Design techniques: DRAW Better Characters

Honestly, this is what I needed to hear. Most tutorials and teachers I have push the standard model as a rule, not a basic framework to build upon and change.

People often forget that with techniques like the Loomis method is that once you learn the rules, you can bend or break those rules to get more variation. Loomis does talk about this in his books.

"Dont't just copy the artstyle without understanding the why" Must keep it in mind

Thanks for having me on!

Tyler is looking a little differently lately.

This is an excellent point! It's so helpful given how stylized most mainstream artist are who are putting out tutorials.

You are an amazing artist and everything you said made sense to me. As an artist that has not been doing much art in the past 12 years, I am going to take this approach and begin creating art again. You have found yourself another follower, thank you!!!

something i began to notice about real people as i got into drawing more stylized faces was all their faces followed the proportional rule top of the ear to eyebrow, and bottom of the nose to bottom of the ear. Point being their is some proportional rule to follow but there is so much variation to humans faces, and it doesnt all follow the methods taught in certain head drawing books which can be a bit of a crutch for beginners

You're absolutely right. Loomis himself breaks this down in drawing the head and hands. The book where the standard head model originates from. The beauty of the Loomis technique doesn't lie within a standard and easy method to create a model. But rather, the flexibility that it can provide while designing one.

As soon as he mentioned he was inspired by Ben Eblen I knew the outcome was gonna look great. Eblen is goated.

Cool. I also sometimes do that color coding of the face features to understand spacing and sizing of certain references, so it's nice to see fellow people who do it too

I like conventional models that also have some unique traits, but I'll give this a try. Thanks.

Nice to see Ronnie Barker as Arkwright pop up here. Unexpected but welcome

The face proportions model was only ever meant to be a baseline. It’s the starting point for new artists. Same face is pretty easy to avoid once you have a lot of experience working within a style, but it’s true that some styles use same face deliberately. Anime is a broad category with tons of variation, but the style being used by a lot of studios these days has same face in spades because they’re reusing assets and templates. When I was newer I did the same thing, I had a handful of head templates and eye shapes I used, and stuck to basically the same proportions for each drawing. This was useful starting out because it allowed me to consistently draw decent faces thus being able to focus my attention on developing other parts of the body. Once I was comfortable with the basic idea, I was safe to mess around with it.

Saving this video. This is great!

Interesting, thank you for pointing this out.

9:27 "... gonna knock it back again and push it a little more." Dude, I needed that. I've noticed I have that 'sunk cost' fallacy, where I've committed so much effort already that I'm scared to start over. So I end up prettifying a flawed image rather than going out on a limb to practice making a better underlying structure (edited for proper timestamp)

Amazing! So glad I found your channel

Excellent tips. I am certainly using these.

06:30 "This guy" is Ronnie Barker, a comedy legend in the UK.