How To Draw People From Different Angles

How to describe a portrait from different angles

This is certainly a tricky skill to master, simply it gets easier with time and practice. The key is to understand the proportions and how the volume and placement of a feature is depicted from various angles. A precipitous, chiselled nose is certainly easier to depict in a side view. But knowing how to depict that same nose with the same proportions in the front view is the key to getting this right.

Face facts

How to draw portrait from different angles — Alway begin by drawing your grapheme face-on

The easiest way to kickoff practising is to use guidelines and draw your character orthographically (front end, side, top). This will ensure that at least your features are correctly proportioned. In one case you have done this a few times, y'all can kickoff experimenting with more dramatic angles. Use line width, shading and shadows to explore the volume of features at the less-intuitive angles.

Another vitally important way to practise is to draw real people from life, at various angles. The more you lot do this, the more than y'all volition understand how facial features work.

Side contour

Describe your character from the front or side to start, but try both for various characters. Think about what makes your character's confront unique – deep-gear up eye sockets? Weak or stiff mentum? Sharp, bony cheeks, or soft round ones? Use shadows and shading to indicate volume and depth, for instance on a nose that is pointy and juts out more usual.

Keep information technology simple

On a separate layer, draw low-cal guidelines across the page to the right or the left in order to depict the side view. Depict the guidelines from central points in his/her features – the tip of the nose, the lesser of the chin, the eye of the center, or even things similar where the bump in his nose is, or where his cheekbones protrude the most. As well many of these can get disruptive.

Once you accept your side view, move it upward the canvas and rotate it about 45 degrees to use it to depict an angled superlative view. You can describe guidelines from the side view and the front end view to help inform this. Then effort drawing the face without guidelines from a less straight-on view, using what you've learnt so far.

Finished piece

How to draw a portrait from different angles — All angles covered

By the time yous've drawn the face up from the forepart, side and top, you should take a adept enough thought of its features to draw an angled view.

Artist's cloak-and-dagger

If not placed with care, textures can flatten an image. Use the Warp Tool to curve the design around whatever surface it'due south on, and then erase whatsoever areas where the blueprint crosses over 2 forms unnatural

Words: Sean Andrew Murray

A freelance illustrator and concept artist, Sean Murray is besides the creator of Gateway: The Book of Wizards, and has worked for WotC, EA and Turbine. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine issue 102.