Why are some faces easier to draw than others?

I’m not a real artist; my freehand drawings look like something a third-grader’s mom would hang on the less-visible side of the fridge. I illustrate by tracing from photos. Yet somehow even when tracing from photos I manage to get some faces completely wrong.

It’s funny. Sometimes I just slash in a couple lines and discover, to my surprise, the intended face staring back at me from the screen. Other times I spend hours – well, I could spend hours, though I usually give up after twenty minutes or so – anyway, I spend a whole bunch of time tweaking and erasing, but no matter where I push the lines, the drawing still doesn’t capture the essence of its subject. The pieces are all there, but somehow they don’t add up.

I suppose real artists must know some tricks that I never learned. They could look at the pictures below and explain why cartoon Jeff doesn’t look anything like real-life Jeff. Something in the nose, maybe? The lips, the eyes? All the above?

My guess is that a proper portrait artist will know how to select the one or two features that are most characteristic of the subject and subtly exaggerate them in a way that seems true-to-life – even though it departs from the actual lines of the face. That’s just a theory. But what is Jeff’s most characteristic feature? I can’t decide.

I had a request to post these drawings of some of my VendAsta workmates, created for a recent MashedIn cartoon, on the blog, and with mild trepidation I oblige. Of the sixteen I think about nine turned out pretty well. To the other seven subjects, I apologize.

(Click through for larger versions.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 9:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.