Don't you hate people that think you woke up yesterday and decided to do illustrations (pen and ink, oils, or watercolors, whatever.,.) Illustrations for their company's annual report ??? They are useally a photographer who pushes a button, then manipulates a negative in the dark room to get what they want.... not sayin' that's easy but it's nothing like putting an illustration together, piece by ever-lovin' piece.., brush stroke by brush stroke. Push your button, Freddy.
I talked to a pastel chalk portrait artist in the Washington D.C. mall around the year 2002. He said that he was doing portraits almost every day there for a year until he got really good and could look at a face and feel like he had drawn it before so, he didn't have to think about it as much. He said after about three years, he could do a full color portrait in about 40mins. It really does come down to what you want in life and how hard you're willing to work to get it.
The best advice I receive was: "Copy the masters that came before you" and "Go for the real thing, draw what you see". But my personal mantra is: "Do it slow, learn it faster. Do it faster, learn it slow"
nice vid! one more thing i want to add > Observation < for every portrait u are drawing, you aren't looking for features and copy them, you are observing what a certain face looks like on certain light at certain angel observation is MUCH important then drawing skills artists with good eyes are better then artists with good hands instead of training your hands for muscle memory, you need to train your eyes and brain to process colors/lights/forms artists are creating and rebuilding faces instead of copying every details we see, think of us like a sculptor dont look for details, look at the whole picture sorry for broken English XD
Skin is translucent. Wow. Just, wow. It seems so obvious now but I've neglected that fact for so long. Everything makes so much more sense now! Also, thank you for explaining subsurface scattering in such a simple way, I've heard so many artists just throw the word out without any explanation.
I really needed to hear that last advice. I had heard most of the advices on the video and was starting too feel bad, because drawing the fec in my cunstruction was really giving me problems, so hearing the number of portraits to draw, was somekind of realief to me, cause now I now what I must do. Good video!
Thank you very much for sharing your wisdom with us. Personaly the best advice I have ever recived in drawing faces is to use different numbers/kinds of pencils, and not just one, because when you use just one pencil you cannot difference the darkest shadows from de clearest ones. It seems pretty obvious now but it took me years to relize that.
I read/heard somewhere that eyes and mouth shape and placement are the most important things to get right of a face to get a likeness of a person. Nose, ears, even head shape are secondary, and that this is the main principle of caricature: you can exaggerate any other facial feature but you have to have the eyes and mouth right. Have you heard this? Do you agree on this? Have you tried it? What is your experience on this?
I would really like a video about the design pipeline, like whats the pipeline in freelance? how to approach sketches (in regard of the clients description)? how clean do they need to be? etc. And thank you for all the awesome content you provide
I cover that topic in my Making Magic videos in the store (www.swatchesart.com). I'd suggest checking out Making Nissa for a good pipeline example. It's $14.
Why such a low like and comment numbers? Your channel is amazing and your information is priceless. You should look into that, your channel has the same potential that your art does.
Very nice video man. I really liked the tip about subtlety, i think i always tend to show more information than the painting. Gonna try to apply it from now on. Thanks a lot for free gold nuggets !
Well one I heard many times that helped a lot was look at the back to the sheet or flip the image horizontally to make sure that your face looks realistic. That's especially for when you draw a face from a non frontal or strictly lateral angle (i.e. most of the times). I think it's a classic?
Great tips! One of the best tips I received was to identity the angles of the face by studying the structural landmarks such as cheekbones and the angles of the ears.
This is really brilliant stuff! It is seemingly basic ideas that on some level I think I know but when you explain them out new things are really starting to click together. Cheers dude!
I have been watching you for soo long now and I just wanted to say you always seem to make a video on the topic I am struggling with.. Thannnkk yooouu sooo mucch all your videoos are informative! ^^ (Keep up the good work)
Thanks for these, Trent, the advices are really valuable ones. Environments painting advices/practices would make for a great next video, if that's something you feel comfortable talking about!
Good move. The brain tries to fill in the gaps, which stuffs up your art, so you might as well use it to use it to your advantage. You are a good artist in my book.
Awesome video, one thing about the proportions though, I think the nose is generally half way between the brown ridge and the chin not the the eyes themselves, am I right?
