Reply To: Polybook – Aaron “The Cabbage Detective” Rudderham
You are doing great man! I love the effort I am seeing here. 🙂
Tackling individual features of the face is a great way to focus and really get to know the characteristics and subtilities of those features. Its a great adventure! Once you have practiced them I strongly advice you to sculpt a few skulls before incorporating them into a full face. Trust me, learning the skull shapes will do wonders for how to place those features, it will help you put those features together like nothing else.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, I want to talk about simplifying and working with planar representations. A nose (or any feature) can be distilled down to a few basic shapes. Anatomy is a great help in figuring these basic shapes out but thankfully many artists have come before us so we should also learn from them. 🙂
Its time for you to start thinking about those planar representations, their proportions and angles.. Its time to watch drawing video’s and, not surprisingly, sculpting video’s. Real sculptors are fantastic in breaking shapes down! To stick with the nose I want to share a few resources.
https://www.proko.com/how-to-draw-a-nose-anatomy-and-structure/
Learning sculpting brushes in 3d or pencils in 2d is not important, see through it, learn the nose! 🙂 Most ‘complex’ features are actually pretty simple once you learn to see them like this. And.. another important lesson is that sharp edges or holes are relatively rare on the face (or the human body in general). This is really great! Because, if you nail the planar representation (its actually pretty hard when learning so don’t be discouraged), all you have to do is soften/smooth a little and then ‘re-add’ the few hard creases, wrinkles, ledges or accents. Turning it into a ‘real’ nose is actually the easiest part!
I want to encourage you to experiment with this. Put the basic shapes in there but stretch, or widen, or fatten. It will still be a nose, or an ear, or an eye, or lips if the basics are in there! Find them!
Here is an old planar practice of the nose from me:
But you pick one you like from an artist you really like! Learn from the masters, not from me (this is just to show I practiced this too and it did wonders for me).
Now here is something else, I feel a little conflicted about posting this because I do not really like the end result that much. Haha. Its also, well, old (9 years ago).I really loved sharing what I learned back then (still do tbh but shy…) It does give you a bit of a look inside my head how I break shapes down and look at anatomy to help me sculpt. If I look at that nose now (endresult) I think I do it slightly different but I still think in the same manner. 🙂 It might help you.
You are doing great though!