How To Draw Faces- 3/4 View: CARTOONING 101 #2

Hey there, I'm BJ Dell, and you just stumbled across episode 2 of Cartooning 101, a new YouTube tutorial series that I'm doing showing you the basics and fundamentals of cartooning. If you missed episode 1, we talked about drawing the head from a front-facing position, and in this episode, we're going to take the head, tilt it ever so slightly, and do a three-quarters perspective. I'm going to walk you through some guides and tips and tricks that you can use to make sure everything is lined up correctly so that you can become a better cartoonist. So if you want to learn all about that and more, keep watching. Hey guys, welcome to episode 2 of Cartooning 101. In today's video, we're going to be talking about drawing the head from a three-quarters perspective, kind of angle perspective. If you have not watched the first episode in this series, I highly recommend hopping over there and watching that one first, just because a lot of the basics and fundamentals we introduced in that first episode are going to be transferred and used over here on this one. That episode was about drawing the head from a straight-on perspective, so watch that one first and come back. As far as today's video, I'm using an iPad Pro 12.9-inch first-gen model with the Apple Pencil, but that being said, this entire video series does not have to do anything with digital. I'm just using the iPad because it kind of speeds up this process, and you'll see I can do some undos, and it makes the whole process easier, and it's going to make these videos shorter. If you don't have an iPad, if you don't have a tablet or computer to draw on at home, just grab a piece of paper and a pencil. You will be able to do everything that's going to be shown in these videos. Let's go ahead and jump into it. Like I said in the first video, starting out, any character that we draw, it doesn't matter if it's a human or a animal or anything like that, it's going to start out with your basic circle shape. Let's start out by drawing a circle. The first video, we drew a vertical and then a horizontal line to break this into four sections. This one, we're going to do that as well, but we're going to make a curved line here for the vertical line. Now, basically, what we're going to do here is think of the shape and the circle as a three-dimensional sphere. It has volume and mass to it, and you can spin it around, and that's why we want this circle to have the center line that's curved following the natural shape of the circle. Then, likewise, we're going to draw the center line here, and you'll see this follows the curve as well and gives it that nice three-dimensional shape. We did this in the first video. Doing the vertical and horizontal line broke the circle up into four equal sections, four equal quadrants. You'll see in this one, we do have the four sections again. However, since this is a three-quarters perspective, you'll see everything over here, these quadrants are larger than what are over here. That also is going to come in handy later to give us the right perspective because anything that falls on this left-hand side of the center line is going to be larger than anything that falls on this side. This is going to be smaller due to the perspective. Now that we've got the center line here drawn, if you remember, this is going to be our brow line, so we need to go ahead and draw a second line here for our eye line. This was covered in that first video. We've got the two different lines here set in. Next step, since this is that three-quarters perspective, if you think about this shape, this is basically what's representing the skull, the cranium part of the skull. Your head has that roundness factor to the skull, but on the sides of your head, it is flat. If we draw in just a oblong ellipse shape here, this is going to represent that flat side of your head where your ear is. It's going to make things a lot easier to understand once we start adding the extra parts in here. Now that we've got that, let's go ahead and draw our eyes in here. This comes in handy, too, because it allows us to center this eye in between this line of this ellipse and this center line. We also want it centered in our line here with the horizontal eye line. Likewise, over here, let's draw another circle. Those are going to serve as our eyes. You might be looking at this, if you didn't watch that first video or if you skipped ahead in it, and you might think to yourself, those eyes look really kind of far set down. They're really close to this bottom. Is that really too close to the bottom of the head? Well, this is not actually going to be the bottom of the head. I'll start to kind of block in a little bit here to better illustrate what we've got going on. If you kind of picture this, this is where that flat part comes down and around into the cheekbone and then the start of the jaw section. I'm just kind of blocking in the underlying skeletal features on this so you can kind of see a little bit better what we've got going on here. You'll see the jaw comes around here and then into the front of the chin. This is the underlying skeletal features. We've got the skull so you can kind of see why these are set so far down, because that's not the bottom of the head. It's going to come down further down into this section. You'll see here too, being able to undo this and going backwards, that's