That's a good observation, I've heard both. It would have been more precise to say that the nose usually is halfway from the brow or the eyes depending on the face shape. Same way that some people have ears inside the 2:3 width ratio and some peoples ears are outside. I'll keep this in mind for future discussions on the topic.
For faces I think the best advice I learned is that if someone is looking straight ahead their pupils tend to cross slightly. The gaze of the character is important. If the pupils are off the character won't be believable. It might even look 'creepy' to some people.
That same issue comes up in filming movies. Often, actors look past the other actor that's closely in front of them so their eye's won't look crossed in that way. From the right camera angle you don't realize they're not actually looking at each other's faces.
Getting a likeness is like shooting pool. Sometimes you sink one, breaking the rack. Sometimes it takes four, five shots ta' hit it just right....and sometimes you think it was a lousy loose rack, so you re-rack 'em, and do it again.....
Cool video, but I have a problem with the face measurement. Shouldn't the nose be 1/2 between chin and eybrow instead of eye? All the other construction seems to be that way and even your own drawings
Sadly, I really haven't gotten any advice from my teachers on faces. I've been out of highschool for 4 years(no college), and while I did learn important things. It's almost like in my schooling experience I was expected to fill in the blanks, and figure it out on my own! And the teachers told me what to do. Oh do this assignment! And didn't really teach me why or what... Anything meant to me! I'm an amazing portrait artist now that I'm out of school, I've had more time to learn and do what's important but I don't motivate myself. I'm going to do 100 portraits, 1 every day at least. I love the advice at the end, and knowing I need to draw 1000 is so awesome. Thank you for helping me! I feel motivated
Great video man Keep em going Can I suggest getting a better cam, since it would make the videos look more professionel. Your cam right now might turn away viewers since it's the first thing they see, which would be a shame since everything else is so high quality. Might just be me tho haha.
True, not a scientific number but one based on experience. He had been doing professional portraiture for decades and had taught hundreds of students how to do the same. In his experience that was a ballpark number and I've found it to be true in my experience as well.
What nobody ever told me is how to deal with "definition" of your art. You show that eyeball with 3D structure. Ok, I know how it goes. I know the shapes that must be there. But as I draw, I make a line as thick as the eyelid (0.5 pencil), I make a human mistake of about that line... And in the end nothing is right. Because I need accuracy of 0.01 mm fault. Otherwise nothing is right. The face doesn't look like that person, the anatomy is a failure, nothing is pleasant... I mean, I can draw 1000 eyes and they all will be different. And that's mistake of 0.1 mm. Because we humans feel the shape of another's face very keen. An eye done poorly looks way off. It's not a tree that can be anything or an animal that won't be as noticeable. I suspect even your breathing makes enough shift for a failure. So everything falls apart. Do I need to actually use a needle-like pencil? Or a huge canvas size of my room? Cause A4 is obviously not enough to get all the shapes right. I try a million shapes and fail a million times. No new style, no getting the reality right. Having enough knowledge and still failing, I can only suspect that error tolerance. Need to go micro? Cause other artists seem to do just fine with a huge fat pencil in their hands, not even sharpening it. It blows my mind to pieces.
Something to consider. That kind of precision isn't necessary for likeness. Remember caricature artists, they capture the likeness of a person with a face that is extremely skewed from the real thing. This isn't what Albert Einstein actually looked liked, www.artstation.com/artwork/deQww, but we recognize it as him. It has to do with the way we actually perceive things. We don't memorize the micro measurements, we recognize standout aspects and features. The exact measurements can be fudged as long as the iconic aspects are preserved.
