Faces are Hard

As promised. Another post with more drawings! As you may have guessed, this post is mostly about faces :D

Also, my dog...who is yawning. Which is a perfect segue into faces! (Turns out it wasn't a good segue, but I'm too lazy right now to think of a better transition, so deal with this awkward jump in topic.) A coworker turned me on to a comic called Lackadaisy Cats, which is a brilliantly drawn and fairly well written comic about cat-people. The real gems for me were a small collection of pages describing the artist's methods for drawing expressions and building characters. In short, a face boiled down to a sphere with a couple of lines at the horizontal and vertical center and some features based on those lines. Easy, right?

Sometimes circles are hard, let alone a sphere. Regardless, the cat-people served as inspiration and got me practicing face drawing. My first exercise was to trace a face and get a feel for how they worked... Where should lines go to define features? How big is a mouth? A nose? Eyes? How the fuck do you draw an ear?

 

After I traced I drew the "same face" freehand. I bet you can't even tell which one is which. My freehand drawing started off with the eyes and the smile not matching up, resulting in a very creepy looking face. It still kind of is. Regardless, I just need to practice more.

Bald people are easy. I haven't figured out the whole hair thing. Or ears. Mine always end up looking like they are bent out from the head on the top and bottom. I'll have to work on that. There is more in the pipe, and my next post should help explain the title of my blog! There's a sneak peak down below a:)

~Chris

Busy Week

Turned out to be a pretty crazy week, and I didn't get as much time to draw as I had hoped I would... Oh well. Iggy hurt his paw pretty badly while Fiancee was on lunch, tearing his nail and landing himself a trip to the vet. Seems like he is there every month for something different. It's always something with that dog. Regardless, I came home to find a very drugged out and miserable puppy.

Yeah, yeah. I cheated and used my other sketch of Iggy with a cone around his head and a bandage where his paw was, but you get the idea. He's been moping around all week and running into everything when he has his cone on, which is actually pretty funny. Of course, he has a ton of energy now that it's been a week without any exercise but he still can't go anywhere. Instead, he sits on the couch watching me draw.

This one is a work in progress...actually, all my stuff is a work in progress. I seem to be able to do the loose sketches, but when I tray and draw a contiguous line it ends up looking worse than my stick figure bear. Not sure what to do about that, but I'll figure something out eventually.

While having the dog mope around this week has been lots of fun, the real adventure was last night, when Fiancee, Iggy, and I were headed to my parents house for my older brother's birthday. We were getting close to their house when...

Ed (my Sentra) is currently on life support in a towing lot. The insurance is likely going to have us pull the plug. I guess the old man behind us decided he was too good for stopping... or for sticking around. He drove off right after he hit us, but the guy behind Old Man grabbed the plate number and passed it on. The police were helpful, and the insurance lady was great too. Unfortunately, dealing with both at the same made me want to scream. Deciding whether the police or the insurance should call a tow truck is not something on my to-do list immediately after being hit. Never again. Next time I'll just call the insurance when I'm safely home and comfortable.

Just before the tow truck showed up, Old Man made his triumphant return. And the first thing he asked?

"How long have you been here?"

"About 50 minutes..."
"Oh, that sounds about right. I think I probably hit you."

/facepalm

The police got his statement and followed him to his house to get insurance information. Thankfully I won't have to deal with a hit and run and Old Man's insurance should cover everything. Now we just have to play the waiting game.

Here's hoping next week is less stressful.

~Chris

P.S.
There will be another post with more drawings later this weekend.