This site was created to assist my Pencil Drawing Art students and my German Language students.
These art videos are available from AMAZON.COM and I do no longer make my own films personally, nor accept any orders for me to do so. Everything is now professionally replicated. I am giving my art students the actual KINDLE notes for free on this website. You can look up any of these videos under "Movies & TV" on Amazon using the search words EXTREME REALISM DVD (and HARMONY MARLIN DVD), or as the search words EXTREME REALISM (or HARMONY MARLIN) under the "Amazon Instant Video" search.
Here is the latest series of instructional DVDs from George Roland Wills and the Gallery513 School of Art & Portraiture; a five hour long (3 DVD) set entitled HARMONY MARLIN. Available as DVDs or AVODs.
The videos are available for purchase from AMAZON in three different formats; DVD, AVOD Purchase, and AVOD Rental. AVOD means Amazon Video On Demand, and is sent to your computer as an on-line movie for either seven days (rental) or forever (purchase).
Here is the Niagara Falls pair of videos that we made in 2006. One DVD is a documentary entitled THE FALLS OF NIAGARA, and the other is a meditation and relaxation DVD known simply as the NIAGARA FALLS MEDITATION AND RELAXATION VIDEO. This DVD has nothing but the roar of the Falls (the relaxation video was filmed in the daylight with no one else in frame, and roar of the falls was recorded late at night, in the otherwise quiet of of Canadian side; no kids, buses, tourists, cars, noise, nor any music; it is like being at Niagara Falls alone) These are currently sold separately. Click on the word link to order them:
The Youtube below is from an upcoming DVD that is to be entitled AN AFTERNOON WITH MR. JEFFERSON. It was filmed at Monticello, and has some scenes from his other home at Poplar Forest, as well. All of the audio quotes were written by Thomas Jefferson, and read by George Roland Wills as Thomas Jefferson. It is being completed now (March 2013). It is a easy-paced afternoon tour of Monticello in late November, as if he had invited you to visit his home.
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And here, for my Art Students, are the actual course lecture
notes in drawing from KINDLE... FOR FREE.
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The Complete Set of Lecture Notes for Extreme Realism Drawing
Extreme Realism Graphite Pencil Portraiture Drawing
- and Some New Ideas to Make Your Work Amazing -
Over ten years ago, I made a series of three 2 hour videos which demonstrated the techniques for what I coined to be Extreme Realism Graphite Pencil Portraiture Drawing. These videos are now for sale on Amazon.com as Extreme Realism Courses I, II, and III. They were originally done on a VHS camcorder, and years later, transferred to digital when I finally got a computer. Those were some of the first videos I ever made. And, despite the out-dated filming methods and lighting with which I had to contend before the turn of the century, these videos have done very well in sales and satisfaction. So well in fact that I am now planning another drawing video to be done - this time completely in digital video - and post-produced on my iMac computers and their advanced movie making systems. It will be an advanced drawing video, shown completely from one end to the other, beginning to end, as an art project. These lecture notes are invaluable to getting your mind around the concept of Extreme Realism Drawing, and if you take the course, I strongly suggest that you read these lecture notes, as well.
At the time, I did not have a way to give the exact classroom lecture notes, nor the theory behind the drawings in the videos as I was filming the work. Now, in 2011, and for the very first time, I am officially releasing these lecture notes from the series of schools I once taught in person, as well as these fascinating new discoveries I have made as an artist.
Whether you are a brand new artist, or an old hand at rendering likenesses, you will benefit from reading the discoveries that I have made in pencil portraiture drawing, over the years...
Many people are drawn to the idea of extremely realistic pencil drawing because of the stunning effect it has on the viewer. They want to be able to possess this powerful ability for themselves, and to do great and mighty things on their own. That is the whole idea behind my teaching anything to anyone, at all. To give this ability to anyone who wants to learn it.
So let's get right down to it. Many people tell me that they cannot draw a straight line. I tell them that neither can I! And fortunately for us both, there are no straight lines in portraiture! So what's keeping you from learning to draw?
The first thing that any pencil drawing artist needs to know is this: What are the limits of the medium in which I am working? Clint Eastwood was right; a man's got to know his limits.
You have probably seen pencil drawings that literally stop you in your tracks, and make you stare at them for extended periods of time. I was one of those people who would see such work, and be completely captivated by it; I wanted to own it. To know how it was done, like a magic trick, or a daredevil act. Once I learned how, I then wanted to share this with the world, and then have everyone who wanted to be able to do this thing actually be able to do it, for themselves. By doing it my way...
You see, there is more than one way to do this. I only know my way, but I do have the power to teach that to you. Read on, and learn what I am talking about. You can literally learn how to draw like I do - simply by reading this book.
The Gift of Human Sight
The gift of human sight is actually an optical illusion. It is based primarily upon an individual's need to relate to things surrounding him at that particular moment. Sight warps everything into an order of importance for us. This means that things which come closer to us appear to be getting larger. As things leave from our presence, they diminish in their over all importance to us, and thus by necessity get smaller as they get farther away from us. They seem to get physically smaller, in fact.
A ship leaving the beach will shrink as it gets closer to the horizon. It will shrink all the way down to a point, in fact; a dot on the horizon... and then it will vanish. This is also known as the Vanishing Point. What is happening is simply this; as the ship goes over the curvature of the earth, and begins down on the other side away from us, our point will then vanish.
A railroad track which extends straight out of sight, with no curves in it, does a similar thing at its horizon line (or eye-level line, since no matter if we are standing or sitting, when we look off into the distance, the horizon is also our eye-level line...) as well. The two rails seem to come together at a point in the exact middle of the track rails. We could actually plant one of those golf flags in the center of the tracks and it would be right on the point that we see where the rails come together, and then vanish... If you walk up the tracks to the flag, you would find that the tracks did not come together, at all, and your flag pole would be in the dead center of the tracks... If you turned around, and looked back down the tracks, you would see that the rails had closed in behind you, where you had been standing, and they now also came to a point at your exact staring location.
A fun house works in the exact same way; a room in which the floor rises up to meet you is actually a downhill slope. Thus, you get the sensation of 'falling upwards'. Your eyes tell you that the corner of the room is 'uphill' from you, but your balance, (which is in your ears) tells you that it is 'downhill'. Thus, if sight were not an optical illusion, it could not be fooled into thinking the wrong thing by the distorted perspectives in a fun house.
A portraiture drawing or painting works in exactly the same way; the eyes are fooled into believing that the pencil smears or the painting strokes on a paper or canvas are actually a person painted into the depth of a two-dimensional surface. It is something called Trompe L'oeil, a French word meaning to 'deceive the eye'.
Look at it this way. An object in a photograph is not that object! It is that object, in that light, at that particular time of day, and at the distance from you, the viewer. Thus, sight is a triangulation between three points; two of these points are actually both of your eyes, an inch of so apart, and then the object itself is defined as the third point, this being the thing described by the two images which were sent back into your brain, through these eyes, thus giving you a depth perception that you would not be able to experience if you only had one eye open. Thus, sight is a triangulation between the viewer at a station point (as it is known)
and the object that you are seeing. Most people tend to draw something like a blindfolded man would feel it; as its exact shape actually is to the touch. But in drawing, we wish to fool the eye with its own perspectives, and triangulations, and this is why it is so hard for beginning artists to do anything realistically... We cannot 'see' it on the paper, like we can through a window. But we can if we are taught how to see it! And it is my job to teach you how to do this...
Getting an Idea for a Project and the Selection of the Source Material
Okay, so we are going to draw a portrait, and we are going to do it from a nice photograph. You should learn from nice photographs first before attempting to set up at the mall and bang out likenesses for money! Selecting source material is very important. Extremely important. It will save you problems later, down the road. I have taken commissions from snapshots and other nonsense photos, and I no longer do that, at all.