@Swatches Well, to me it's a paradox. I see how much I would ruin this portrait. I would ask myself how do I know that, say, his lower eyelid looks like this, outwards and not straight? I pick one tiny detail and it affects the mood so much! It's not just his eyes melting down on further edges, it's a certain angle. One of a million. It looks simple. But when I try to draw, I face this ocean of chaos, anything can be right, anything can be wrong, no indication, no clicking sound that would tell me I hit the spot. So since there's no difference I pick just ANY position, size, shape... and it's wrong. You may say it's where experience, "mileage" ((c) Sycra) comes in. But then it needs to remain a blind spot? I have to somehow charge my sub-consciousness with these details by not thinking about them directly while practicing? I have to go crazy? Because when I take the wheel, I have to "manually" memorize each tiny detail, each interaction between the thousand shapes that make a million different ratios. Then I look back and realize it's impossible for a human being to calculate all that. And artists don't do that, they just do what they like. See my problem here? So many ways, so many questions... What if I'm just unable to learn that with my mind since it needs to specify so much? Ok, I go to the upper level, I pick the philosophy to approach art. I still face a hundred ways. And each had masters who went down them. "Draw from life" - ok, I do. But then I look at cartoons and they actually do everything wrong. They just focus on surface perception, on symbols. I try them and I face the need to learn how body works, how gestures work, how face works, to know how to symbolize emotions. I go back to life drawing, I focus on precision, people tell me I get too stiff, I forget to add squash-and-stretch, I forget to add emotions, style... Everything is connected and learning takes to explode, split into 1000 people, learn all the parts for 20 years each and then get back together like T1000. And even starting from focusing on one thing I inevitably need everything in the end. Say, I decide I will only draw a brick. With eyes, simple legs and arms. Such a character. Seemingly simple, I face even stronger need for gestures and mimics of a real person because to add sense to a brick I need to apply these to it. How he squints? How he laughs? How he bows? How he runs? And learning one without another forms bad habits and cements me with drawing "what I know". Like... always 3\4. Or always plain standing... See what I mean? It drives me crazy. It would probably not be a problem if I had an art college education. But I had no such luxury, only basic art school. Pots and fabrics. Shading, volume, proportions... I'm hopeless?
I love how you can gather years of study and knowledge and combine it in a fast, interesting and straight to the point video.
Thanks!
@@Swatches these are great. Thank you so much.
Don't you hate people that think you woke up yesterday and decided to do illustrations (pen and ink, oils, or watercolors, whatever.,.) Illustrations for their company's annual report ???
They are useally a photographer who pushes a button, then manipulates a negative in the dark room to get what they want.... not sayin' that's easy but it's nothing like putting an illustration together, piece by ever-lovin' piece.., brush stroke by brush stroke.
Push your button, Freddy.
I talked to a pastel chalk portrait artist in the Washington D.C. mall around the year 2002. He said that he was doing portraits almost every day there for a year until he got really good and could look at a face and feel like he had drawn it before so, he didn't have to think about it as much. He said after about three years, he could do a full color portrait in about 40mins. It really does come down to what you want in life and how hard you're willing to work to get it.
The best advice I receive was: "Copy the masters that came before you" and "Go for the real thing, draw what you see". But my personal mantra is: "Do it slow, learn it faster. Do it faster, learn it slow"
nice vid!
one more thing i want to add
> Observation <
for every portrait u are drawing, you aren't looking for features and copy them, you are observing what a certain face looks like on certain light at certain angel
observation is MUCH important then drawing skills
artists with good eyes are better then artists with good hands
instead of training your hands for muscle memory, you need to train your eyes and brain to process colors/lights/forms
artists are creating and rebuilding faces instead of copying every details we see, think of us like a sculptor
dont look for details, look at the whole picture
sorry for broken English XD
When I understood that, I really really improved.
Skin is translucent. Wow. Just, wow. It seems so obvious now but I've neglected that fact for so long. Everything makes so much more sense now! Also, thank you for explaining subsurface scattering in such a simple way, I've heard so many artists just throw the word out without any explanation.
It is funny, how somehow even your examples of "wrong", still kinda look good. It really speaks of the skill.
I love that you show examples to really highlight what you're talking about. Well done, insightful, and easy to understand video.
I appreciate the positive feedback!
Lots of “starts” on different portraits are more useful for learning than hours of making one finished drawing.
I really needed to hear that last advice. I had heard most of the advices on the video and was starting too feel bad, because drawing the fec in my cunstruction was really giving me problems, so hearing the number of portraits to draw, was somekind of realief to me, cause now I now what I must do.
Good video!
Thank you very much for sharing your wisdom with us. Personaly the best advice I have ever recived in drawing faces is to use different numbers/kinds of pencils, and not just one, because when you use just one pencil you cannot difference the darkest shadows from de clearest ones. It seems pretty obvious now but it took me years to relize that.
