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.

@artshare@lemmy.world

  • Dæmon S.@calckey.worldOP
    4·
    1 month ago

    @artshare@lemmy.world

    As per requests, the final art is included below.

    Alt-text:
    Picture of the final art originally drawn in the time-lapse, depicting a close mugshot of a feminine face meant to be a safe depiction of Lilith (demoness-goddess in occultism; here, Her more potentially disturbing features such as horns, wings, blood and hollow dark eyes are replaced by a more womanly anthropomorphic depiction which has just the pointy canines, a.k.a vampire fangs, but without the blood, as the most explicit supernatural trait).

    She is depicted as having brown skin, soft triangular face with tender blushed cheeks and round nose, dark red lips from an open mouth that reveals both her subtly-vampiric teeth and a tongue whose tip slightly touches the middle of the upper teeth, large almond-shaped eyes with expressively feminine eyelashes, wide pupils and reddish-brown irises (looking directly at the viewer), as well as a long and almost vivid red straight hair cascading onto Her shoulders (which are partially visible, featuring the clavicle bone and subtle relief from muscles and tendons in the neck).

    The background is just a solid black color.

    Picture of the final art originally drawn in the time-lapse, depicting a close mugshot of a feminine face meant to be a safe depiction of Lilith (demoness-goddess in occultism; here, Her more potentially disturbing features such as horns, wings, blood and hollow dark eyes are replaced by a more womanly anthropomorphic depiction which has just the pointy canines, a.k.a vampire fangs, but without the blood, as the most explicit supernatural trait). She is depicted as having brown skin, soft triangular face with tender blushed cheeks and round nose, dark red lips from an open mouth that reveals both her subtly-vampiric teeth and a tongue whose tip slightly touches the middle of the upper teeth, large almond-shaped eyes with expressively feminine eyelashes, wide pupils and reddish-brown irises (looking directly at the viewer), as well as a long and almost vivid red straight hair cascading onto Her shoulders (which are partially visible, featuring the clavicle bone and subtle relief from muscles and tendons in the neck). The background is just a solid black color.