Trace them. Or use a ruler. Don’t fuck around. Like. I could write you a book about angles and proportions but there are so many books, and you can get a book if you want, but faces in perspective are hard as hell. Even if you know what’s supposed to happen, it can take a long time to get the hang of it, and it can take a long time to train your eyes how to see it, so give yourself some training wheels. That kind of thing… the skills won’t come from knowing what to do but by repetition and getting used to seeing what happens.
For practice, you could draw yourself in the mirror. Or get a bunch of screen caps of a character from a single scene where his face angle changes. Trace them. Compare them so you learn to see the differences.
To worried youths in my inbox: Tracing is a tool. It’s not cheating. That’s a bullshit notion perpetuated by little boys who can’t draw Batman.
Art is not a magic trick that comes from the sky and infuses your hands with divine powers. Inspiration is a lie. Natural talent is an even bigger lie.
Nobody expects a surgeon to be able to do brain surgery without a chart, a scan, a ruler, the right tools, an entire team, a hospital, and practice.
Trace the damn thing. Use the tools you need to make the art you want to make. Even Michelangelo traced.
I think a lot of people who don’t make art and therefore don’t know how art gets made insist on having opinions anyway about how art should be made
And that’s garbage
You can’t replace skill. That’s why we say tracing is a tool, because it’s ONLY a tool. You can’t trace and end up with this:
Trace to help you see. Trace to get from here to there. Don’t waste your time waiting to be a magician.
I forgot camera obscura is a thing. I remember being shocked and–not knowing better at the time–slightly disappointed when my art teacher pointed out that one piece I was admiring was done with camera obscura. Even now, years later, I still feel like I’m cheating when I trace. The truth is, tracing is not easy either, and it helps tremendously. Thank you op for addressing this. We should not have to feel guilty or explain ourselves to anyone regarding the techniques we use to create art.
Anti-anything in art is almost totally guaranteed to be the product of elitism in art. It’s one group of people wanting to control what stories get told, and you do that by elevating and mystifying storytelling, allowing it to be seen as a divine skill that only a select few have been chosen to have, while at the same time invalidating all other methods as vulgar or dishonest.
In the Renaissance, it was the Church doing the controlling, and that body has changed over the years, but it’s still white men, and it’s still the patriarchy or the wealthy, it’s still colonialism. It’s still hetero and cis. It’s still able bodied and able minded. It’s still the belief that one person can be more valuable than another.
You are the sovereign of your story and how it gets told. Gatekeeping is bullshit.
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