Concern #1 – How to Get a Likeness?

You’re going to want to pay close attention here as getting a likeness between what’s on the page and the person you are drawing is often a tricky problem that can stop you from getting the success with your drawings that you are looking for.

The head is broken up into 5 basic components and each and every one of them is important.  The parts of the head that you need to focus on and pay attention to are:  The nose, the eyes, the mouth, the hair and the general shape of the head.  Notice that I didn’t include ears in this list, and to be sure there are some wacky looking ears out there, but for the most part an ear is an ear, and unless the person you are drawing has something especially strange going on in the ear department, you’ll be fine with just concentrating with the five categories I listed above.

What you are going to need to do, and in the course you will learn a whole lot more about this, is first of all know how to draw these parts of the head – and they’re not that hard, but once you know how to draw their basic shape and placement on the face in relation to each other, you really need to tailor the details to that specific person.

Have you heard of this book called ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell?  It’s a book about human nature and to put it in a nutshell it’s all about trusting your first instinct, like when you see someone for the first time, you immediately, either consciously or subconsciously form some kind of opinion about that person.  The same holds true for almost everything in life.  There’s this quick judgment that happens in just seconds, and to a point this is the first place to start with your caricatures.  When you first look at the person’s face that you want to draw, what strikes you first?

This process happens so fast that you may not even realize what is happening.  Take a second and look at the following faces and see what kind of thought comes immediately in your head about this person.  You can have an opinion about the features, such as ‘Wow, that’s a HUGE nose on that guy,’ or ‘She has very kind eyes,’ or ‘He looks like trouble.’  What you are looking for is your quick ‘gut feeling’ for that person – something about their face that almost immediately jumps out at you.  Try looking at the next 4 faces and see what you notice in the first 3 seconds of looking at each face… And if you don’t happen to see anything – well don’t worry about that, there’s a lot more you can notice about a face beyond what happens in the first 3 seconds.  Ready?  Go…

Were you able to notice something about these faces?  Did you notice a particular feature, or did you find yourself having some kind of emotional reaction to the person?  These are really good things to notice, because chances are that other people will notice the same thing about that particular person, and when you are able to bring out those characteristics in your drawing you will be a whole lot closer to getting the likeness that you are going for.

Practice noticing what your quick reaction is to things in your everyday life.  There’s literally thousands of situations where you can train up this skill like when meeting new people, selecting a restaurant, ordering food a la carte, watching movies, looking at magazines, furniture shopping, buying a car, grocery shopping.  Start taking an extra second to realize what your initial reactions are to these moments in life.

So once you have some idea of the feeling of the person then you can start into the details.  In the course you will learn how to draw the details of the face so easily that you’ll literally amaze yourself at how well you can draw, but once you know how to draw these features the easy way you’re still going to need to start developing a more trained eye for evaluating the people around you.

Let’s take a look at some examples of different eyes and point out the differences between them.

Can you understand this idea now that even though you will be drawing the same features of the face, that these features come in all different shapes and sizes and that they are all unique to the face that you are drawing.  This is one of the essential keys to getting a good likeness in your drawing.

Anyone can draw an eye, but it takes a bit more skill to draw an eye that looks like the person you are trying to draw.  In the course you will go over many, many different examples and you’ll learn how to quickly see exactly what you should be exaggerating and focusing on to create a good likeness.

Awesome update and announcement coming tomorrow afternoon – look for it in your email if you have signed up for the insider’s newsletter below.