Any fault in the finished drawing is yours, no matter if you drew the subject from your absolute eyes-closed memory, with no photographic guide, at all! You have to know this,
going in. If they can hook you up with an Olan Mills head-and-upper-chest shot, or even closer (a full face portrait shot) to open your selection possibilities, so much the better.
Any magazine can supply you with highly detailed facial photos, however they do tend to airbrush the facial tones and wash them out to an unrealistic light reflection. You will then have to 'see' what is going on by deciding exactly what the cheek, or the lip, or the forehead, or the chin, or the neck, or whatever is giving you the difficulty is 'doing' in that
particular light. And this is what you are going to do every time you select a photograph from which to draw...
A quick word about photographs. Imagine, if you will, that a person is standing in front of you, and you are holding up a square, clear piece of glass, like a window pane. You are looking through this glass at your subject as you hold this pane out in front of you. Got the idea? Great.
Now, imagine that you tell the person to come up and touch his nose to your glass. That is how close you would like all of your subjects to be in your photographs. A subject that close is as close as he can get without going 3D, and coming through the paper into your face.
Now, have him take a step back from your glass.
That is how close most photographs actually show the subject in the photograph; about two or three feet back. This is called the portrait shot, and this is as far back as you ever want to accept a commission photograph. If he takes another step back, you get a head and chest shot. Another step back, and you get a down-to-the-waist shot. Another step, and its to the knees. Another, and the entire body is in the window frame, or in the photograph.
A head and chest shot is a very difficult portraiture distance to recreate. Only those who have done several successful portraits should even think about attempting such a thing as that. Therefore, anything over three feet back in the photograph is way too far. The whites of the eyes are very diminished after the second step back...
A photograph that has been airbrushed is often pure evil to get skin tones from... and magazines are notorious for wiping out all of the shadows when they try and take out imperfections with the air brush effect.
The head-on, face forward shot is the best to draw. Heads which are turned up, down, sideways, or even three-quarter angles away are going to give you head shape difficulties. The eyes will be foreshortened and seem to be different sizes. The nose will have a smaller far side than the nearer side. It's quite hard to get the mouth right when one half of it is actually a little bit shorter than the the other (closer) half. Word to the wise; head-on shots, or as close to head-on as you can get, for at least the first couple of portraits that you do!
Stay away from Chiaroscuro styled photos (like my Sharon Stone from THE PURSUIT OF SUNDOWN novel artwork I did. It is from THE QUICK AND THE DEAD and half of her face is missing in total blackness!) Stay away from harshly lit photos. Calm lighting, and well-defined shadows. Make it easy on yourself! You will thank yourself much later! You will want clear, crisp many-pixeled images with great clarity!
Determining Values and Setting Your Own Darkness Tones
You have to ask yourself a couple of questions, now, once you have selected the source material from which to draw:
A). Where is the light coming from in the photograph?
Light in a photograph keeps a photograph from looking like a color pencil drawing. In fact, when a photograph is 'faked' on a computer to look like a color pencil drawing, or even a black and white line "outline" drawing, the 'light' effects are removed by the computer to 'deaden' the subject down to a pencil sketch... Your job in portraiture is to reverse this process. To make it come alive!
So, determine exactly what light exists in your photograph, and identify it.
This means can you tell me what are the shiniest parts of the face, the hair, and the neck? Now where are the darkest parts? One of the rules of portraiture art is this: Shine is always opposite Shadow. That means where ever you have a shine, the shadows will thus accentuate that shine, and be on the other side of it.
In my Youtube video on the Youtube channel known as CaptBeauregards Channel I am drawing a sphere ball in the video clip. Notice that the shine is on the opposite side from where the light is coming in from. Makes sense, doesn't it? If it doesn't yet, it will when you start doing it. Shine causes shadows, basically. When the sun comes out, the area behind a tree and under it gets darker...
There are a number of ways you can choose to represent your photograph and to set the overall tone of your portrait's general lighting scheme. You will decide if you want the entire effect of your subject to be in lighter or darker light than in the actual photograph... or you may choose to represent it exactly as it appears. You will do this by identifying and selecting which gray scale values for which areas of your drawing. You will basically do this the same way, each time, by following these simple rules:
B). Where are the darkest Darks and the lightest Lights?
This is of supreme importance when figuring out your gray scale range. A gray scale is the range of values on your black and white drawing ... and it is also a series of values depicted by squares drawn side by side on a piece of paper which go from white to black. These squares become increasingly darker as you progress from white to black, and increasingly lighter as you go back from black to white. Usually these are represented in a series of shaded squares in sequence.
A standard gray scale has five squares, starting with white (1), and going to black (5). The middle square (3) is usually a medium colored gray, halfway between the (1) and the (5) value. The (2), then, will be a lighter square in a light gray and the (4) square is a dark gray square. You can draw one of these freehanded, by drawing the black one first in a completely black tone and ignoring the inside of the white one, altogether... This (1) square is literally the unerased white of the paper. Then do the (3) somewhere between the (1) and the (5), and then do the (2) and the (4) squares by comparing the (3) to either the (1) or the (5)...
What is this good for?
Basically getting an idea of what values to assign to given shadows and shades you will come across in a photo. After awhile, you will have such a scale in your head, anyway, but it is a good idea to make one just to see how each of the values compares with what you are trying to draw.
The pupils of the eyes, and the nostril holes are usually (5) value blacknesses. The high shines of the cheekbones and forehead and the whites of the eyes are usually a (1) and should be 'roped off' with a faint line to save these areas and to never draw in these areas, at all!
You will begin to understand this once you start to draw your portrait. The white square, the (1), will be the white of your paper; and the whitest part of your drawing. The whites of the eyes, generally, and the teeth... the white shines of the cheekbones and the bands of shine in the hair. A Band of Shine is the area where the hair is perpendicular to the light source, and reflects a white area instead of hair color values. Look at any photograph of hair, and you will see these areas. These are your whitest white areas. In contrast, then, your blackest blacks will then be the blacks of the pupils, the nostril holes, and sometimes the corners of the mouth...
C). Now, where are your middle values?
After you define exactly how dark you will go and how light you will go in your portrait, you will assign the middle values. The middle grounds are those areas in which you will eventually assign (2), (3), and (4) darkness values. On skin (as a general rule and in normal lighting conditions) areas around the (1) values are usually faded into the (2) values. These could include forehead areas not in the shine, as well as cheeks and chin areas not directly in the shine nor in the shadowed areas. Skin itself looks best as a (2) for the most part, and a (3) where well defined and even slightly shadowed. Skin tone rarely gets out of the (2), (3) and (4) ranges...
A good rule of thumb; Values next to each other on a gray scale - when they are found next to each other in a photograph, will usually blend seamlessly into each other... The farther away on the gray scale that two values are found from each other (say, black and white), the more severe will then be the boundary line found to exist between them - if they are found next to each other in your photograph. (The best example of this is the black pupil and its white highlight - which is actually found in the pupil area of black, itself. There is a hard line where they come together. The hardest line, in fact, in your entire drawing.)
(1) and (2) values generally blend seamlessly into one another, as do (4) and (5) values. Thus, then, a (3) is also generally blended quite seamlessly into either a (2) or a (4) value, as a rule, as well... Like a blended two tone paint job on a car.
A value of (1) next to a value of (5) will by necessity be found a hard line between them. (As we have said, the (5) of a dark pupil with a (1) value of a highlight in that eye will most always be a round white circle encompassed by a hard black ring). Likewise, when (2) and (4) come together (as in a shadow under the neck of a portrait) they will have a fairly definable shadow line separating them...
D). After you have laid the basic tracks for all five gray scale values, now you must go back and join them all together into one facial portrait.