Best Art advice for painting environment studies or painting landscapes
I read/heard somewhere that eyes and mouth shape and placement are the most important things to get right of a face to get a likeness of a person. Nose, ears, even head shape are secondary, and that this is the main principle of caricature: you can exaggerate any other facial feature but you have to have the eyes and mouth right. Have you heard this? Do you agree on this? Have you tried it? What is your experience on this?
Faestock is also drop-dead gorgeous.
I would really like a video about the design pipeline, like whats the pipeline in freelance? how to approach sketches (in regard of the clients description)? how clean do they need to be? etc. And thank you for all the awesome content you provide
I cover that topic in my Making Magic videos in the store (www.swatchesart.com). I'd suggest checking out Making Nissa for a good pipeline example. It's $14.
@@Swatches Thank you for the reply, i definetly look it up.
The best advice is showing us these flaws ,to correct them, thank you great video
Why such a low like and comment numbers? Your channel is amazing and your information is priceless. You should look into that, your channel has the same potential that your art does.
those videos are insanely good.
So much information packaged degestible
A thousand portraits, now that is at least a number to work with. I have somewhat 700 to go then :D Nice video!
Very nice video man. I really liked the tip about subtlety, i think i always tend to show more information than the painting. Gonna try to apply it from now on. Thanks a lot for free gold nuggets !
Great video, I'll try a feew studies now.
Well one I heard many times that helped a lot was look at the back to the sheet or flip the image horizontally to make sure that your face looks realistic. That's especially for when you draw a face from a non frontal or strictly lateral angle (i.e. most of the times). I think it's a classic?
That's just amazing and too many professional advices, it really visualize the depth of your experience. please keep up the good work
More to come!
You are so helpful. Thank you. When I am able to, I want to support you
Man you have such clear concise info on these topics. Thanks for sharing!
Very good advices ! The best advice I received was what you said about the skin tone, a lot of color on skin.
Great tips! One of the best tips I received was to identity the angles of the face by studying the structural landmarks such as cheekbones and the angles of the ears.
This is really brilliant stuff! It is seemingly basic ideas that on some level I think I know but when you explain them out new things are really starting to click together. Cheers dude!
thanks for all this info! much appreciated
Amazing video, definetly deserves plenty more attention.
Thanks and I agree :)
These videos are great Clint! Lots of great info.
I have been watching you for soo long now and I just wanted to say you always seem to
make a video on the topic I am struggling with.. Thannnkk yooouu sooo mucch all your videoos are informative! ^^ (Keep up the good work)
This is soooo huge! 👌 Thank you
You're welcome!!
So helpful! Thank you!!
Excellent - thank you
That was very helpful, thanks for your tips!
Your videos are amazing, this is exactly what I have needed. Thank you so much.
Thanks for watching!
Always great to see an upload from you :)
Thanks for these, Trent, the advices are really valuable ones.
Environments painting advices/practices would make for a great next video, if that's something you feel comfortable talking about!
Maybe a bit of talk about brushwork, you seem to be really proficient in that:)
Trent Kaniuga sure looks different from what I remember, almost looks like that Clint Cearley guy
@@InkyMuste Lmao u got me there
You know, it's the only two art youtubers actually responding to/reading comments, so i messed up
Good move. The brain tries to fill in the gaps, which stuffs up your art, so you might as well use it to use it to your advantage. You are a good artist in my book.
The biggest hurdle for me right now is resemblances. I'll look around your videos if you have some info about it. Love your work on Magic :)
Really useful advices! Thank you!
You're so welcome!
Whats the canvas size for the magic illustrations? They look very crisp on that level of zoom.
The finals have to be at a minimum of 3300px wide but I generally work at 8000px width.
That's a huge canvas. What resolution do you use? 300dpi?
@@linn4511 dpi is a print measure, not applicable to a digital resolution. 8000px in 300dpi would be about 27 inches wide. 1 pixel = 1 dot of color.
Swatches Thank you!
Thx havnt drawn for a month. This video helped me with motivation to start again :)
Thank you, just really thank you 👍
Such precious knowledge 🤤
My god. This advice is so good.
Thanks for more awesome info. Likeness is certainly something I've been working on improving (and more blooper reels, please)
Good stuff, much of which I'd worked out but it's good to be reminded.
