Time-lapse: pareidolia as a tool for face drawing
Warning: the video contains some flashing lights. Do not watch if you have epilepsy.
This one is less about the art and more about the technique. This time-lapse is a demo of how I draw seemingly-convincing anatomy from scratch with no visual aid other than my own "instinctive" sense of pareidolia (i.e. whatever's going on in my own fusiform gyrus), so it may serve as a guide for those who draw faces.
There are a lot of techniques for drawing anatomically-convincing faces. One involves plotting some geometrical shapes using compass and straightedge in order to have a visual reference for facial proportions.
But, then, the human brain has this funny ability to see faces where ain't none. And the "uncanny valley" allows us to feel whenever a seemingly-human face isn't that human.
This mechanism usually goes this way: we see a visual pattern that triggers our "it's a face" perception, then the more specialized facial recognition mechanism kicks in, only for it to perceive how this "face" have some unexpected details (e.g. glowing irises, sharper canine teeth, etc) and/or proportions (almond-shaped eyes larger than expected), so it gets uncanny.
One can leverage it by going the reverse way: crafting an external visual pattern until it maximizes this perception, fine-tuning it for either uncanniness and/or accurateness, depending on the intended goal.
This explains the main flow going on in my mind as I'm drawing a face fully from scratch (i.e. no rotoscoping). I often start by drawing a pair of circles (meant as either eyeballs or eye sockets) to trigger my initial notion of size, then (inspired by owls) I draw the eyebrow ridge going from the silhouette for the nose slightly below the median point, then the forehead, then the mouth cavity, then the cheeks (meant to have some blushing), and the zygomatic relief, and chin, and then... well, it'll depend on the how the drawing is triggering my fusiform girus. You can see me getting back quite often to previously-drawn details as I fix these to better adjust my current perception, sometimes redoing things from scratch. I try to draw the hair as soon as I can, because it's one of the main references for this specific face.
The final shading ended up a bit "flatter" than I originally wanted to draw. I have a previously-drawn "mugshot art" where the shading ended up imbued with better 3d depth, but I didn't record a time-lapse for it, so I made another drawing.
That's pretty much everything for this post, feel free to ask if you got any questions...
Alt-text: a time-lapse disclosing the drawing of a feminine face (meant to depict Lilith, with large almond-shaped eyes, long red hair, expressive eyelashes, soft-yet-sharp chin, blushed cheeks and tender red lips with sharp fangs), seen in close mugshot. The drawing starts from a gray shape akin to a Venetian mask, then it gradually evolves into a feminine portrait.
Yeah, no, that's fine not like I wanted to see the finished product anyway...
@CallMeButtLove@lemmy.world @artshare@lemmy.world
Sorry, I didn't quite understand what you meant due to the seemingly irony in the way you phrased your reply... are you asking for the picture of the art I drew in the video or, to the contrary, you're saying that the drawing I made during the time-lapse ended up as overly unsettling? (when the alt-text beforehandedly told how my art was meant as the depiction of an entity Who's originally from occultism and demonolatry)
If it's the latter, well, this depiction of Hers is the most family-friendly one my mind could conceive, the only potentially triggering thing being Her fangs... Maybe the eye contact can be triggering to some people? (but, then, I explicitly mentioned my art as a "close mugshot" of a "feminine face" "meant to depict Lilith") In any case, that's why I wrote the post so the alt-text is duplicated (both as actual alt-text for the media, and as a explicit disclaimer before the embedded media can be played, as I mentioned to another person in the comments).
If it's the former, I didn't initially post the final art because this is post is more about the technique (described in-text and illustrated in-video) than the drawing per se but, sure, I can post the final art as a reply to this thread if you people want it :)
I atleast came to the comments to see the finished piece in all its glory
@sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.works @artshare@lemmy.world
Glad you people enjoyed the art, sorry for not including it initially in the post. I added a comment at the top-level of this thread with the final picture and its alt-text: https://lemmy.world/post/45885123/23334421