This is in the finishing touches section. These important connections will make your face literally leap out of your canvas in three dimensions! It will make all of your value selections make sense...
The Mindset for Drawing and How to Think like an Artist!
These rules will help you decide how dark to go in your final piece. Here are some rules of thumb to draw and to live by...
1). Err on the side of lightness.
Many artists are woefully sorry that they initially went too black with their values. It is easier to go darker, but it is always harder to go lighter. Erasing is not a guarantee of neatness nor restoration of the paper to the original texture and consistency... Neater artists tend to be lighter in their touch, any way... and their only long term crime is that they some times do not go dark enough to satisfy. Darker artists, like I am, are inherently sloppier artists to begin with, and their work (and their resulting eraser marks) are tragedies waiting to happen. Err on the side of Lightness for this reason. It takes a lot of practice to be able to do that!
Neatness counts when there is no color!
2). Lose every outline and hard drawn line in your drawing.
There are not only no "straight lines" in portraiture, there are actually no hard lines of any kind. A hard line happens when a direct pencil mark is made anywhere on your paper. So, how does one get rid of such an outline? By deciding which side of that line is the darker value, and then shading it in right up to that hard line. In doing so, the line vanishes into a value, and does not offend any longer...
Think about it in this way. A hard line drawn on your paper is like having a line drawn on the window that you are 'looking through' into the photograph to see the subject, or the image itself. So, say that you are looking through an actual window at a young girl's face. You then decide to outline her face with a black magic marker on the glass separating you from her (the white of your paper, in a drawing) . You then will have to get rid of that magic marker outline before she looks 'right' again!
But, you say, I needed that outline originally to show me where exactly she is on my blank paper! So I had to draw it in... Yes, but you do not have to keep it there forever! You need to lose it, once it has served its purpose. And the way to lose it is to decide which side will be shaded to make the value you need. If the image of this line is still obnoxious even after you have shaded one side of it, take your stick eraser (Tuff Stuff, or electric Helix) and erase over top of that line along the line itself. Then, take a dirty pointed tortillon and 'draw back in' the original direction of where the line was... (Note: A tortillon is a cylindrical drawing tool made out of rolled paper and tapered to a point on at least one end used by artists to smudge or blend marks into their paper. You should know this, already, but if you don't... there it is. A 'dirty' tortillon, then, is one which has been used enough that you could actually draw an extremely light pencil mark from the resulting graphite picked up from previous rubs and blendings on a drawing... A 'clean' tortillon is a new one, right out of the box). By losing all of your hard lines, you get to a sort of realism, whether it is yet accurate to your subject, as a likeness, or not!
3). Get as much Tonal Contrast as possible in your work.
Tonal Contrast is that gray scale business, again. You need a great depth of difference in your darkest darks and your lightest lights, and you also need a lot of in between shadings. My own personal mental gray scale has about fifty variations between light and black. That means that my mental #3 value is a #25! There are 24 shades of light gray and 24 shades of dark gray in my mental gray scale. Now, I do not number these and
say, oh, look! A 16! or a 35! Nothing so elaborate. But I do get a much greater sense of exactly how dark or how light something may appear to be in black and white.
It is said that the #3 value is the true color darkness (red, blue, et cetera) of an object in black and white. So, you take a picture of a red car - and you make it into black and white on your computer - and the gray that the computer uses to represent that body of the car is the actual intensity of darkness of that particular color of red on that car... in that exact light, at that angle, and at that time of day...
Notice my LeAnn Rimes on the cover of this book, and see just what I mean! There is an magnificent amount of tonal contrast between the whites and the darks.
4). Know about the situations to which I refer as the Smudge and the Ugly Stage.
Many artists wade into a drawing, only to get frustrated and give up when they reach a couple of critical areas in their work. In Part Two, we will go over these terms and help you to deal with these situations. For now, just know that these two terms exist, and will plague you about halfway through a drawing... Gaining more Tonal Contrast is one cure for this, as is completing the work to a deeper level than you had originally intended to go! The Smudge is in fact a type the Ugly Stage, and actually helps to cause artistic dissatisfaction part of the way into a work.
AMATEUR MISTAKES
Okay, so you know what photograph you are going to use. You know not to pick one with any areas of uncertainty... e.g., hair hanging down into the eyes in an uncertain manner, a blur of facial movement in the photograph, terrible facial expressions (even mild ones; your audience does not care to see that), a bad light that blanches out part of the skin tones, a photo so airbrushed that it can not be distinguished as to values, at all, eyes obscured in hair or shadows, ... and et cetera. You now that you are going to have a wide range of values in your work, many different value changes in your drawing, and that there will be no hard lines in your work.
There are a number of mistakes that you can make which will be a problem for you. I list these now, herein...
1. Outlining everything, and then not erasing the outline when the drawing is mapped out!
2. Drawing too darkly before the final tones can suggest how dark to go.
3. Drawing lines (yes, cross-hatchers! I am talking about you!) to represent tonal values.
4. Trying to get skin tone with a tortillon (doesn't work). Use the tissue (which thing and its use we shall discuss) instead.
5. Not plotting the darkest Darks and the lightest Lights first!
6. Not getting an exact likeness (outline) and not mapping out these areas first.
7. Drawing too hard with the pencil and casing an intaglio in the paper, which is a dent in the fibers which stays there even after you erase everything and is an unsightly scar forever in that work...
8. Not building enough tonal value and contrast between light and dark in the work.
9. Stopping too soon. Not going 'far enough' into the intense details that you need to show.
10. Selecting inferior source material (photos) from which to draw.
11. Not keeping that pencil sharp!!!
12. Not changing to a clean side of the tissue (or not getting a new tissue) when you do your smearing of the skin tones...
13. Laying your sweaty, oily arms and hands on your nice clean drawing as you are drawing on it. ALWAYS use a clean cover sheet of paper upon which to lean if you must...
14. Not recessing the darks with the tortillon.
15. Not freshening up the shine area after a bout of smearing in your darks.
Okay, so from what you read above, you can now figure out what you will be doing...
You will be 1). getting an outline, 2). placing darkness tones on the paper (with the pencil lying sideways and lightly putting the graphite down in certain areas), and then 3). smearing in these tones with a tissue over the end of a pressing down finger...
Take a tissue out of your box, and wrap it loosely around your index finger like a small ghost. Then press down upon the drawing paper on some graphite which you have put down in an area roped off for adding some value... and then rub it lightly into the paper...
Rubbing it in will cause two things. 1). It will recess the darkness and push it back into the paper, and 2). It will lighten your overall darkness value through this rubbing, causing you to have to reapply darknesses until they are as dark as you want them to be blended...
This lightening through rubbing is a good thing. You can control exactly how dark you will want the thing to be, by repeatedly applying these layers, over and over again, until you get it right. It is like a sort of an 'accident forgiveness' insurance policy that you get every time you add in tonal value. It is always easier to add more than to take away and make less!
PART TWO
Rendering the Likeness
(Drawing the Portrait)
The absolute most vital thing you should know in drawing a portrait is that neatness counts, and that the supplies you use will be about half of your battle. People like to look at neat things, whether they are even anywhere near accurate, or not. And this business is all about the customer. The supplies that you will use will be of enormous benefit to your finished work. You will never do any great work on a sheet of notebook paper, or a newsprint sketchpad. It will never look like anything important, at all.
So go and get yourself some excellent drawing paper before you begin. You and your efforts are worth it! The cream-colored 80 pound bond Strathmore drawing paper is the best. It is acid free, and will last virtually forever. It is sort of expensive, but well worth it.
Berol Turquoise pencils are also the best I have found. Use a wooden pencil to draw with as mechanical pencils tend to slip and do not ever seem to sharpen right. Get the following types of art pencils; HB, 3B, 6B. Then, get the following types of drafting pencils, as well... 2H, and 3H. These are normally for drawing upon Mylar, but they will have a use in pencil drawing, as well.
