Drawing the Human Head Series: Lesson 8 — Detailed Study of the Parts of the Face
Eyebrows and Eyes - The Nose and Ears - The Mouth
Follow these lessons with a mirror in front of you, verifying for yourself the aspects and details that I will enumerate. You will not find anyone who is a better model than yourself, as patient and well-disposed.
Look at yourself face-on in the mirror, head raised, tilted, turned to the side. Study in each case the different forms that the parts of the face we are studying take…
WHAT COLOR ARE THEIR EYES?
Do you remember exactly?
(And it is not enough to say that they are light or that they are dark!)
Naturally, it is possible that you remember the exact color of their eyes. But… and the color of the eyes of your closest relative—your mother, your father, your brother…—or that of the eyes of this friend you see every day? Do you remember? Do you remember if they are hazel, chestnut, black, blue, gray, green with a bluish tint, tending toward brown…?
I venture to suppose that you have forgotten. And yet, the eyes of this relative or of your friend are the part of the face that you see most often: looking at them every time you speak to them or they speak to you.
Leaving aside the causes; let us consider only that this lack of memory for retaining details such as eye color largely justifies that, if one tries to study how to draw the eyes—then the nose, the ears, the mouth—one begins by… quite simply seeing them, looking at their shape as if it were something new, never seen before.
Here they are, in the figure above (fig. 45). Stop and observe them… But be careful; do not look at them as usual, in passing distractedly! Look at them with real attention, to study with me the following points and details:
ABOVE, THE EYEBROWS
You have already seen them, you know it; yet, look: eyebrows can be full or not; smooth, as if they had just been combed, or quite bushy, with thick hairs that hide their normal shape; arched, almost straight, or in a broken line, etc. (fig. 46).
When drawing an eyebrow, do not think “as many hairs, as many strokes,” not at all! But think about giving these strokes the necessary intensity to imitate the thickness of the hairs and the differences in tone that exist between the parts. Do not forget that these differences must be obtained by strokes and not by regular or smudged tones.
Study the different forms that eyebrows take according to the position of the face. Remember that there are two of them, that they are symmetrical and…
…are found on a curved surface, the forehead, more rounded at its extremities than in its center.
“CLEAR EYES, SERENE…”
It is without doubt the most living part of the face, the most beautiful and, in every sense, the most extraordinary. There is no painter, writer, musician or poet who has not devoted one of his works to the eyes, like Aragon in his famous poem “Elsa’s Eyes”.
It is obvious that such lyricism, such poetry, leads the amateur to believe that they must capture the expression, the soul, the intimate feelings and passions through the lines and shadows drawn by the eyes; and of course, they would be frightened, they would be distressed, saying that they cannot, that to draw eyes, one must have an artist’s sensibility.
No, no, that will not prevent us from arriving, you will arrive. You will draw the eyes with as much inspiration as you wish, but without letting yourself fall into commonplaces or preconceived ideas.
For you, the eyes must be… what they are: small rhomboid shapes, with small dark circles inside—the iris and the pupil—, and a series of small curved hairs—the eyelashes—that extend around them. You must see them objectively, without trying to see or understand anything other than their exact shape, their color or their precise tone, their play of lights and shadows. As long as these factors—the shape, the tone and the light—do not preoccupy you at all, you can amuse yourself by “saying more things than one sees”, but for the moment, I beg you, think of nothing other than drawing them as they are.
Start by looking at and studying only one eye, viewed from the front and in profile. Note the following points, which are essential:
VIEW FROM THE INTERIOR:
As you know, the human eye is composed of a small sphere—the eyeball—placed in this bony cavity called the orbit, covered and protected, on its frontal part, by these folds of skin called eyelids. These open and close at will, obeying certain muscles in the form of a ring that surround our visual organ.
In this description you will need to remember the following:
Indeed, if one paints on a small ball a smaller circle, and one pretends to draw it from different points of view, one will have in principle almost the same problems as when one draws eyes: the foreshortening and the perspective. Try to understand these problems by looking at the illustrations on the following page; you will see that the more the ball turns, the more one sees the small circle foreshortened (fig. 48).
Imagine this same ball enclosed in a rubber envelope about two millimeters thick — this is an example —, and suppose that here, where the small black circle coincides, you make a slightly curved cut toward the bottom (fig. 49 a). By opening this cut, we obtain an imitation of the eyelids. You can almost always see one of the edges of these spherical eyelids as the ball and changing shape according to their position (fig. 49 b).
On the outer edge of these borders, the eyelashes spring forth, perpendicular to the plane of the ball and forming a right angle with the envelope or eyelid. Look carefully at this precise point where the eyelashes push out, to better understand the place and the position, when you draw them (fig. 50).
VIEW FROM THE EXTERIOR:
Above, the eyebrow; under it, the skin that covers the muscles activating the upper eyelid; then the upper eyelid. It is evident that if this skin above is taut, one will be able to see and draw the arc or the curve that forms the eyelid (fig. 51); otherwise, this curved line will remain half hidden by the fold of this skin placed above. The fold or the pocket that these tissues form, can be so accentuated that it entirely hides the shape of the eyelid (fig. 52).
The eye opens and closes thanks to the action of the upper eyelid. This one descends truly like a curtain, to join with the lower eyelid which remains practically immobile below, waiting for the other one to close. This will help us not to forget the following very important fact for drawing the opening of the two eyelids, when the eye is open:
When the eye is open, the curve that draws the upper eyelid is more accentuated than the line that draws the lower eyelid (fig. 53).
In general, it is incorrect to draw an open eye composed of two equally curved and symmetrical arcs.
It is also important to remember the shape and placement of the eyelashes—the place where they grow and their position in relation to the eyelid—, and that they are on a spherical surface; this helps us better understand the way to draw them, with the variations that the position of the eye causes in relation to the draftsman (fig. 55).
