The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [87]
• Then, turn back to your drawing to transfer the ratio. Using the pencil, re-measure eye level to chin in the drawing. Holding that measure with your thumb, turning your pencil to the horizontal position, measure from the back of the eye to the back of the ear, then to the back of the head (or hair). Make a mark. Perhaps you will not believe your own sights. If carefully taken, they are true, and your job is to believe what your eyes tell you. Learning to have faith in one’s perceptions is one of the principal keys to drawing well. I’m sure you can extrapolate the importance of this to other areas of life.
Fig. 9-31. Look for the shape of the space under the nostril. This shape will vary from model to model and should be specifically observed on each individual.
Fig. 9-32.
Fig. 9-33.
Fig. 9-34.
Fig. 9-35.
19. In drawing your model’s hair, what you want not to do is to draw hairs. Students often ask me, “How do you draw hair?” I think the question really means, “Give me a quick and easy way to draw hair that looks good and doesn’t take too long.” But the answer to the question is, “Look carefully at the model’s (unique) hair and draw what you see.” If the model’s hair is a complicated mass of curls, the student is likely to answer, “You can’t be serious! Draw all of that?”
But it really isn’t necessary to draw every hair and every curl. What your viewer wants is for you to express the character of the hair, particularly the hair closest to the face. Look for the dark areas where the hair separates and use those areas as negative spaces. Look for the major directional movements, the exact turn of a strand or wave. The right hemisphere, loving complexity, can become entranced with the perception of hair, and the record of your perceptions in this part of a portrait can have great impact, as in the portrait of Proud Maisie (Figure 9-36). To be avoided are the thin, glib, symbolic marks that spell out h-a-i-r on the same level as if you lettered the word across the skull of your portrait. Given enough clues, the viewer can extrapolate and, in fact, enjoys extrapolating the general texture and nature of the hair. See the demonstration drawings at the end of this chapter for examples.
Drawing hair is largely a light-shadow process. In the next chapter, we’ll take up the perception of lights and shadows in depth. For now, I’ll set down some brief suggestions. To draw your model’s hair, gaze at it with your eyes squinted to obscure details and to see where the larger highlights lie and where the larger shadows fall. Notice particularly the characteristics of the hair (wordlessly, of course, though I must use words for the sake of clarity). Is the hair crinkly and dense, smooth and shiny, randomly curled, short and stiff? Take notice of the overall shape of the hair and make sure that you have matched that shape in your drawing. Begin to draw the hair in some detail where the hair meets the face, transcribing the light-shadow patterns and the direction of angles and curves in various segments of the hair.
Fig. 9-36. Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1832-1904), Proud Maisie. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Fig. 9-37. Note the position of the ear. The placement fits our mnemonic for locating the ear in profile view: Eye level-to-chin equals back-of-the-eye to the back-of-the-ear.
20. Finally, to complete your profile portrait, draw in the neck and shoulders, which provide a support for the profile head. The amount of detail of clothing is another aesthetic choice with no strict guidelines. The major aims are to provide enough detail to fit—that is, to be congruent with—the drawing of the head, and to make sure that the drawing of details of clothing adds to, and does not detract from, your drawing of the head. See Figure 9-36 for an example.
Fig. 9-38.
Fig. 9-39.
Fig. 9-40.