Learned a bunch ty
Amazing advice!
This is solid gold.
This was so helpful thank you!
Really helpfull! Can you do another one at drawing the human figure
So helpful, thank you!
Once again an excellent video! Thank you very much for your advice! This may help me overcome that portrait struggle. :)
Awesome, glad I could help :)
Good advice 👍
But in 9:57 why the lower jaw teeth have the same light?
Awesome video, one thing about the proportions though, I think the nose is generally half way between the brown ridge and the chin not the the eyes themselves, am I right?
That's a good observation, I've heard both. It would have been more precise to say that the nose usually is halfway from the brow or the eyes depending on the face shape. Same way that some people have ears inside the 2:3 width ratio and some peoples ears are outside. I'll keep this in mind for future discussions on the topic.
@@Swatches Cool thanks for the answer! I never heard that about the ears before, it should be helpful, thanks for the videos.
the white on her waterline of the bottom of the eyelid is not a moisture but a white eyeliner, often used in makeup to make the eyes appear bigger :)
Amazing video, just what i needed!
Thank you, kind sir!
4:58 - Gave me "I love it loud" flashbacks. (Bet only a few people will know what I'm referencing here.)
Best Art Advice on Drawing Faces！
Amazing!
Great video!
God bless you
Thank you !
For faces I think the best advice I learned is that if someone is looking straight ahead their pupils tend to cross slightly. The gaze of the character is important. If the pupils are off the character won't be believable. It might even look 'creepy' to some people.
That same issue comes up in filming movies. Often, actors look past the other actor that's closely in front of them so their eye's won't look crossed in that way. From the right camera angle you don't realize they're not actually looking at each other's faces.
Just found you. Great advice
Getting a likeness is like shooting pool. Sometimes you sink one, breaking the rack. Sometimes it takes four, five shots ta' hit it just right....and sometimes you think it was a lousy loose rack, so you re-rack 'em, and do it again.....
what a pleasant surprise
The best advice I’ve ever learned was to forget what I think a face looks like in my head and draw the shapes I see with a close enough value
I vote for vegetations, trees leaves and bushes how to draw them at different distances and make em look good. That's what I need help with.
When you click on a video to help your drawing and trip over an artist that does work for the greatest game ever
Cool video, but I have a problem with the face measurement. Shouldn't the nose be 1/2 between chin and eybrow instead of eye? All the other construction seems to be that way and even your own drawings
We should call it "the dependant-on-lighting-conditions of the eye" from now on.
Ok, then, gonna draw a thousand portraits :D set it as goal
Thank you so much! Just what I needed!
Thanks for the video :) LY
Implied Detail. (Teeth)
Sadly, I really haven't gotten any advice from my teachers on faces. I've been out of highschool for 4 years(no college), and while I did learn important things. It's almost like in my schooling experience I was expected to fill in the blanks, and figure it out on my own! And the teachers told me what to do. Oh do this assignment! And didn't really teach me why or what... Anything meant to me! I'm an amazing portrait artist now that I'm out of school, I've had more time to learn and do what's important but I don't motivate myself. I'm going to do 100 portraits, 1 every day at least. I love the advice at the end, and knowing I need to draw 1000 is so awesome. Thank you for helping me! I feel motivated
Omg.. I love the drawing of your cousins kid o.o she looks so damn cute
Great video man
Keep em going
Can I suggest getting a better cam, since it would make the videos look more professionel. Your cam right now might turn away viewers since it's the first thing they see, which would be a shame since everything else is so high quality. Might just be me tho haha.
I've been thinking along the same lines. It was the recommended cam back when I bought it but I think it's time to upgrade.
Thick outlines also make them look older.
Amazing content you have here, subscribed. Guys, if you want even more content like his, follow Istebrak here on UA-cam too!!
tooth tooth toooth tooth tooth
Hey, I like my ladies with an emphasized nasal fold.
It was creepy af to me when you put that pure white in her eyes. LOL, I had to look away.
Good tips except the 1,000 portraits bit. Why not 10,000 or 100,0000. Gimmie an F'ing break. 100 done conscientiously will do.
