Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Girly Doodle Faces


So here I am, copying girl faces from my instruction book with just a pencil on sketch pad paper. When I was just a young thing in middle school, I used to see other girls doodling these "pretty girl" fashion faces or profiles on their notebooks or wherever else they would draw when they were bored. The style is distinctly a late-60s or '70s look of the American ideal: round white face, pert upturned nose, big wide eyes with lots of makeup, and a puffy hairdo. Meanwhile I was drawing Roman and Greek warriors with bronze crested helmets. Or superheroes.

I have returned to the level of a bored schoolgirl as I learn to draw these conventional girl faces. What is interesting to me is how exacting the depiction of "prettiness" is. One tiny disproportion, one wrong angle, and she is no longer pretty, she is stupid or even evil-looking. Or ugly. It just takes one little pencil stroke to change her character.

I need to draw hundreds of these, and fix the perfect proportions of prettiness in my mind. Here below are two I did in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet. I'd like to draw them both in traditional pencil and paper, and on the digital tablet.



1 comment:

emikk said...

I empathize!...hope I spelled that right.