higher and drop this down a little bit more to make sure
they're more even.
On her face, I don't see a muscle rhythm like at all because she has such a young, firm
face.
But if I were to draw it, it would probably be about here.
I don't see any divisions in the face giving me any clues where they're at, but it's good
to have to dig it into to draw the muscle rhythm if you ask me because there might be,
in some faces where you don't initially see a change in light or form there, there might
be a slight change that you're missing.
Or if you can insert some plane changes in the final rendering, this will help map out
where that's going to be.
Because even if her fat pockets on her face are not clearly defined as they would be on
an older person, they are there.
They're just smoothed out at this young age.
Okay.
And let's go ahead and find the rhythms of the upper eyelids.
It runs essentially parallel to the rhythms of the crease of the upper eyes.
Let's find the distance between where the inside corners of the eye would be in relation
to the centerline of the face.
So it looks like your eye over here on the right is a little bit too far out compared
to the eye on the left.
Well, I am changing the position of them a bit so that's probably why that looks so off.
Let's go ahead and draw the orbs of the eyes in right here.
And she's looking right at the camera so the pupils and irises will be complete circles
looking right at us here.
Again, this is not something I always do in my rhythms and abstractions.
It's just to show as much details in the eyes.
But I thought it was necessary.
And I'm going back down to the front plane of this chain here, and I think it will behoove
us to change the front shape of the chin a little bit here to bring it out a bit more,
not quite so squared off but just a little more forward.
Because one thing distinctive about her is I think she does have kind of a distinct chin.
It's kind of boney and not a large chin, but it definitely has a distinct presence on her
face.
And the triangular septum rhythm of the lower face, you can see how the mouth is a bit asymmetrical
now.
She is smirking, but it looks like it's a little bit too much here so I'm gonna just
bring the corner of the mouth out to the left a bit more here.
And the rhythm will be asymmetrical, I think.
It's not gonna be...you know, since she is smirking, I am gonna alter the rhythm to her
particular expression.
It doesn't have to be totally even every time.
Whenever you make a conscious choice to make a crooked shape or an uneven shape, this is
the time where you're gonna plan it out and make it look good.
And remember, the corner of the mouth will not meet the nasal labial rhythms.
There's gonna be a bit of a gap here, and that's where that node rhythm would be.
Even on her, it's not really visible, but this is where the nodes will be.
They'll be pretty small on her.
Okay.
And the only other thing I would probably do is create a rhythm for the hair because
it is...it goes off her head quite a bit and has its own distinctive shape.
So I'm just gonna, as simply as possible, find where that hair is.
And it's pretty similar to where you've already drawn it, Miguel, but I'll keep it as simple
as possible.
I don't wanna get involved in all the contours of the hair just yet.
I just wanna look for the average shape and draw that in.
And there's two locks of hair down here, and I would just express them as one simple connecting
shape because that's kind of what they're doing here.
Here's one strand and here's the other, and they're almost meeting at the bottom there.
So everything on the face, you wanna make sure you give it a strong sense of design.
You don't wanna just draw random strands of hair and have them hope that they look okay.
Let's go ahead and really plan them out.
Here's another sort of lock of hair hanging down in front of her ear.
It has a definite S-curve shape to it.
And this is a case where I'm just modifying the idea of the abstraction of the rhythms
to help sculpt her hair in a little bit more of a conscious way.
Okay.
Again, it looks mechanical, robotic and scary.
It doesn't really look like Emma at this point, but I'm confident that her likeness is in
there.
And if you develop this to the next stage, I think you'll see that it will be a good,
more solid sketch than your rough sketch originally was.