why I'm using the eye pad because I can illustrate stuff like that and not have to redraw all this. We're just going to kind of erase those and erase this and get started with the actual design. With this design, I think we're going to go ahead and do a female character with this one. Let's go ahead and kind of start blocking in the eyes. Usually start over here. One thing to remember in these three-quarters perspectives is this eye here on the shortened side, it's going to actually be obscured by the nose a little bit. You'll see here as I do this, this nose and the bridge is going to hide part of this eye. It's going to kind of be tucked back underneath and it's going to give that realistic three-quarters perspective. If you're worried too about drawing eyes and stuff like that, I'm not going over those in these videos, the head videos at least. I'm going to do all separate videos for how to draw eyes, how to draw noses, mouths, ears, and then how to draw the body, how to draw dynamic poses with the body. Don't get too worried if you're not up to par on drawing the individual parts. We'll get to that in the videos. Make sure you stick with the video series and we will go over all those parts. One thing to remember too as you're drawing the eyes, and I'll talk about this as I'm doing it, is the round shape is, once again, like we drew the skeleton, this is what's laying underneath that eyelid that we're drawing. You don't necessarily have to follow that circle perfectly when you're outlining the eyes. That is basically just to give you that underlying structure of where you want everything else to go. Once you have that, it kind of sets in where the lines need to be. Like here, I didn't actually connect everything and do a perfect line that touches everything. That's because we kind of know where it's supposed to be and we don't really need to do that. We can kind of clean some of that up later. If we go in and color it, you can make things a little bit more obvious where the eyes are. So just get the pupils in here, a little shine on the pupils, oops, okay. So next up, we've got the brow line up here. We can go ahead and add those in there. Once again, with this being a female character, the brows are going to be kind of thin, not super thick. And then we'll go ahead and add this crease to the top of the lid here, put that in, okay. So our next step then is to start working on the nose. Now in the first video, I talked about putting the nose directly in the center of the vertical line that comes down. But with this, obviously the center line comes and curves back around. So we're not going to do that with this one. But what we can do is, let's draw another line here. And it's basically going to break this eye in half and come down and follow that same curvature that this line and then the outer circle line has. So with the nose, we're going to put it down here at the bottom of the circle like we did in the previous video. However, we're going to start it over further. So using the center line, if you remember, we did the nose like a kind of pyramid triangle shape last time. So we're going to do that here. But once again, that perspective is going to be skewed because this is the three-quarter shot. So we're going to start over here at that center line. That's going to be the back of our triangle. And once again, this line is going to be longer because it is actually closer to the viewer. And this one's going to be going off in the distance because of that perspective. So we've got our nose kind of blocked in there. I'm going to pull this back around. And of course, with the female characters, usually you want the noses a little bit smaller, a little bit pug-like. That kind of does that cute little pinup girl or if you're doing young characters, that gives that cute factor to them. So we've got that in there. Next up is the jawline and the cheeks here. So usually what I will do is start over here. And what we want to do is follow this circle around. And depending on the character, I usually bring this and touch this eye right here. If it is a younger character or a female character, it just kind of makes the overall design look a little bit cuter. Now, if you're dealing with a larger set character, a man, anything with a little bit of girth, you might pull this out further so it doesn't touch and it leaves a little bit more room off to the side. Likewise, the jaw itself is really going to depend on the character that you're making. It's going to define that character. So like we talked about before, babies have that smaller, shorter squash set jaw to give the overall young factor. Older characters, you're going to bring the jaw down further. If you've got, of course, a heavy set character like that bouncer that we did in the last video, you know, the jaw might be pulled out to here and it just really depends on the character you're doing. So kind of play around with the jaw placement to get that right look, but we'll go ahead and pull this in. Now, the next step, this is super important to get that cartoony and cute look is to pull the cheek out. So this is going to come out in a kind of a flowing dynamic line here. You'll see this pulls out and down and around. I'll do that a couple of times just so you can see the motion that it takes. And this is going to pull that eye out into the cheek and then bring it down to where the jaw is going to start