Get yourself a nice electric Panasonic desk sharpener (around $20) and have it ready to go.
Hey, a man does not change the oil in his car without an oil filter wrench, a drain pan, a socket set for his drain plug, five new quarts of oil, and a brand new filter to replace the old one. A woman does not prepare a meal without checking to see if every ingredient that she needs is in the house, and ready to use. So why are you going to start a masterwork without making sure that you have pencils, paper, tortillons, tissues, kneaded erasers, hard white erasers, Tuff Stuff erasers, helix automatic erasers (with fresh batteries), and a working pencil sharpener?
You aren't. You are going to know and understand the importance of thus having everything together before you begin. You do not need the added strain of working around
want, and unpreparedness. Nothing frustrates faster than this!
Once you are ready to begin, we will take a look at how we want to start.
Getting the Perfect Outline
The one thing of a primary importance is this; you have to get an accurate outline before you can start filling in the values, and blending them accordingly. There are a number of ways to get an outline from your photograph.
Before we get too involved here, we should say a word about TRACING. This is the one 'four-letter word' in all of portraiture drawing. Tracing has a reputation that is really a borderline criminal activity. It seems like the most absolute dishonest thing anyone could ever do, and if you want to be hated by everyone, and shunned by the art circles generally, just tell them that you 'traced it'.
But, what is tracing, exactly?
Tracing is the act of following the outline of an object by putting your paper over top of the photograph, and getting your outline coordinates from the exact dimensions of the photograph. Don't think anyone does this? Think again. There are things for sale in art circles called 'Lazy Susans' and light tables, sort of like an x-ray technician has on his walls.
Why is tracing such a terrible thing to do, or to admit to having done? Simple. It has the reputation of being an unfair advantage in getting a likeness. But, how did it come by this horrible reputation?
Why, from the successful artists, themselves!
Why would they do this, or say such a terrible thing about trying to get an exact outline, when such an outline is so vitally important to the finished likeness? Because they
want to keep the ability to draw really well to themselves, and not have any competition from the next generation of artists coming along.
Here is what I teach about the subject; if a person traces something enough times, he or she gets to where they can free-hand it, after a time. That's right; tracing is training wheels and no real crime, at all. I teach the grid-squares method, which, in reality, is really just an approved form of tracing, when you think about it. It shows you the exact location where certain points fall upon a grid, You just have to estimate what is going on in between an inch or so of the paper, at a time, between these points on our grid. But, the grid-squares method is 'legal', so we use it. I personally would rather see students trace out their first couple of drawings, so as to get the exact likenesses in the first instance. I myself do not like to trace, because I cannot see very well through my thick paper, as it is, and it would be the worst part of any drawing, for me, to have to trace it out. I can do it, and I have tried it, before. I end up getting confused as to what is actually going on, however, and end up just trying to eyeball it in, like the guys banging these things out at the mall do. But then I go back with a ruler and get exact measurements. I want it dead on the money!
So, get the perfect outline any way you can. Grid squares is the safest method, but
Tracing can teach you much about how to train your hand to make shapes. Eventually, you
will be able to sit down in a mall and bang these things out completely free-handed...
A Couple of Notes
When you are considering and studying a photograph from which to draw, you will want to try and imagine what it would look like in black and white. In the old days, I always told my students to go down to Office Depot or Staples and run a couple of black and white copies of the picture, changing the DARKER or LIGHTER settings as you did. This would begin to give you an idea about the darknesses and the lightnesses in the actual color photograph. I would then have them run an excellent black and white copy of the photograph on the laser machines behind the desk and have a perfect black and white to go by...
These days, just load it into iPhoto, change the thing to Black and White, and then do a series of exposure adjusts and intensities... which will give you an idea of what looks good on this thing; a lighter or a darker setting. Decide upon a set of values and then print the thing if you like, and use it in your drawing.
You may like the eyes darker and the mouth lighter, and you will keep all of this in mind as you are beginning to render your own drawing from these copies of the actual photograph. You can draw from each copy you made the area which looks the best in each photograph. It is really up to you.
Consider your first attempt at a drawing to be a rough draft. It is very likely that this one will be your masterwork, in the end, but do take all of that stress off yourself when beginning to draw a portrait...
Drawing is not an exact science. It is an art form. You will feel more like it on some days than others. Whatever you do, do not approach your canvas or paper unless you are balanced, and ready to go into the zone (we will talk about that, later). If you are rattled by the days events. don't go near the drawing! You will do untold damage to your progress because you can't 'see' anything when you are upset!
Get your art teacher to look at your work, and then get someone who is very objective and yet who is not in the least artistic to look at your work. Many times the untrained viewer sees things that we as artists cannot see, at all. They will point out things that you may have missed, entirely.
Develop a sensitivity to your source material. Try to see where the photo is 'wrong', or not lit properly. Try to imagine shadows to be darker than they really are, and then lighter. Is there an improvement in what you visualize? If so, then render it either darker or lighter than it is in the photograph and capitalize on making something beautiful instead of just accurate. Even modern day photographic artists mess with the light intensities and the saturations of color and tonal values in their work. Improve upon reality; this is Extreme Realism; as opposed to just ordinary realism.
THE UGLY STAGE
All of your art will go through the Ugly Stage. Get used to it, and learn how to just deal with it. Don't panic unless you have run completely out of notes and ideas from these lectures and have tried everything you can to bring it back into beauty. Then it is safe to panic, and start over (Kidding!).
Seriously, almost any drawing can be 'fixed', even if you decide to call it a rough draft and then take what you have learned about that particular drawing to another clean white piece of paper, using that drawing as the source material for the new, fresh paper.
What is the Ugly Stage? It is where the drawing has not yet become a trompe l'oeil and a "fool the eye" extreme realism work of art, but is still a line drawing in pencil that any idiot could do to that level with a light table! A traced-looking thing, even if it was done with the grid squares method!
Work through it! Seriously, keep at it. All art goes through the ugly stage, except that most people get mad, and quit, and leave it there. The only reason you should ever start over and try again is if you have intaglioed your paper with indentations that will not erase away.
You have nothing to lose by keeping on trying, and everything to gain.
NEW NOTE: If you have a good (7) megapixel camera, or thereabouts, always photograph your work up close before you begin for the day, and then after you are done. In this way, you will know exactly what you either did right, or wrong!
Your art will look UGLY before it will look beautiful. That is how art drawings work, and I can not make it any different for you. I live through it every time I start a new portrait. It never changes, at all...
So, what causes the Ugly Stage? and what makes it so very ugly?
THE SMUDGE
The Smudge. The hardest point in a drawing to overcome. It usually comes from laying on darknesses in a given area that are not yet 'justified' by the other values. This is not a mistake, yet, but to fail to justify these darker values will be a great mistake, for the drawing will remain in the ugly stage forever, until you do justify them with the surrounding values.
First off, the Smudge is the part of the Ugly Stage where none of the shadows which have been laid make any sense. There is no 3D depth and everything looks sort of stained. Now this is not a mistake, yet, nor is there any damage done, so long as you can back off some of the darknesses neatly (This is why you want to err on the side of lightness, originally! It will give you some room for error at this time).
Now, if you do decide that you do have to erase some of the value back out again, and it does not work out like you want, it will look really bad. But don't give up! All is not lost, yet.
Here are a few pointers for overcoming the Smudge Look!
1. Go back and darken the darkest parts of the Smudged area. This will make the overall drawing darker, but it will be closer to being salvageable than if you did not.
2. Try to take an HB and lightly shade any #3 or #4 values than you have. Again, this will darken the overall drawing when finished, but it will cover up much of the ugly erased area.
