Drills!

I've been telling a lot of friends about this exercise and my buddy Vince started calling them drills - which I like so I'm keeping it! So here are some more timed drill head drawings, and some gestures. Some of the more contorted faces, I hit "back" and did 4 minutes instead of 2... More important to me to get it right than to go fast, even though the speed forces me to be more loose and quick.

The photos I'm using are just collected from google and flickr searches, with terms like "fight" or "unposed" or actors' names (this works best when using the name of a movie or character so you don't get so many press shots), looking for different expressions and angles. Don't bother looking for specific emotions like "anger" because this just brings up badly-acted stock photos of businessmen yelling at their laptops and stuff like that. Sports and news images are good for expressions too, and sometimes just looking for a very common name like "Michael" will get nice unposed shots too. They don't have to be very large images since these are very quick drawings, but I do look for clear lighting as it's really hard to see the form when it's just omnidirectional indoor light. Really large images or ones where the whole head is not in the frame are a lot more difficult to draw from for this, as getting the proportion and placement of features and the structure of the skull are extremely important for getting any likeness (and just for getting the face and expression to look right at all).