to meet the chin down here. So just kind of play around with how far out you want it and how, you know, the character's style and personality is going to determine that. So now that we've got that, come back over here where we've got this ellipse and just start bringing this down. And this is going to be that backside of that chin and we can pull this down into this bottom section here. So we'll do that, kind of make the line a little bit thicker here and then we just want them to meet in the chin. Now, it really depends with the chin too, what kind of character you're doing. You know, females are going to have a little bit more naturally feminine quality to them. Sometimes you might go for a little bit more angled look on a female. Sometimes it'll be, you know, a nice soft line. It just really depends once again on that character. So now that we've got that in, let's go ahead and do the mouth. The mouth is going to fall in this midsection here. So if you want to do another line, kind of following the curve of the face and then like we talked about in the previous video too, if you start here in the middle and kind of go down in a triangle and hit the sides of the nose here, this is going to be pretty much the area that the mouth goes in a normal expression. So like I said before, with cartoons, you can get some crazy facial expressions out of them. It's fun to really go crazy and hog wild with these where if you, you know, had like a super comical thing like this, you can make some really fun mouths. But for this sake of this video, we'll just do a fairly normal size mouth here and just make it look, like I said, pretty, pretty normal. So once again, taking into consideration the angle that we're at, this back part here is going to be larger than the front part because we have that three quarters perspective that we're dealing in. So make sure that as stuff trails away back here, it does get smaller and it covers less surface area. That way you make sure that you are using the correct perspective. So we've got the mouth in there. Now let's go ahead and do the ears. Ears like we said previously in the last video, start from about that center line here and come down to about the bottom of the nose here. Once again, the ears are really going to be dependent on the character as well, the size and shape of those. And we will talk more about ears in one of those later videos too. So don't get too caught up in worrying if your ears are perfect right now. And I'll just do the neck down here. And then for hair, we'll just throw in some hair real quick here. Once again, there will be a separate video on hair, so that will be one of the future ones. So don't worry too much about the hair right now. If you need tips or tricks on hair starting out, definitely just get on Google image search of, you know, hairstyles for women or hairstyles for men or boys. And you can just kind of take those real world examples and see how you can adjust those to what kind of style you want for your character. There's always a ton of hair pictures out there for, you know, hairstylists and stuff like that. So they're definitely a good resource to give you ideas. So there is our female character. Let's go ahead and throw a couple of freckles in here to make it cute. There we go. So there's our female character. Now let's go ahead and I'm going to duplicate this layer and then I'm going to turn down the opacity. Once again, this is one of those ways that I can make these videos really quick. And we're going to use that same shape that we had to begin with. And we're going to draw the baby using this same base layer and turn this down a little bit further. And you're going to see how adjusting this jaw is going to kind of affect everything else here. So these lines in here, a little difficult to see, there we go. So we'll go ahead and draw our eyes, get our circle back here. Now, let's kind of block these in, make this part fairly quick, eyebrows up here, eyelids there. All right. So once again, hiding that behind here, we'll pull that bridge down. Now, the nose on the female character was down here. With the babies, like I said, everything needs to be a little bit closer. So we're going to actually start our nose up quite a bit further here. So it's going to be a lot closer to the eyes. This is also going to work too once we pull the jaw and the cheeks around. So let's go ahead and do that now. We'll pull in this close here. I'm going to pull this out a little bit further, and then you'll see the difference in the area there. This is going to be up a lot closer, and then the mouth, of course, is going to be closer too. So you can see how far a difference that makes as far as the size that is in between the sections. And then the ears, we'll just kind of knock those in real quick here. So if you can see underneath here, the difference between the two, that jaw comes down quite a bit further. The mouth is set down here. We even kind of move the eyes in a little bit closer too, just because with the babies, you want all those features kind of closer together, and it reads a little bit more younger and cute. And same thing with the neck, we can go really small with that. So that's the baby. So taking the steps that we learned so far, we can also adjust the way that the character is looking. So just draw these circles in here again. So we started out with just basic angles here, but we