3. Take a very hard white eraser and try to clean up the full white area (#1 value) where you may have shaded wrongfully.
These three changes may give you the contrast that you need to make a mistake into a masterpiece!
Never use WHITEOUT (oh, please!) nor white charcoal. White charcoal will go BLUE when mingled with graphite, and then you really are done!
Contrast - The Most Important Rule of Them All
Contrast is the main thing which will make your work look like an oil painting. Without any real contrast in our drawing, we will never get beyond the flat, sketchy look... and most certainly not beyond the #2, or #3 on the grayscale for a darkest dark! You only have one color, and one real hue. The only thing you have going for you, at all, is the diversity in that one tonal shade. Get as much out of it as you possibly can!
Fortunately, that tonal shade can be really milked into an infinite number of lighter or darker possibilities. Contrast uses the full gray scale. It makes the drawing come into tight focus in black and white, for this reason.
With a lot of contrasted difference between black and white, you will have an interesting piece, if you have nothing else at all. Even if you do not make a good likeness, nor even a realistic human representation, you will at least have an interesting and pretty work of art... at last until you can figure out where you went wrong in your outlines and shadings.
And that is something.
The Justification of Shadows
In the drawing of portraits, everyone wants to see IMMEDIATE results. NOW. We have all the patience of a three year old child, when we are drawing, and the reason for this is we are terrified that we will waste all that time and not have anything to show for it. And this is crazy, when you think about it.
When you are building an automobile, you cannot admire the wax job before the fenders go on... and before the motor is wired and installed. It is simply not possible. The same is true of a portrait. You know the Ugly Stage is coming and you just want it to be over... so you get impatient to begin, and then get through.
Won't work. Not at all.
Draw what is quite apparent first. Do the darkest darks and leave places for the lightest lights, and then draw what is very obvious. This will give you an actual cartoon outline. Did you know that even Tom and Jerry will begin to look real if someone erases their black outlines? It's true!
But then they would have to have all of their shadows 'justified'. This means that they would have to have all that blue or brown drawn in to show their facial curves, and lines. They would then become 3D, and come up off the page... Sort of scary, when you think about it... but that is what you want to have happen in your drawing of Aunt Edna. She must lose her sketchy look, and become a real human figure. And the justification of the shadows will do this for you.
Many times a pencil artist will make the overall shadows in a photograph much darker than they are in reality. They do this so it is easier to see, and clearer. 'Prettier', if you will.
This will then make what you have in the middle grounds (the #2, #3, and #4 value areas) spring to life. Blackening around a value will make that value very clear, and framed in a nice hard focus. It will 'justify' the shadow that you placed there. It will make your work pop out in contrasted 3D! It's weird, but it works. Try it.
Middle Ground Maintenance
When an artist is at last in the finishing touches category for his work, he will have to go back and maintain all of his Middle Grounds. Cheeks, Glabellas, Nose Bridges, Foreheads, Chins, Necks, Upper Chests, and other areas between areas of darker importance will have to be addressed, and completed. You will have White Paper Syndrome if you neglect this middle ground in your work. White Paper Syndrome is when you have part of the face actually disappearing into the white of the paper simply because you did not do anything in that area, nor give it any skin tone value at all. You were probably too scared to go there, and so your work has paid the price for your negligence. But do something in these areas, even if you have to do it very lightly. There is a value in that area, unclear though it may seem, and it is most definitely NOT the white of the paper!
Only by connecting these Middle Ground areas, these areas which usually consist of the #2, #3 and #4 values - to your finished and polished #1's and #5's - can you get that depth of realism you are looking for.
The Various Levels of Portraiture
There are a number of levels in drawing portraits that we have identified. They are as follows:
1. Rough Sketch (outline) -work in progress ( may be a practice drawing).
2. Quick Study - Work in progress (may be a practice drawing)
3. Rough Draft - work in progress ( a drawing you plan to finish for a commission or just keep as a masterwork in progress).
4. Finished Drawing (Commission level drawing) - finished drawing
5. Masterwork In Progress - being perfected
6. Completed Masterwork - perfected
The only thing separating each of these various levels is the amount of time that you put into its completion to that level. All of them will eventually become the next level in sequence if time and effort are applied to the work. These are fairly self-explanatory; the Masterworks are those you plan to perfect and to keep. The Commission Level is the level you want to attain to be able to justify selling it to the client. Anything less than than is a Work In Progress.
And now, the truth about this whole business...
Yes, the truth. Aside from neatness, and using the right supplies, and getting the proper source material from photographs... and knowing these techniques... the absolute truth about this whole process is quite simply this; TIME. You have to invest great amounts of time into each piece, and the more you invest, the absolute better the drawing will turn out. This will not be a problem to the serious artist, who spends inordinate amounts of time with a pencil in his or her hand, anyway... But the sunshine artist and the summertime dabbler may want to reconsider the premise for attempting extreme realism drawing as a hobby. This is a job; like the Peace Corps. The toughest job you will ever love, most certainly. But a very tough job. Oh, you will know what to do, and what needs to be done... if you watch the videos are learn these lecture notes - enough people have done so, in my presence, to convince me of this - but it is like climbing the mountain... one step at the time.
I cannot make this any easier; it is not easy. But then, beauty is not ever very easy to find, acquire, nor maintain. That is what is beautiful about it. Beauty demands and thus requires sacrifice. Sacrifice in time, and effort.
Part of Art is Knowing When to Stop
Truer words were never spoken. if you know when you have done all that you can do, without undoing something you have already done, then you have arrived. You know that what you have will not get any better with more effort; at least, not right now. So you can hang up your picture and stare at it for years, if you have to, before seeing something that you KNOW will make a difference. Then, and only then, should you attempt to repair anything which might be a little bit 'off'.
In our method, spraying it with a fixative is not really necessary, nor should you ever spray anything onto your drawing. Ever. At any time. Amen.
PART THREE
Finishing Touches
I have had some students say to me, almost in tears, that their college art teachers and professors actually told them that they could not touch the paper with anything other than the tip of their pencils! Now, can you imagine trying to do extreme realism in this fashion? It would not be possible.
Again, I offer my own opinion in the matter. It is because they do not wish for the students to become very good at what they do very quickly. In our classes, my idea was to make the students as good as they could be in as short of time as possible.
These last sets of notes will have to do with being STARE BLIND, and having your eye in, and being focused as an artist, as well as being in the zone. A form of self-hypnosis that an artist learns to do, involuntarily... like successfully driving a car with your mind elsewhere... We shall also deal with the curious problem of Envy in others, and how to deal with that. We shall also deal with the Science of Blurring parts of out images, as well as The Viewing, and Correction of Bad Photography in your less than perfect Source Material.
And, finally, we will show you how to literally break the rules of Extreme Realism in order to profit from their suspension, and with-holding. We shall give you the lecture on BEING NICE to a subject, artistically, while not getting caught at it! This will conclude our studies of Extreme Realism from the original lecture notes of the school.
STAREBLINDNESS
STARE BLIND; what is it? It is the situation that occurs when great fatigue sets in, and you are not any longer able to see what is going on in your art project. One of the little known secrets of drawing is that you are at your best when you are just approaching your work for the day for the first time; a condition that lasts about 30 minutes, to an hour.
True, you will have golden days of drawing, where you just lose time, and immerse yourself in your work for hours on end, barely surfacing long enough to go to the bathroom, or to get some lunch. All of your planets will be lined up, and everything you do will be spot on right, and perfect! Treasure such days, for they are few, and far between. Most of the time, the act of drawing is a job, like going to work.
The solution to being stareblind is to stop working on it. Anything that you do to your drawing in this condition will be wrong, because you have ceased to see anything, at all. You are just feeling your way along, and most likely, will have to end up feeling your way back again, with an eraser. Therefore, save yourself some time, and just knock it off.