True, not a scientific number but one based on experience. He had been doing professional portraiture for decades and had taught hundreds of students how to do the same. In his experience that was a ballpark number and I've found it to be true in my experience as well.
...good artists do not get paid enough. :(
What nobody ever told me is how to deal with "definition" of your art. You show that eyeball with 3D structure. Ok, I know how it goes. I know the shapes that must be there. But as I draw, I make a line as thick as the eyelid (0.5 pencil), I make a human mistake of about that line... And in the end nothing is right. Because I need accuracy of 0.01 mm fault. Otherwise nothing is right. The face doesn't look like that person, the anatomy is a failure, nothing is pleasant... I mean, I can draw 1000 eyes and they all will be different. And that's mistake of 0.1 mm. Because we humans feel the shape of another's face very keen. An eye done poorly looks way off. It's not a tree that can be anything or an animal that won't be as noticeable. I suspect even your breathing makes enough shift for a failure. So everything falls apart. Do I need to actually use a needle-like pencil? Or a huge canvas size of my room? Cause A4 is obviously not enough to get all the shapes right. I try a million shapes and fail a million times. No new style, no getting the reality right. Having enough knowledge and still failing, I can only suspect that error tolerance. Need to go micro? Cause other artists seem to do just fine with a huge fat pencil in their hands, not even sharpening it. It blows my mind to pieces.
Something to consider. That kind of precision isn't necessary for likeness. Remember caricature artists, they capture the likeness of a person with a face that is extremely skewed from the real thing. This isn't what Albert Einstein actually looked liked, www.artstation.com/artwork/deQww, but we recognize it as him. It has to do with the way we actually perceive things. We don't memorize the micro measurements, we recognize standout aspects and features. The exact measurements can be fudged as long as the iconic aspects are preserved.
@Swatches
Well, to me it's a paradox. I see how much I would ruin this portrait. I would ask myself how do I know that, say, his lower eyelid looks like this, outwards and not straight? I pick one tiny detail and it affects the mood so much! It's not just his eyes melting down on further edges, it's a certain angle. One of a million. It looks simple. But when I try to draw, I face this ocean of chaos, anything can be right, anything can be wrong, no indication, no clicking sound that would tell me I hit the spot. So since there's no difference I pick just ANY position, size, shape... and it's wrong.
You may say it's where experience, "mileage" ((c) Sycra) comes in. But then it needs to remain a blind spot? I have to somehow charge my sub-consciousness with these details by not thinking about them directly while practicing? I have to go crazy? Because when I take the wheel, I have to "manually" memorize each tiny detail, each interaction between the thousand shapes that make a million different ratios. Then I look back and realize it's impossible for a human being to calculate all that. And artists don't do that, they just do what they like.
See my problem here? So many ways, so many questions... What if I'm just unable to learn that with my mind since it needs to specify so much? Ok, I go to the upper level, I pick the philosophy to approach art. I still face a hundred ways. And each had masters who went down them. "Draw from life" - ok, I do. But then I look at cartoons and they actually do everything wrong. They just focus on surface perception, on symbols. I try them and I face the need to learn how body works, how gestures work, how face works, to know how to symbolize emotions. I go back to life drawing, I focus on precision, people tell me I get too stiff, I forget to add squash-and-stretch, I forget to add emotions, style... Everything is connected and learning takes to explode, split into 1000 people, learn all the parts for 20 years each and then get back together like T1000.
And even starting from focusing on one thing I inevitably need everything in the end. Say, I decide I will only draw a brick. With eyes, simple legs and arms. Such a character. Seemingly simple, I face even stronger need for gestures and mimics of a real person because to add sense to a brick I need to apply these to it. How he squints? How he laughs? How he bows? How he runs? And learning one without another forms bad habits and cements me with drawing "what I know". Like... always 3\4. Or always plain standing...
See what I mean? It drives me crazy. It would probably not be a problem if I had an art college education. But I had no such luxury, only basic art school. Pots and fabrics. Shading, volume, proportions... I'm hopeless?
Is this computer generated ??? Your voice is out of sync with the way your lips move....hope i'm wrong......
No, this was made years ago. Just dodgy recording and processing on my part.
Best art advice on painting faces: use a camera
Nice, and so is your work! Thanks for the tips.
You bet!
Wonderful sum up!
thank you!