M2M Day 41: Finding the proportions of Morgan Freeman’s head
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For December, my goal is to draw a realistic self-portrait with only pencil and paper.
A few days ago, I finished drawing my first portrait. Since then, I’ve reread my notes, reviewed some parts of the course, and wrote up my “Portrait Drawing Cheat Sheet”.
With all the steps documented, it’s now time to deliberately practice the most important skills.
In particular, as I said on Day 35, I believe that it’s most important to accurately capture the proportions of the head, the head shape, and the level of the features. If these things are done correctly, the rest of the process is very forgiving. If not, the portrait will end up beautifully shaded, but won’t look like the subject.
Today, I’m going to practice finding the correct proportions of the subject’s head using a few celebrities: Matt Damon, Natalie Portman, and Morgan Freeman.
Matt Damon
Here’s the photo I’m using.
Here’s my attempt to locate the peak of his head, the lowest point of his chin (which is located on the chin’s left side), the leftmost point of his cheek, and the rightmost point of his ear.
In Photoshop, I overlaid my sketch on the photo to check. I was pretty accurate.
Natalie Portman
Here’s Natalie.
And here’s my attempt to locate the peak of her hair, the lowest point of her chin (again on the chin’s left side), the rightmost point of her cheek, the leftmost point of her hair, and the notch of her neck.
Checking in Photoshop, everything seems pretty accurate. Although, the low point of the chin may be slightly too far left.
Morgan Freeman
Here I try to locate the peak of his head, the lowest point of his chin, the rightmost point of his ear, the leftmost point of his ear, and the notch of his neck.
This one looks right on the money.
With each of the sketches, unlike with my Derren Brown portrait, I felt that I was able to see the angle on the subject and accurately replicate it on the page with limited effort.
This is a good sign…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
