04-22-2020, 11:58 AM
Some of those faces are quite pretty, so you're obviously not hopeless at this. Drawing well from imagination is my main aspiration, and I think I've recently advanced from being bad at it to merely being mediocre, so I hope I can give you some good ideas. Some thoughts on drawing faces in particular:
Firstly, if you don't have one already; here's a .zip of pictures of the same skull taken from many different angles that I found on another forum (I have no idea who took these but they hopefully intended for people to upload them willy-nilly on the inner-net): https://www.dropbox.com/s/nijwg02tyk7x22...s.zip?dl=0
Studying skulls is enormously helpful, but once you get a good sense of them you have to move on to the soft stuff, which is far more perilous. The easiest way to understand why anything looks the way it does is to understand the underlying structure, which is harder with faces than the rest of the body, because the way that facial muscles contribute to the surface form is not obvious (except for the masseters and, to some extent, the orbicularis oris). The best way I've found to get a good feel for the forms of the face is to study males who are sufficiently sallow-faced that you can see evidence of thin muscles like the zygomaticus (if you have no refs of this type, do an image search for "lipoatrophy" or "Jean-Claude Van Damme"). This is only partially helpful for drawing faces that have fat on them, such as young female ones, but it will help you understand why they look they way they do. Simplified plane heads like the Asaro head Leysan linked are helpful as well.
Firstly, if you don't have one already; here's a .zip of pictures of the same skull taken from many different angles that I found on another forum (I have no idea who took these but they hopefully intended for people to upload them willy-nilly on the inner-net): https://www.dropbox.com/s/nijwg02tyk7x22...s.zip?dl=0
Studying skulls is enormously helpful, but once you get a good sense of them you have to move on to the soft stuff, which is far more perilous. The easiest way to understand why anything looks the way it does is to understand the underlying structure, which is harder with faces than the rest of the body, because the way that facial muscles contribute to the surface form is not obvious (except for the masseters and, to some extent, the orbicularis oris). The best way I've found to get a good feel for the forms of the face is to study males who are sufficiently sallow-faced that you can see evidence of thin muscles like the zygomaticus (if you have no refs of this type, do an image search for "lipoatrophy" or "Jean-Claude Van Damme"). This is only partially helpful for drawing faces that have fat on them, such as young female ones, but it will help you understand why they look they way they do. Simplified plane heads like the Asaro head Leysan linked are helpful as well.