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Now I'd spent a lot of time trying to accurately draw people's heads from all angles, but my most common angle was from slightly above because I'm 6'3" tall and that means nearly every model (who usually sits) is below me. I just got used to that angle, but I'd change it too.
As I got better at drawing heads as closely as I could from weird angles, I started noticing that other paintings look...odd. Like, necks are slightly too long, or face is aimed at you and you can also see under the chin. But, I was a beginner so I thought I was wrong.
In this class, the teacher would sit, right in front, under the model, looking up into the model's chin, every time. She never did a different view for the alla prima class. She also would sit and paint while we painted, toss out 30 second random quips for "tips" then pigeon.
What's "pigeon" you say? Oh that's where a teacher doesn't actually help you, but instead walks around periodically shitting on everything then flies away to go do her own thing. Pro-Tip: If you take a class and the teacher paints while you paint, you're being ripped off.
The good teachers will demo, stop, then have you do what they did and walk around and supervise. They'll also stop and actually show you, on your painting, how to fix it. Pigeon teachers are mostly getting you to pay for their models while they paint something to sell.
Now, this pigeon teachers was driving me nuts because she would walk around to my easel, see my drawing, then "correct" it. But, remember she sat down and looked up at people? My terrible 20 second artrage sketch, the left is what she saw, right is what I saw. Very different.pic.twitter.com/mWc70tlqjt
She would come along though and tell me to move the eyes up to basically where the model's crown on the forehead was. I was baffled, like, doesn't she know the eyes aren't on people foreheads? Then I started studying really what she was doing and it was fascinating.pic.twitter.com/SMvbi1J2LJ
The first thing I figured out is she learned this very simplistic formula of "the eyes are always in the center of the head." This is actually not even close except in people with hair, directly facing you. Move even a tiny inch in any direction and this measure is off.pic.twitter.com/gkBJO8rZKd
The more accurate formula--which has been used at least since Michelangelo and Davinci--is divide the head into 3rd of brow line, nose, bottom of lip. This works better because you can see it no matter how the head is tilted since it uses landmarks that are always visible.pic.twitter.com/hof053eHL2
Now, if someone's head is tilted back because you are *under* their head, then there's foreshortening that causes these three lines to go toward the top of the head. The head also more of a ball on top of a cylinder (cranium on jaw/face), so it shortens in the face, but not head.pic.twitter.com/ATFrUjJEfE
And if you're above someone then the reverse happens. These three lines move down, shorten, the chin disappears as the facial column falls away, and you see most of the cranium.pic.twitter.com/UZHJDGe28k
But, she only knew the "eyes are in the middle formula", and she was 1' shorter than me, so literally every view of the model's head was below or straight on for her, but for me was more above. BUT AS A TRAINED ARTIST SHE HAD NO IDEA SHE DID THIS. In fact, she did worse.
See, she would sit a look at people like this, where their foreheads should be very short and you can see under the chin. But, this is a terrible view of a person in the head. In the eyes, nose and mouth it's very dramatic, and she really wanted to keep those in the center, so.pic.twitter.com/aTh9JEa3kM
She would do these paintings where, the face is tilted up, with dramatic under views, but the *head* was facing you, so you didn't see under the chin, the forehead was elongated, and the ears were in front. That let her frontalize/centralize the features while tilting them back.pic.twitter.com/RX7Syi1e1L
What was crazy is she was so good at the realism that I didn't notice she was doing this until I literally took photos of her paintings and drew lines on them like in this blog post. Your brain is so bad at seeing faces realistically that if they're just a little close they workpic.twitter.com/rvcITY4trF
The blog post is right, given that the face is straight on (nose is pointed right at you) the ears should be directly at you. But you also should be able to see the side of the face if the eyes, mouth, and nose are dead center and pointed at you. The AI does a pigeon!pic.twitter.com/bwWROOUIRe
Basically, what pigeon teacher figured out (accidentally and unknown to her) is that if you centralize one part of a portrait, and make that accurate, then you can warp a lot of the rest to make it more appealing. Centralize the features and you can bend the head.
If you want to bend the features, but not tilt the head in an ugly way, then you can get away with it. As long as it's not crazy the brain will go "yup that looks good!" and move on with its life. In fact, this effect was so powerful that _pigeon teacher_ didn't even see it.
That class was when I realized that most of painting is figuring out what you can get away with given the average person's brain is kind of crap at visual perception and memory. As long as you hit all the cliches and didn't go too crazy people were fooled.
Finally I stopped bothering with her class for this reason, but also because I found out 90% of the paintings she sells were from photos while she was walking around blabbing about how photos were terrible. At that point I figured there wasn't much to learn from her.
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