Practicing Proportions:Working On Weaknesses Within Your Strength

​In this post I’m going to be practicing drawing foreheads and tellig you about working on weaknesses within your strength.

This is a follow up to my last post. If you haven’t read that one, this one might not make a lot of sense. So I suggest you go and read it, and then come back to this one.

​I’m using newsprint 

​because I’m expecting to make a lot of throwaway drawings and newsprint is perfect for this. Just an aside:Do not use newsprint for anything that you want to last, because it will yellow and deteriorate over time. Like I said, it’s best for little practice or warm up sketches that you’re going to throw away.

​I’m also going to be working in pen 

​because I don’t want to give myself a chance to erase and forget about my mistakes. Those mistakes are going to be staring me in the face. This is going to be so uncomfortable.

​The drawing of the forehead went better than I expected so I decided to extend this practice to the whole face. I could see that I drew the eyes too close to the edges so I moved them in closer to the center. I could also see, once I had the mouth in, that the left side of the jawline should be more curved and not indented like I had it. That brought the chin down lower.

​What I just showed you was an example of working on a weakness within your strength. Even with things we’re good at, there will be areas where we are weak, but if we work on them, we can strengthen those weaknesses.

What Did I Learn From This?

What I learned by doing this was that if you start drawing something with the idea that you really don’t know how to draw it, you’ll pay more attention to what you’re doing and draw it better, whereas if you start drawing something thinking you know where it should be and how to draw it and everything, you won’t pay so close attention and end up drawing it not as well.

​Of course this isn’t a huge deal most of the time because we have erasers, but I think that’s interesting to know.

​Of course that’s just my experience. Yours might be totally different.

​I’m making this video because, number one, I refuse to be embarrassed by the fact that I have weak points, and number two, I want to help you not to be embarrassed.