Just quit. There is no shame. Take a walk outside.
Stareblind generally happens after a couple of hours of intense work, and even though you have not yet reached 'a good stopping place', the true is this; yes, you have. Take it now, before you have to undo something later on... something which might not be so easily undoable!
There are days when you start out stareblind, and have no 'touch' at all. Please do not go anywhere near your canvas. It is worse than being half asleep. You are not able to do any great thing, nor any good work, at all. Refrain from ruining where you are, because you will have to get back here, once again, before you can continue!
BEING IN THE ZONE
We often hear about athletes being in the zone. Jeff Gordon used to have his car 'dialed in', and 'on rails; a rocketship going around this racetrack'. Tiger Woods used to be on fire, and on target. Being in the zone means hitting on all eight cylinders; it means to be at optimum performance, and working at one's peak. But how does one get mentally prepared for this level of play? What is required of the performer, mentally, in order to make this happen?
It is being at a level of concentration that allows you to perfect your game. We have another name for it; relaxation. Total and complete concentration. Learning your artistic lessons on technique are not enough; you have to be so focused that you lose time, and you start to think down on the theta level. This is when, if you are a religious person, the hand of God works through you. A level of complete obedience.
Get your music going; Yanni In My Time is that music to which I always taught my students to draw. Soon, you do not even hear the music, at all. Your hand is just following what your brain is seeing, and your strokes are excellent. You do get a whole lot done in this way, and your work comes out pleasing. I worked midnight shift for many years, and on my days off, I stayed up late at night in order to be able to stay on schedule. I would get my best drawing done between 2 am and 5 am in the morning. A time when the rest of the world is in a coma. I could do a lot of automatic drawing in those times; drawing that just seemed to come from within.
And that is the process for completing a work of art that is not yet where you want it to be. We call it The Viewing.
THE VIEWING
It does sound quite funereal, and yes, so it is a sort of post-mortem for your artwork. It is actually a post-mortem, of sorts. A review of the game. A critique and an analysis of your work. It is a simple task, really.
Hang up your art, and live with it. day in and day out. There is a signature on it, and since we do not use fixative sprays, we can always take it back down and work it, any time
we please. But there is the great secret to it. A trick from Chinese Taoism.
"Can you sit perfectly still, and wait until the sediment settles... and the right answer arises, all by itself? Only the man of Tao!"
And that is the viewing stage of this process. It may be years before you take it down again (but more than likely, it will be about ten minutes for the first fix. You will most likely see a mistake right away!).
When you come back to it, again, you will be seeing it with NEW EYES. Eyes that are not fooled with the artist being you, and your weakness at the moment of completion to hurry up and get it done. No, once you get away from your work, you separate from it, forever... or, at least until you take it down again, and once again absorb yourself in it.
Live with your art in this condition. Stare at it while you walk past it, or are seated in front of it. What corrections would you, the viewer make, as opposed to you, the artist? That is the secret to its final repair, and completion. The right answer will eventually rise all by itself, even if the answer is 'just leave it alone!'
THE SCIENCE OF BLURRING
Blurring something is a science? Oh, yes. When we remember that all cylinders blur around their edges, and indeed, all round objects do the same thing... That would mean the earth's horizon line, and also any rounded shape; a bridge of a nose, even. On my drawing for the cover of my fourth novel, THE PURSUIT OF SUNDOWN, I blurred out part of the bridge of Alicia Silverstone's nose, in the middle of that bridge. The effect was immediate and very realistic! It is a trick of the actual eyesight in that the eyes play those same tricks upon a viewer, and can go out of focus in places such as that, and create this same illusion. A very handy thing to know how to do.
Blurring is great any time you want to 'de-importantize' a hard line in your work that is an actual hard line in the photograph. For example, let's say that you have a hard-lined ring on a finger, or a part of a chair in the shot that you have to draw as a hard line value. Now, in the photo, it looks fine as a hard line, but in your drawing, it looks like you did what you actually did; which was to draw it, as such. A hard line. And as we have stated elsewhere, there are no hard lines in portraiture... and for this reason! They look like hard lines which have been drawn in place.
Err on the side of lightness, first.
That means you will blur the line as lightly as you can get by with, before you go medieval on it, and almost erase it out with a furious tissue rubbing. Take a clean tortillon and begin lightly going over the line along the path of the line, not across the line. This will impress the line deeper into the scene, and make the drawn-looking quality of that hard line diminish in its turn, accordingly.
If this does not satisfy, then go to a tissue, and scour along the line. If that is not enough, then take the eraser tip of a TUFF STUFF and gently wipe it along the line. Then, you can tissue over the erased area, and it should be pushed back just enough now - not to resemble a pencil line! Wipe over it with a tissue, and stand back and admire. That ought to have settled the issue, entirely.
Correction of Bad Photography
All of your source material will be inferior in some way, or other. Photography comes in the best form it has ever been made, but now we have to deal with airbrushing and all sorts of effects - from Adobe Photoshop all the way down to those little iPhoto-styled corrections. The common garden-variety photograph is no longer a sacred record of what was there; it is at best a realistic work of art in its own right. And that will bring us all a great deal of problems. We have discussed how to get a photo into black and white, which tends to strip aside a lot of the blindness that color can give us, with reference to a given set of values. But the main thing to remember is that our clients will bring us some really bad things to try and get a likeness from...
A few ideas here will help us out. In bad photography, or pictures which have been made into multiple copies, a generalization of shadows will occur. This means that a black inky pool of shadow will literally block out a whole area of value which would have been a lot better lighted, originally, in that particular light.
Shadows tend to generalize naturally in harsh lighting such as chiaroscuro (meaning obscured light) type lighting. In The Pursuit of Sundown drawing, (used as the cover of the Extreme Realism Book 2) we see The Sundown Bandit (Sharon Stone's character of The Lady from The Quick and the Dead) in a harsh noonday light. The shadow on the right side of her face is an all-engulfing inky blackness, and when you look at the drawing upside down, the entire right side of the face absolutely vanishes! Not right side up, however, because we naturally fill in the missing information with our knowledge of a woman's face, particularly Sharon Stone's! But, the harsh light does completely generalize every darkness on that side of her face to complete blackout. If we were to represent that darkness as not so hot a darkness, more of the face would be visible on the right, instead of just a reflected light line under the chin, on that side, and a reflected light line around the right nostril. Viewed upside down, we can see how very little of the face is represented, at all, on the right side.
That same sort of harsh lighting effect occurs where it is not supposed to occur in photographs which have been copied over and over again. The shadows will generalize darker and darker, and you will have to decide if that sort of a lighting works in your drawing, or if it will look like a graphic novel illustration; an almost cartoon-ized image, instead of a realism portrait. You have one of two choices; either draw it as it is, or else try to get another representation or photograph. You could attempt to back off the shadows and try and 'see' where some more detail could be made, but in general, when a real photograph has such a generalization of shadows, it means that you are stuck with just that!
George Roland Wills, 22 November 2011
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Full Facial Portraiture Notes
April 2012
In this series, the theory of art has already been taught. You know that the gift of Sight is an optical illusion, you know all the amateur mistakes, and you know the basics, such as Shine and Shadow being opposite each other, and erasing Light over Dark to get rid of all of the hard lines, as well as smoothing in the transitions between values with the Smear Tissue Technique. What will now be taught is a written 'visual' look at what the three videos cover in demonstration. I was so impressed with how that worked that I am sharing it with you now.
Explaining How to Draw
I must admit, this was new to me; this explaining how to draw a drawing, and not actually illustrating it, at all. But it was very well-received by the students. So here goes.
