The Head and Face

If the body and a pose show a personality in a character, it is the face that pulls you in. This is where you make contact with the viewer, this is where the character becomes ‘real’.

When it comes to drawing faces, I’m a stickler.

If you zoom in the image above, you will notice the face I end up with in the final line art is slightly different from where I started from. This is not really a mistake, but a process I usually go through. Like I said, I’m a stickler on faces. I never deemed any sketch as finished until I draw that last line. Leonardo da Vinci has claimed to have quoted “Art is never finished, only abandoned”, and that is how I approach pretty much drawing.

TIP: I watched a video of Mythbuster Adam Savage talking about Dodos, the Maltese Falcon, and the Art of Obsession (search for it on Youtube) and it inspired me. There, he talked about his obsessions and how he has a folder in his computer called ‘Creative Projects’ where he stores images upon images of things he’d like to do. Following his lead, since 2009 I have managed to collect tons and tons of images of faces. Categorized by expressions, emotions, hair styles, hair colors, etc. If I find myself stuck at a certain facial expression, or if I can’t figure in my head what I want to convey, I dive into the hundreds upon hundreds of photos and find inspiration.