start to adjust where these lines here that are horizontally go, we're going to have a character that's looking up this way. We pull these down. This is going to be a character that's looking down this way. We go the opposite direction here, you're going to have a character that's looking up and to the left. And the same thing here, pulling it down, you're going to have a character that's looking down and to the right. So this is a good way to work with perspective on top of the three quarters. So you can get some dynamic poses out of your characters and change, you know, which direction they're looking. This is one of those good tools. If you're doing comics or cartoons to kind of add to the viewer interest, makes it just not seem so stagnant and stale and cookie cutter by changing the, you know, the direction that the characters are looking. So next up, let's go ahead. Like we did last video, let's take what we learned so far and kind of throw everything on its head and make some really kind of funky designs just by using these basics. So we'll start out with the same shape here. Let's move everything up though. Instead of having the character looking up though, I'm actually going to still have it looking towards the viewer, but it's just going to kind of skew this whole shape of the face. So these in here, I think I kind of want this character to be an older character. Let's make kind of crazy bridge nose here. It's going to come down longer and be a little bit more prominent. This is one of my favorite things about cartooning is just being able to do fun designs like this and create some, some really cool characters. Let's kind of do some droopy eyes here. Bags underneath there. It's kind of cool. All right. And we'll get the pupils in there. And then for the eyelids up here, these are going to kind of be wrinkly, add some age to them. There we go. And then for the eyebrows, let's go ahead and make those kind of bushy and big here. Exaggerate the overall size of those. And once again, remember this eyebrow here is on the right-hand side, the foreshortened side of that center line. So this eyebrow needs to be smaller in surface area than this one over here, and it gives that correct perspective. Fill those in just ever so slightly. Okay. So now we can go ahead and start pulling out the shape of the face. So let's do the eye here into the cheekbone. I think I'm going to have the nose sticking out a little bit past here. And you know what? Let's do a mustache on here. I think that might look cool too. So let's do a mustache. Once again, mustache-wise, this is going to follow the perspective that we've already set in there. And this backside is going to be shorter than that front side. And then let's go ahead and put in his bottom lip here. Top one's going to be covered by the mustache, so we kind of just want to give the impression of the bottom lip. I'm not going to draw it in 100%. I'm just going to have that kind of shadow effect to it. So there's that. And let's go ahead and start to pull down this jawline here. I'm going to make this kind of exaggerated and elongated, so it's going to come down quite a bit here into the chin. And let's go ahead and make this chin kind of crazy too. There we go. Have this lip kind of overreach outside of that jawline. Gives it a pretty cool effect there. And then I'm also going to do just a cheek line here to give that extra gaunt look to him. And with this, you can kind of shade in lighter there. Bring down some age lines around the nose and the mouth there. And let's go ahead and add the ears in. We're going to go ahead and make these kind of bigger too. So they're kind of stretched out and exaggerated. There we go. Looking good. So now for the top of the head, instead of... Because I've kind of got this up further. You can pull up the head if you wanted to, but I kind of like how this breaks off here. So I'm going to go ahead and just do this like squared off look on the forehead. There's not going to be a lot of forehead, and I think it looks really kind of funny like this. Of course, this goes against, you know, everything realistic, but I think for this character it adds an interesting element to him. And then let's go ahead and add some hair here. We'll have him bald on top, and then his hair's coming down here and maybe a little bit longer and shaggy on the sides. Couple here still hanging on to on the top. There we go. All right. So that gives you kind of another example of how you can take what we learned to begin with and just kind of go crazy with it. Go just nuts with those lines, stretch everything, and really make something unique and one of a kind. So that's it for today's video. All right, guys. That's it for today's video. As always, thank you for watching. I appreciate it. If you like today's video too, make sure you give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and hit the bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos. And speaking of new videos, the next up in the series is the last one about heads, and we're going to be taking the head, turning it on its side, and doing the profile. So that's going to be the last one about heads before we move on to the features, focusing on nose, mouth, ears, so on and so forth, before we move on to hands, feet, how to connect everything, how to put your characters in dynamic poses. 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