The first thing I had to tell them about rendering a likeness was, of course, the precise form of an outline of the subject in question. Once we got the tracing/grid squares method talk out of the way, we were then able to get on to the various points on the face. After a brief talk about the head being 'five eyes wide', as some estimates go, and the nose being an eye in length, and the mouth being an eye in width, and so forth, we got into how to draw each part of the face, and what it meant to draw upside down. Yes, upside down. That is one of the major techniques that I use for 'seeing' what is 'going on'. When one draws upside down, or when one looks at a drawing or a photo backwards, in a mirror, a lot of new information comes forward. It is really nice not to be confused with the facts.
Our eyes are incredibly lazy, and want to know stuff without us having to stare at it. We want only to stare at great beauty, but even when we are drawing it, we have to then determine the exact shape and form of 'great beauty'; and once we 'see' what 'great beauty' is really made of, we may not think that it is as 'beautiful', as we did before. That is one of the costs of learning about what something 'looks like'; it is not as beautiful to us, for some reason, once we know what makes it so beautiful. In staring at it to that point, we see small things that we did not see before, and we 'look the gift horse in the mouth', so to speak. We 'know' what it looks like, how it is, and beauty then loses some of its mystique; it's secret charm. Hey, its a price that we have to pay, to know. And we pay it, because we just have to know.
The Eyes
In drawing the eyes, I noticed that each and every set of eyes on the wall in any of the various classrooms were basically the same shape; an almond shape. A shape like the Jesus-fish that one finds on the bumper stickers and emblems for cars representing Christianity (or else like the Jesus-fish with 'legs' and DARWIN spelled out within the almond-shaped design). That simple almond shape is universally used by the untrained artist to represent an eye in a head-on full-frontal facial portrait. It is, of course, wrong. I redrew the shape for them, giving place for a tear duct, and the more realistic shape of the almond with a higher arched top-line on the upper lid, and a flatter lower lid; more of a straight line, in fact. I then told them to replicate exactly the outline of what was going on in their own source material photographs. This would be of enormous value in making real-looking eyes.
The most important thing about eyes is something called a Highlight. This is the small dot of white that is found in most any eye you will ever see. It is the place on the rounded eye where light is coming from at that exact particular moment. It shows the wetness of the eyeball itself, and without it, your eyes will look absolutely dead. The best airbrushed Marilyn Monroe I ever saw looked dead as the proverbial doornail on the hood of that car. Two small dots of whiteout would have saved her, completely...
Most art courses tell you to make all your highlights as these spotlight circles, but I do not recommend this, at all. In doing highlights from photographs, do the highlights exactly as they appear in the photo, unless none are shown. Then and only then may you add these generic spotlight circles. And if you do the circles at all, please follow these several rules for doing them. 1). Put the circles in exactly the same places on both eyes. It is the same light, after all, and it has to be coming from the exact same place against both eyes. If you do not do this, your subject may look cross-eyed. If the spotlight in your photo is dead center of the iris, please do not draw it that way in your drawing, or it will looked demonic, and possessed of devils, or something. If you see four small squares in each of your photo's eyes, those are window panes where light is coming in as highlights, and they look really cool in a drawing! Some times small pie slices are cut out of each of the eyes, if the subject is under the long fluorescent type lighting.
Most of the amateur drawings of eyes that you will ever see will have a common problem; they will all look angry, startled, or Egyptian. Ancient man, God love him, was quite clueless about how to render realism in his representations of human faces. It could have been a religious thing, where he did not want to offend God, or something... or it could have been an arrogance, where he thought why duplicate perfectly something that God had already done, even better? Or, indeed, he could have just been clueless about realism.
Thus, in order to not have angry, startled, nor Egyptian-looking fake eyes, the second most important thing about eyes must be considered. The thing is known as a Lash Line Shadow. This small but extremely important bit of shadowing will make or break your eyes as to their realism. The last line shadow may not even be visible in the photograph, at all, but try leaving it out, and see how unreal your eye will look!
Just under the upper eyelid, you will very lightly shade a thin line of shadow under the lid. It is the shadow that is made from the upper eye lashes, and this shadow falls directly onto the eyeball. You can even make this a bit more pronounced if you need to do so, but it is a subtlety that will be of enormous value in making your eyes look real.
The Iris is the colored part of the eye, and the it comes from the Greek word meaning Rainbow. It is a translucent object, where light can be seen through it to a small degree. You will always draw your pupil dead center within your iris if the subject is staring directly into the camera dead on, face front. Like a bullseye target, one perfect circle within another. And I do mean perfect; as in, get out your circles template and make it so. And make the pupil dead center in both eyes. The Pupil is always going to be your blackest black, and your darkest dark in your portrait, so make sure you shade it in very well. But notice to see if the highlight encroaches a little bit into your pupil. If it does, leave a completely unshaded area where the full light of the pupil may be seen over top of the dark black pupil. A highlight that takes in part of the pupil and most of the iris is in fact the most realistic eye that you can draw! Do not draw a hard circle for your highlight. Lightly imply it, and then draw darkness of pupil and / or iris right up to the pencil line, to get rid of that line... then, if you have to, erase white over top of any pencil line that is not valued-out on one side.
In order to make your iris look real, make the area just outside the hard black edge of your pupil (usually one of the only hard values you will have in a portrait; the other one being the outside edge of the iris as it goes into the white of the eye) a bit lighter than the rest of the iris. Then, as your iris expands out to the edge towards the sclera (the white part of the eye) draw it to where it appears to grow darker as it heads out to that hard line. The effect will be to have your iris outer edge darker and your iris inner edge lighter. This will help to make the iris look real, as well.
A good way to draw the middle of the iris - as translucent - is to draw light wagon spokes in the iris from the pupil out to the sclera. Then, tortillon in those spokes, and shade lightly cross-wise over top of them, and then smear this, as well.Then, take your kneaded eraser and form a small point, and 'bap' out lighter areas in places within the iris, at certain intervals. Keep erasing out small areas of light with your TUFF STUFF eraser, or else a sliced-in-half white eraser with a cutting edge to it. This will help you to dig in deep and pull out very small areas of white that you can then blend back into translucence as you need to do that. This adding-and-taking-away routine has the effect of creating depth in a drawing, with layers and layers of black that you dig out, in certain areas, and then smooth back over again, and again.
If you can draw the human eye, you can draw anything on the face. If you can draw the human face, you can draw anything in the world.
The Ears
Most of the time, we will not be drawing ears, because of hair, hats, and other things that tend to block them out for us. If we do have to draw them, remember that the top of the ear is about level with the eyebrow, and the lower lobe is about level with the bottom of the nose. There will most always be a shadow below the ear lobe, and in back of the ear. The top part of the ear will pick up a strong light, if it is exposed to the open air. Draw each of the various parts of the ear, accurately. If you are close enough to see the folds, don't try and blur out the inner features of the ear; this looks very amateurish. Drawn each firm fold as it is. Learn about the various parts of the ear so that you will spend time delineating these parts and making them a part of your ear, if they are visible; the helix, the anti-helix, the concha, the scapha, the tragus, the anti-tragus, and the inter-tragal notch... these are the parts of an ear that are found on all ears. Google "Outer Ear Anatomy" for some diagrams that you can follow.
Remember to draw along all of the edges of the ear with your eraser, to draw 'white over black, or 'light over dark'. This way hard pencil lines do not make your ear look like a diagram schematic. Rub the area between the light and dark with a tortillon point to join the areas seamlessly without any hard line showing. Smear with a tissue and bap back all the darknesses with your kneaded eraser, and then smear again. This builds value and depth to your drawing, adding even more 'realism' because of it.
