How to Make a Drawing Reference - DIY Models

Are you good at drawing facial features from the front or side, but horrible at drawing them from any other angle? I'm Darlene, and today I'm going to share with you a quick way to make a 3D model and use it, so you can always know how a particular facial feature should look, from any angle. It's going to involve three sections. We'll actually make the play-doh from scratch. Form it into some facial features, and then I'll show you how to use these models to help you draw. Making a 3D model is simple. Just mix flour, dish soap, and table salt together very well to form a play-doh. This recipe is just right for me, but if you find it's too dry, add more dish soap. Too wet? Add more flour. Too crumbly? Add less salt. And that's it! Salt acts as a preservative, so you can keep this for a few months in an airtight container without it going moldy. Many recipes use oil, which I don't recommend, because it can completely ruin your drawing. You can add a few drops of food coloring too. Okay, let's make the models. Making an eye is easy. First make a ball. Just grab a piece and roll it in your palm. Now get another piece and flatten it out. You can also use a rolling pin. Cut it in half using a straight edge. I'm using a ruler. This one's the top eyelid. And this one's the bottom eyelid. Pinch the two lids together so they stay. Of course eyes aren't this bulbous, because the eyeball sits inside the eye sockets. So ignore the surrounding area, and just focus our attention on precisely this area of our model to understand how this football shape changes as the ball is rotated. Now you can find out what eyes look like from any angle just by rotating the ball. You can use this crude model to draw a page full of eyes in all sorts of directions so you can memorize it for later. Instead of needing to rely on a physical reference all the time. If you want to study the nose from different angles, create a wedge shape and add two round pieces on the sides for each nostril. You can make it as realistic as you want, but I think making it blocky helps you quickly grasp what a nose should look like from any angle. Keep it next to your desk in case you come across difficulties when drawing. To make a model head, you can use a styrofoam ball, or any ball that can be pierced all the way through the center, with a stick, such as a toothpick. Draw a vertical and horizontal line all the way around. Make sure the corner forms a 90 degree angle, and that the vertical line goes through the north and south pole. The cross marks the very front of the face. Use this and follow my tutorial on drawing faces from any angle to learn how to use your new model of the head. This model can have a second use. If you turn it into an eye like we did earlier, and center the cross, you can find out how to make someone look directly in front of them, no matter what direction they're facing, by taking note of where the cross is as you rotate the eye, and centering the pupil there. This is helpful if you tend to draw cross-eyed people by accident, and have a hard time correcting it. Okay, so you have some models, how do you use them? The first thing to understand is that these are crude, simplified models of facial features. They're not going to show you the exact way to draw an eye or a nose, but they do help you get an idea for how these facial features might look from challenging angles. They're very helpful when you can't find a reference image for the exact pose that you need on Google Images. If you're trying to understand how a nose should look from an extreme angle, rotate your model so you can view it from that angle. As you rotate to that position, pay attention to how your model looks as you rotate it. Being able to rotate a 3D object and study the way each plane or side of the object changes is important. Doing studies of this can help you create a library in your mind, so you don't need to rely on a reference every time you want to draw a person who's lying down or looking up. It's also crucial for drawing from imagination. But don't solely use these for study. You'll want to mostly study from real people and image references. Now you don't need a very detailed model in the beginning. It's actually more helpful to have a model that's super simple. For example, removing the spheres on this model and using just the wedge, so you can get some solid practice for drawing the most basic blocky form of a nose. Once you have a good understanding of the wedge drawn from many different angles, adding back the spheres helps you answer questions like, how much of the left nostril should I show from this particular angle? When practicing your eyes, focus on this area. Try to guess how the shape will change before you rotate your model, and then check if you're correct. Make even closer observations, like how the bottom eyelid forms something similar to the letter J when the eye is rotated to the three-quarter angle, or how it looks like a straight line at this particular angle. Now revisit old drawings that you had difficulty with. If something doesn't look right, see why and how you can fix it. And remember, study from actual faces so you can get a better feel for how facial features should look on their own and when you put them all together to form a face. I actually used two different recipes to make these, and within just a short period of time, you can see that a Play-Doh recipe using water dries out very quickly when you're not working with it, while the recipe using dish soap can last much longer. If your Play-Doh starts to dry out, just knead it very well, and or remove bits that have hardened. Both recipes will dry out and crumble if you leave them out overnight, so when you're not using it, store your Play-Doh in an airtight container or ziplock. It could last up to a few months' time without going moldy. It also helps to clean your hands before handling. If you want to make models that will last forever without needing to be stored in an airtight container and can double as an eraser, check out my video for making a putty eraser using common household items. The homemade putty erasers I made in this video you're seeing here have been sitting in the corner of my room collecting dust in the open air for more than two years, and they're still soft and pliable. The process takes a little bit of muscle work, but definitely check it out if you're interested. So next time you're struggling to understand how something should be drawn, whether it's from your imagination, or your reference image is just too ambiguous, you'll have a little help. Something you can pick up and rotate in just the right angle, instead of scouring Google Images for a specific reference in that exact pose. If you want to follow some tutorials that make use of these drawing models, check out my growing list in the description. I will also be uploading new videos where these models will come in handy, so subscribe to my channel if you're interested in watching those. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one!