You know what I hate? When quizzes and midterms pile up in the same week, because then everything else does as well. Apologies for the delay, my sweet little honeyclusters!
Anyway. Onto proportion.
Proportion is about things having the proper relationship to other things. Drawing–and seeing–is all about relationships.
Put away thoughts that you are drawing something. You’re not. You’re re-presenting something according to your spatial awareness–you are never really reproducing something, just producing an interpretation. This is significant, remember it.
We reason by relationships of light, shape, size. If something we know to be small appears very large in our field of vision, it is reasonable to assume it is close to us. If something we know to be large appears small, we can assume it is far away. Spatial sense grows more precise the more it is stressed–the more faces we see, the more we move in spaces and interact with objects, the better our spatial reasoning gets.
So all this technical stuff? Gets easier. But you do have to make some choices.
The books I listed in my previous entry say different things, and so does conventional wisdom.
Some people insist the head is 8” from chin to crown, others say 9”. There are problems with this that must be overcome. The biggest–whose head? A man’s head? A woman’s head? Go to a hat store–hats come in different sizes, because heads do. A small person probably has a smaller head than a big person.
Another problem–if the head is 8”, then how many heads tall is a figure?
And what am I talking about by “heads tall”?
The Classical Greeks divided the figure using relative measurements, though they were not the first. We know the Egyptians did, but they used the fist–not the spread hand, specifically the fist.
This sounds tricky, but is actually the best way of doing it, because you can scale up and down very easily, and start anywhere as long as you start with a known quantity. This is the basic idea of relative measurement–it is the same no matter what the scale of the depiction is. Giant statue like Il David, wee little action figure–it doesn’t matter.
The Greeks are thought–evidence is sketchy–to have used the head. Their idealized figures are about 7.5 heads from ground to crown of the head. If they used an 8” head, this is 60”, or 5 feet. If it’s a 9” head, this is 67.5”, or about 5’8”. Hopefully, you see the problem–which is it? Eight inches is a significant difference among people.
Next, we run into another question. How many heads? The Greeks probably thought 7.5 was majestically tall, because back in the days of cholera, habitual malnourishment and total lack of antibiotics, people were short. Tiny! Even in the Victorian era, 5’5” was considered quite tall for a woman. Nowadays, that’s average to small. So we use a different number for our ideal figures. Actually, we have several.
Modern idealized proportions tend to fall into 3 categories.
- “average” — at 8 heads, this figure ranges between 64”-72”, or about 5’4”-6’. The lower number, obviously, is the 8 inch head.
- fashion — at 8.5 heads, this figure tends to run long in the legs especially, ranging between 68”-76.5”, or about 5’8” to 6’4”. Here we start running into The Problem. More on that later.
- heroic — at 9 heads, this figure is very tall, and has a massive body with small hands and head. Basically, this person is a bear.
The Heroic proportion shows the greatest degree of the Problem.
The Problem is that by reducing the size of the head and hands compared to the rest of the body, you sacrifice expressiveness for power. If you’re trying to make stories about people, sacrificing expressiveness makes it harder for people to relate to your characters. It makes storytelling harder.
If you look at animated characters, the really expressive ones are designed to have larger hands and head–proportions more in common with a child or baby. In order to engage people emotionally, they need to be able to be able to read your characters’ faces. Massive characters will need different “cinematography” to correct for that. Also, massiveness is not necessarily the best option, even for hardboiled or superhero stories.
Me and my honey show how the proportion system is a bit squiffy.
I am 5’8” (68”), and my honey is 6’2” with a bigger head (74”). When we stand next to each other, there’s a 6” difference. OK. When we sit down, I am 2” taller. What can we conclude? That difference is getting eaten up somewhere, namely my legs are shorter and my torso is longer. This is not consistent across gender–that is, not all women have long torsos. Those are individual characteristics.
Drawing these differences requires being able to find certain measurements on a body. This is easy once you get the hang of it, and remember what I said about starting with a set scale. If we know the figure’s height, and the length of the head from crown to chin, we can easily solve all of the other distances.
So, I will demonstrate this by deciding to draw a young woman and a young man. The young lady is 5’4” (54”), with an 8 inch head. This means she is 8 heads tall. The young man is 5’, with a 8 inch head. That makes him about 7.5 heads.
First, I’ll indicate 8 head-heights, and then divide these in half. Because I have a set scale, these half-units are 4”. This will make it easier to measure the other figure.
Here, the head heights and half-heights are marked in orange and blue respectively. Click to embiggen.
Now, I’ve decided on the general body type of the young woman with a loose gesture drawing, and that of the young man. I’ve decided on their builds (slight) and the distribution of their measurements. I know he is 4” shorter than the young woman, so those 4” divisions are coming in handy–I know the upper limit he should reach.
Very, very loosely sketched-in figures. Click to embiggen.
And more complete (but still rough) figures. They’re both quite slight, and I made his torso a little longer than the usual models.
Very loosely-indicated figures, with lots of cleaning up to do. Click to embiggen.
This task is easily accomplished by creating a grid, by hand or in a digital art program. Just keep in mind what measurement you’re using.
My next blog entry will focus more on individual differences, but I have created a feedback thread in our Creator forum, so if anyone has any questions or requests for topics, that’s the place to ask!