Random Character Sketches

Here are some random head shots that I did in the past couple weeks. They're in a manga style, but I actually started out with a drawing of the skull and built off of those proportions. Although I can draw the skull from memory now, I still don't know the surface anatomy yet, so I'm a long way away from drawing realistic faces straight out of my head. However I can apply the proportions and shapes to cartoony drawings, which is basically what I did here:

More Skulls

These are some drawings that I did in between the Structure of Man videos for a little extra practice on drawing the basic skull. I did these in my little 5x7 Cachet Earthbound sketchbook, which I really like because it has really nice brown pages. It was one of the only sketchbooks that I could find that had toned paper, and I had to order it online. I love drawing on toned paper (which you can tell from my posts about my AP Art Concentration) because you can pull out shadows and highlights. It's like doubling the value range you can get in a drawing. So enough about the paper, here are the drawings:

Structure of Man #5

In the last post I finished up the structure of the skull and I'm now moving back to the rest of the body. Now the videos are starting to focus on each part of the body separately, so after a short review of the basic structure of the entire figure, I'm now focusing on the chest cavity.

Structure of Man #4

First of all I'd like to apologize for the lack of posts in the past couple weeks. I started my summer job and had less time than I anticipated. I haven't done as much drawing as I would have liked either, but I have done some, so that's what I'll be posting in the next week or so. Hopefully I'll be able to get myself on a little bit more of a regular drawing schedule for the rest of the summer, so I'll be able to keep up with this blog.


So anyways, here is the next stuff I did in the Structure of Man videos. I finally wrapped up the part about the structure of the skull for now:

I know the edges kind of got cut off, but I decided to start scanning my drawings from now on instead of photographing them and my 11x14 sketchbook doesn't fit very well in my 8.5x11 scanner. I'm going to work on getting better scans in the future, even if I have to scan half the page at a time.


That's it for now, but expect a few more posts this week!

Structure of Man #3

So the next part in the Structure of Man series is rotating the skull into a three-quarter view. This is always the hardest part. It's very challenging to make your mind understand what happens in between the front view and the side view. I said this before when I was talking about rotating the entire figure (click here), but it really makes by brain work, almost like I'm doing calculus or something haha. Once you get the hang of it though, you can replicate it over and over with almost identical results.

Character Design #1

This is the inked sketch from my sketchbook. It was so easy to make this character design in profile after learning how to draw the skull from the Structure of Man videos. I hope to keep making up more of my own characters from now on.

I brought the original sketch into photoshop and practiced my digital inking using a combination of the pen tool and the brush tool. I'm going to try to add color to it soon, so be on the lookout for that post in the future.

Structure of Man #2

The next step in the Structure of Man videos is the skull. The above photo shows how to set up the human skull with realistic proportions.

This page shows how you can use the previous skull to develop a character design in profile. I didn't come up with this design, (it was the example from the video) but I did create my own that I will post later. The other two skulls are clearly the front view. It's all about getting the shapes right, especially of the eye sockets. I thought the front view of the skull looked a bit like batman, so I modified the skull on the top right a bit to enhance that haha :P

This photo just shows how to make the connection between the proportions of the side view and the front view. The eye sockets, mouth, nose, and brow should all line up.