The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [96]
10. Feel on your own face and neck: How wide is your neck compared to the width of your jaw just in front of your ears? You’ll see that your neck is almost as wide—in some men, it’s as wide or wider. Mark the blank. Note that necks are wider than you think.
11. Now test each of your perceptions on people, photographs of people, images of people on the television screen. Practice often, observing—first without measuring, then if necessary corroborating by measuring—perceiving relationships between this feature and that, perceiving the unique, minute differences between faces; seeing, seeing, seeing. Eventually, you will have memorized the general measurements given above and you won’t have to analyze in the left-hemisphere mode as we have been doing. But for now it’s best to practice observing the specific proportions.
Now we’ll turn to the three-quarter view
Recall our previous definition of the three-quarter view: one-half of the head plus one-quarter. Still sitting in front of a mirror, pose your head in this view by starting with a full, frontal view and then turning (either left or right) so that you can only partly see one side of your head. You are now seeing one full side plus onequarter—in other words a three-quarter view.
Artists of the Renaissance loved the three-quarter view, once they had finally worked through the problems of the proportions. I hope you will choose this view for your self-portrait. It’s somewhat complicated, but fascinating to draw.
Young children rarely draw people with heads turned to the three-quarter view. Children generally draw either profiles or the full, frontal view. Around age ten or so, children begin to attempt three-quarter view drawings, perhaps because this view can be particularly expressive of the personality of the model. The problems young artists encounter with this view are the same old problems: the three-quarter view brings visual perceptions into conflict with the symbolic forms developed throughout childhood for profile and full-face views, which by age ten are embedded in the memory.
“When drawing a face, any face, it is as if curtain after curtain, mask after mask, falls away . . . until a final mask remains, one that can no longer be removed, reduced. By the time the drawing is finished, I know a great deal about that face, for no face can hide itself for long. But although nothing escapes the eye, all is forgiven beforehand. The eye does not judge, moralize, criticize. It accepts the masks in gratitude as it does the long bamboos being long, the goldenrod being yellow.”
—Frederick Franck
The Zen of Seeing, 1973
Fig. 10-25. A sketch by the author from a three-quarter view portrait by the German artist Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), Head of a Youth with a Red Cap.
What are those conflicts? First, as you see in Figure 10-25, the nose is not the same as a nose seen in profile. In three-quarter view, you see the top and the side of the nose, making it seem very wide. Second, the two sides of the face are different widths—one side narrow, one side wide. Third, the eye on the turned side is narrower and shaped differently from the other eye. Fourth, the mouth from its center to the corner is shorter on the turned side and shaped differently from the mouth on the other side of the centerline. These perceptions of nonmatching features conflict with the memorized symbols for features that are usually more symmetrical.
The solution to the conflict is of course to draw just what you see without questioning why it is thus or so and without changing the perceived forms to fit with a memorized-and-stored set of symbols for features. To see the thing-as-it-is in all of its unique and marvelous complexity—that is always the key.
My students have found it helpful if I point out some specific aids to seeing the three-quarter proportions. Let me again take you through the process