Alright you lot, hows it going.
As the title suggests, today we’re looking at drawing facial expressions.
It’s not something I’ve practiced a lot but since my focus at the moment is to learn
new things, I though why not give it a go.
It’s really important I think to have a wide range of facial expressions in your drawing
repertoire, most of us stick to that standard neutral face which is fine and is probably
what you’re gonna use the most to be honest but whenever it comes to drawing something
with a bit of action, a bit of emotion or something with a story behind it, you’re
never gonna really be able to convey that without a few different expressions under
your belt.
So for reference today I went on deviantArt, there are sooo many of these facial expression
sheets that people really generously make and publish for artists to use, so I’ll
leave the one I used linked below.
But yeah I wanted to go for a some really varied ones.
You’ll have seen I started out really quickly by just drawing some quick head shapes around
the page to give me a template of where each face would be just so they wouldn’t all
be running into each other.
Then I started with just a plain side view as a sort of warm up since that’s something
I’m relatively confident with.
I do a really quick light sketch first to just get the gist of the different shapes
and things where I want them to be and once it looks right I’ll go in with a heavier
hand to give darker, more confident lines.
Err I’m not at a point yet where I feel like I can really stylise this kind of thing,
these drawings are more just observational, I haven’t learnt enough about facial expressions
to have a good enough foundation to really exaggerate things or put a twist on it, but
since I do always work quite quickly with my preliminary, lighter sketches and I tend
to keep things either quite angular or just like simple shapes, I do think that helps
to make things look a little bit more stylised I guess, that’s just my way of laying out
a drawing anyway so I think since I always use the same approach, the finished piece
will end up looking like something I’ve drawn.
If you know what I mean.
So one tip that I can give you that I picked up during this practice is when drawing mouths
in weird positions, or any positions really, I’ve found it helps to start with the inside
of the mouth, the inside shape, and then add the lips after.
So even if the mouth is shut, you would draw the line in the middle where the lips meet,
obviously making sure that line is the right shape or angle or whatever to convey whatever
expression you’re trying to convey and then add the lips in around it and yeah, that’s
been really effective for me.
Uhh let’s see what else can I talk about.
Okay let me try and answer another anonymous ask I got on tumblr.
To paraphrase the person basically said is it ever too late to pursue art or get into
an art school.
They’re 20 with no prior education or knowledge but they’re passionate and can’t imagine
doing anything else in life.
I mean listen, I’m not an expert on anything okay, I’m not a careers advisor, I only
know my own personal experiences, so don’t take my word as the gospel.
All I know is, even though I’ve been drawing since I was little, I never had any proper
training, all I knew was that this has consistently been what I wanted to do in life, so I took
the steps to make that happen.
And I’m STILL taking steps to make that happen.
I mean, I KNOW its not that simple, trust me, because we have financial or economic
factors and social factors that can stop us from pursing things but like, you can come
up with a plan that works for you.
If the goal is art school then learn about what it takes to put together a portfolio,
look into the schools you’d be interested in going to and see what requirements they
have, see if you can get in contact with anyone that’s been there and find out what steps
they took to get in.
If it’s gonna cost money, then start saving.
It might take years to save up but as long as you’ve got an achievable plan in place,
you’re working towards what you want and you’ll get there eventually and in the meantime
you could be working on building your knowledge and your skills.
I actually wanna talk about that in more detail, you know being self-taught, studying or even
just LEARNING more about art so let me know if you’d wanna hear more about that kind
of thing, I’m gonna do a video on it soon.
So yeah hopefully the person that asked that question is watching but I think this could
really apply to anyone who’s not sure about pursuing any thing.
It’s never too late.
I always just think to myself what’s the alternative.
Live the rest of your life thinking 'I could’ve at least tried’.
Anyway, we;re coming to the end of the video, didn’t expect to end up preaching but here
we are.
Thanks so much for watching guys, I’ll see you all in my next one.
Bye!