The Nose
The nose has four sides, the bridge of the nose being the 'top' side. Each of the barrels of the nose will have a 'reflected light line' that is implied around the dark entrance of the nostril barrel, to show where the darkness begins. About halfway down the nose, you will see where the bone ends and the cartilage begins. The nose will sometimes darkness just a bit in this area, and then get brighter again as it gets down to the tip of the nose. Most nose tips seem to have a 'ball' embedded in the tip area. Some noses have a flat back part of the nostril areas that is the actual wall of the face, itself. Noses should not have hard lines defining the top bridge of the nose in slight three quarter profile shots, and should definitely not have two hard lines running down either wide if the nose in a straight-on head shot. There will most always be a shadow of some sort under the nose, along the septum, where the nose is blocking out the main source light from off the face.
The Mouth
Mouths are about an eye wide, and the lower lip is not only a bit larger than the upper lip, but is a bit lighter, as well. This is because light comes down from above, and the larger lower lip usually catches this light. Mouths are slightly bow-shaped, but do not play into this shape, or it will look fake. Do not outline lips, and only make both lips the same size if you are trying for an evening glamour look in a woman. Women will usually try and make the upper lip as large as the lower one in order to have a nice 'pucker' factor. Lips have slight vertical lines that should be implied, and blended in as part of the mouth. Teeth should never be just implied, but drawn as hard as they are, and then recessed in their creases with the firm 'bap' of a kneaded eraser. The inside of the mouth is usually very dark!
The Neck
The neck is usually recessed, and so will be in a dim light, unless it is picking up light from an usual tilt of the head, try and make some statements in this area; darknesses where long hair may be blocking out the light, or lightnesses where the neck ligaments form. Make sure that you recess the whole area lightly in a shadow, to make the chin and the face come forward. Also, lose the 'chin strap' hard outline of the jaw that you used to show where it was, originally. Erase it, and then imply a dirty tortillon back over the area, and make one side of the line lighter or darker, accordingly.
The Facial Middle Ground
This area is the 'mask' of the face or the Middle Ground Maintenance areas. These is the ares without eyes, without nose, and without a mouth. It takes in the areas of the Forehead, the Glabella (area between the eyes), The Temples, the Cheeks, the Septum (under the nose), the outer mouth areas, and the Chin, and Jawlines. These areas are most of the time a #2, and should always be drawn as a #2, and if more is needed, then amp it up to a #3 in these places... This is to err on the side of lightness, so you do not have to trust an eraser to set you back right, again. All of these areas have rolling hills and valleys that are best seen upside down in order to 'get' their exact shapes.
The Skin
Your skin is a value on the gray scale, and it should be a value, usually, of a #2 or a #3 in darkness. #4 and #5 are reserved for lighter shadows on skin and for darker shadows on skin, respectively. The color of the skin in a normal light with no shadows is a #2 or a #3, most of the time. Even ethnically dark skin does not go any darker than a #3, as a rule, there are just fewer places along that same ethnic skin where a #2 is ever shown. This loss of the #2 value in places will make your skin appear to be blacker, or darker, as in a negro skin color, or that of a dark indian person. That, and the nose and hair and lip shapes usually tend to make the person look negroid, or whatever race of people that is being represented. A Nubian black man may, of course, be shown in a #4 value in places, if he is in a hard light, or outside in the sun. You do not want your black people being shown too black, however (because they tend to look comical and caricature-like, as in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons from the 1930's and the 1940's) unless they are outside, and you want to capitalize on their natural darknesses, and show a heavy white shine on their reflective areas.
The Hair
Hair must be take by the layer, each hair is part of a mass of hair. The eye selects highlights from each curl (that means that the hair rolling towards the light source picks up light and the hair rolling back and receding away from the light source will be picking up shadow).
Hair is relatively easy, once you get the idea. What is the surprising part of hair is that you start out drawing hair in the same amateurish-looking way that children draw it; just not as badly. You will draw actual lines to show the direction that the hair strands are taking, and you will imply this shape of the hair... but then you will go back and fill in the realism by erasing out the highlights and the Band of Shine. The Band of Shine is any great area of reflected light across a rounded part of the head, where that rounded part of the head is towards the light source. Any person with natural (not dyed) hair will have this band of shine reflected in the natural oils of the hair, and it is the one dead giveaway that hair has been dyed, when this band of shine is missing from dyed hair...
To draw in a band of shine, take your eraser, and lift out the pencil lines in that area, with slashes and wipes, Then, along the edges of that band of shine (where the darker hair enters and leaves the band of shine area) wipe across them lightly with a tissue, to blend in the 'entry and exit wounds', as I call the pencil slashes leading up to the area, where they were just erased to make the band of shine lighter in that area.
You will then lighten rounded areas which are convex, and darken those which are concave. Do this subtly, and look for clues in your photograph for how dark to go or how light to leave a certain area.
Bangs will have a darkness just at their tips, all the way across, where the uneven scissors always leave a slightly ragged edge (all bangs do this, and all scissors contribute to it!).
Hair must be formed in actual layers of pencil 'buildup'. This is crucial to getting nice looking hair, with depth! It could take you hours to build up an entire head of natural looking hair. Check out my second video on EMILY for the process as it is shown.
Fingers and Hands, Arms, and Legs
Draw them exactly as they appear, and remember that all cylinders (fingers, arms, and legs) all blur around their edges, slightly! Never draw fingers with hard lines remaining!
Look at my LeAnn Rimes hand for the effect. Always use as much tonal value to separate the various fingers and so forth as possible. This will take some practice. Do draw in the line creases for the joints and things, but 'bap' them back with the kneaded eraser to make the hands 'age-appropriate'. Remember where the overall light is coming from, and make a light side and a dark side to your hand, if you can. always remember to erase away hard lines with a sharp eraser, and then fill that line back in with a sharp tortillion. To make lines disappear all together, always remember to shade one side of the line into a value. This will have the effect of losing the hard line, entirely!
And again, Good Luck to you! If I think of any other things, I will add them in future lecture series notes, and eventually combine them together...
George Roland Wills April 2012
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Some More Advanced Notes
May 2012
In this complete set of 'everything to date', we have one or two more ideas to explore, and this will complete our studies of the Black and White Pencil Drawing, as an Art Form.
A. Everything starts out basically lying flat upon the surface of your paper, as an outline. Think of your paper, then, as the surface of the water in a quiet pool. A mosquito lies fairly flat upon the top of the water. This is basically your outline, when you first start to draw your picture. Got it? Thus, let's say that you have a small toy raft floating on this water...
B. Now, the trick of making the drawing look 'real' is to push the raft under the surface of the water, holding it steady, and down about six inches, or so. Notice that nowhere does the raft break the surface anymore, so it is not on the surface, now, but under it... and there is no hard outline, at all. It is all in the water, and is represented now as an image pushed down into the water a few inches. Like your subject behind your glass plate. who has stepped back away from having his nose against the glass, on the other side... he also will have to have the outline of him erased in order to make realism of any kind.
C. What this all means, then, is this; when you erase all of your outline in a portrait, the image sinks itself beneath the surface of your paper, and is not any longer a schematic outline. but is rather now a photographic image recessed back behind the paper, as if it were a clear piece of glass, or a calm pool of water. This is REALISM. You have recessed the image and now it looks 'real' to you.
D. If you recess the image, and make all of your shadows and darknesses with a furious amount of contrast, various gray scale changes, and a massive range of values, then some thing wonderful happens... It will appear to come up off the page in 3D.
E. That's right. 3D. In my LeAnn Rimes drawing, her face and her head are about a foot back into the paper, but her hand seems to come forward out of the paper, and into your face
- about six inches off the surface of the paper - like one of those lucite holographic images on the lighted stands that you see in those hippie shops in the mall that sell amethyst crystals and black light posters. Now, the frame, the glass covering the paper, and even the paper, itself actually disappears, entirely. It is there, it is just invisible!
And, when that happens, you have achieved, and attained, Extreme Realism.
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