Facial Features
Lets start with facial features, the contents are eyes, nose, mouth, ears and jaws.
_Eyes
The eyes are one of the most important feature of a head, the eyes gives identity and are
important in expressions (wich we will discuss later).
There are types of different eyes, I show in image wich are each one.
Image1(w/o markers)
Image1(w/ markers)
in the red marker there is a tip of what define an eye type, and as well you can mix eye types
to achieve the looking you want.
_Noses
Now with noses, there are kinds of noses and in this tutorial we are just relating them infront view,
wich cant determine some types of noses well.
the straight nose is defined showing a bit of a tip and nostrils barely visible.
the downward noses makes the nostrils less visible and the tip ends below the nostrils.
the upward nose show the nostrils and doesnt has a tip delineated in the bottom area.
Noses can have different shadings and diferent widths, make sure to get a good ref.
This is all about noses by now.
_Mouth
Mouths are the most simple to draw, the markers is there to say that you need to make
that curves on the top and on the botom of the upper lip, different emotions gives different lookings.
_Ears
Ears are as easy as the other features and I wont talk much about it, in the markers, we have three lines
wich defines ear shapes. the outter line is wich defines the "contour" of the ear, the inner ones defines
the insides, if you study it and do this three different lines, you will have a realistic ear looking for your heads.
_Jaw
I Like jaws and I put them in My heads, the best tip for jaws is to look at where they goes and their width (jaw and chin).
if you are going to put it too much in the bottom of the head, use warp to make it fit in front view.
the biggest differences in jaws are with shading and width, and you can use it as optional, you go and see what works better
for your heads and your target customers.
Image2
here is a bit of a reference with all the parts of each feature, I put it here, but it will help you in the previous parts
if you knowledge is basic.
Image3
I wont forget to talk about how to make female eyes looking more femme, the tip is to use eyelashes and makeup
and so put eyebrows thinner, it gives a bit more of femme looking.
Proportions
If you are cool with facial features, You now need to map them to the head.
the eyes of a human head has one eye space in between them and almost one eye size to the ears each.
the nose and jaw are mapped looking the eyesbrows, nose, forehead and chin mapping, normally their distance are equal.
the mouth a bit below noses, if you want to add expressions to the mouth, make sure you map all the other features well in the head
and keep proportions.
the ears gets from the eyebrows to the end of the nose, dont forget this proportion.
Image4
In this image, the proportion for the forehead is small, I made in purpose, some humans has tiny foreheads.
Expressions
What gives your head a special feeling are the expressions your head makes, neutral expressions tend to be boring.
Image5
Here I will describe a bit of the expressions I studied for this tutorial.
the surprise expression is made much with mouth, eyebrows amd eyes.
the eyes go wide open and so the mouth, in this expression the eyebrows gets a specific shape,
and the nostrils show more, cause the mouth is pulling them.
the happy face, is made with smile and wrinkles, the eyebrows goes up a bit and the eyes looks pressed up a bit
there is a difference in happy faces and fake happy faces, the fake happy wrinkles the eyes more in the outter area.
Fear and sadness are alike, both of them wrinkles forehead, and pushes eyebrows up, the difference is on the eyes
and the mouth, the sad mouth is pull dowm and the eyes looks sadden, changing its shape.
the anger and disguts are almost the same and can be confused,
anger feeling shows in mouth and eyebrows and so with disgust, the difference is on the wrinkles and mouth, normally
disgut face wrinkles more on the eyes and the mouth is pulling up a bit wich gives that feeling of disgust
The Skull
Image6
if you are looking into human face you should understand its structure, the skull.
the forms are defined by the skull, you should give a try and study skulls, even for heads.
you will feel that the jaw, mouth, nose, eye holes, are all defined by the skull and placed in a
believable way in humans.
when shadowing a face, you should look at the skull and see where the light goes and where it doesnt hit in certain lighting.
it will help you the way a human is inside.
Muscles makes a difference here too, I wont cover it this time, but it is learned by study and practice mostly.
Line art
You now have to be comfortable with how to draw facial features and map them in the head, do your line art before painting.
think of what would be the best to suit your character, copy references, experiment with different features, you will reach a good sketch
and will do your line art.
as I am going to show a head process, I will put the line art here.
Image7-Lineart
Painting
I am going to talk about the painting of a human head, in this topis I would emphasize in most general techinique, the one I use,
if you feel you can do with other types of techniques, feel free to post.
_Light direction
in toribash, the most suitable lighting is the top light, as toriabsh doesnt have lights normally, you would have to paint light in heads,
to make it look better at any angle, you should better do a top lighting.
_Blocking
Okay, get a reference and look how the light is going from the top to the head,
select your colors for Base color, light and shadow (you can use the reference one), make sure to put a saturation
midtone as I did.
Image7-Block
at this moment you want to define what colors will be in each area of the head, go with big masses,
dont go with detail yet. If you check my flat, I have made a base color, a shadow color, a light color and a midtone color (with saturation).
the red in the nose and ears are achieveed when the light pass throught thin parts of the body and over lighten it.
Check at this step, where the shadows are going to be and so where the lights are going to hit.
_Rendering(Blending)
in this step you should use the eyedropper to get colors and get a brush with low opacity, go getting tones and blending them,
you get a color, brush in the edge like three times, get the midtone of both and brush in the egdes.
At the end of this step, you should have a smooth transition between colors.
Image7-Render
_Detailing
In this step you should make your own brushes, or get a default one and set it to make it work as you wish.
I used a texture and make a brush preset, then I mixed tones with it, sadly you can barely see the difference in this head.
This time I defined the mouth highlights and wrinkles, the most important.
You can make two windows of the same image and put one zoomed in and other 100% zoom and check how the detail is going.
here is the result of My detailing
Image7-Detail
Hair
there are many ways to do hair, I highly recommend setting brushes for that.
I did some of my own brushes and defined presets for Photoshop brushes.
My hair looked like this:
Image7-Hair
I will show you what I did. I marked the shape of the hair first, then I put a base color (you can do with brushes) and defined the texture of the hair
it was a short shaved hair, textures worked well, but in the end I ended up with holes with different masses, so I took a soft low opacity brush and made the bottom
less visible so it would look better.
for the short hair, I did with a brush and stroked it going down a bit, then I selected the layer contents and used a highlight color with a brush to randomize the highlights, so it would look more realistic.
now in the top of the hair, I used a brush preset with low opacity and made it with polar coordinates, I just stroked in some flow to make it lok like hair, then I made the shadows, beneath it (you can do otherwise).
MousePaint
to do it with a mouse, do a wise use of paths, selections and transform tools.
paths works to delineate lines and make selections. Transfrom tools can change everything, use wisely.
I cant explain all of that in this short tutorial, mostly because it is different on many programs.
You can study that as well and try to make it your way.