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Woo! Moneys have arrived for me to start building my new computer. Considering I still have to order all the parts and that I've never actually built a computer before (yes, I have help), vidding again is not immediate, but it is going to happen soooooon. \o/ \o/
Random thing that comes with learning to draw and that kind of totally freaks me out in an abstract way. That nearly all adult human faces/heads have roughly the same proportions and shapes in the same places. All of them. I mean, I think I knew that vaguely through osmosis, and I even kind of got it in theory when I first started reading theory and tutorials and whatnot. But the more faces I draw the freakier it gets that every single one of them starts with the exact same shape and the guidlines for the features in the exact same place. It doesn't feel like it should be true when you look at the vast and nearly infinite variety of faces around you, and every single time I start I feel like I'm being wrong, because surely for faces as vastly different as my son and a random woman picked for a reference because of strong contrast lighting while sifting through google images of faces....should not start out exactly the same. And yet they do. And yet the reason I kept drawing faces wrong all this time is because I kept trying to draw them as vastly different as I thought they were. It is, instead, the very slightest difference in the angles of the structures, the thickness of the bones, and the depth of the flesh over them that makes faces so different. THIS IS FREAKY.
You want to truly weird yourself out (assuming you're not an artist and presumably have already come to terms with this bizzare fact of nature)? Take your thumb and forefinger and measure the space vertically between the center of your eybrows down to the bottom of your nose. Now shift down without changing it and discover it is the same approximate distance between the bottom of your nose and your chin. Now go up, and find it's the same distance from your brow to the top of your head (where it starts to curve back). Now go find a bunch of random pictures of people who look wildly different to you and do the same on their faces. I KNOW, RIGHT? For extra credit freakouts, measure the length of one eye. From the inside corner of one of your eyes to the other will be the same length. The entire width of your face? About five eyelengths. The entire width of the face of the person sitting next to you on the bus who looks absolutely nothing like you? Five of their eyelengths. It's like the freaking Twilight Zone.
Random thing that comes with learning to draw and that kind of totally freaks me out in an abstract way. That nearly all adult human faces/heads have roughly the same proportions and shapes in the same places. All of them. I mean, I think I knew that vaguely through osmosis, and I even kind of got it in theory when I first started reading theory and tutorials and whatnot. But the more faces I draw the freakier it gets that every single one of them starts with the exact same shape and the guidlines for the features in the exact same place. It doesn't feel like it should be true when you look at the vast and nearly infinite variety of faces around you, and every single time I start I feel like I'm being wrong, because surely for faces as vastly different as my son and a random woman picked for a reference because of strong contrast lighting while sifting through google images of faces....should not start out exactly the same. And yet they do. And yet the reason I kept drawing faces wrong all this time is because I kept trying to draw them as vastly different as I thought they were. It is, instead, the very slightest difference in the angles of the structures, the thickness of the bones, and the depth of the flesh over them that makes faces so different. THIS IS FREAKY.
You want to truly weird yourself out (assuming you're not an artist and presumably have already come to terms with this bizzare fact of nature)? Take your thumb and forefinger and measure the space vertically between the center of your eybrows down to the bottom of your nose. Now shift down without changing it and discover it is the same approximate distance between the bottom of your nose and your chin. Now go up, and find it's the same distance from your brow to the top of your head (where it starts to curve back). Now go find a bunch of random pictures of people who look wildly different to you and do the same on their faces. I KNOW, RIGHT? For extra credit freakouts, measure the length of one eye. From the inside corner of one of your eyes to the other will be the same length. The entire width of your face? About five eyelengths. The entire width of the face of the person sitting next to you on the bus who looks absolutely nothing like you? Five of their eyelengths. It's like the freaking Twilight Zone.