Have a Nosey at this Common Portraiture Mistake

I see a lot of common mistakes people make when beginning to paint or sculpt faces and this post will show you why you make one and 3 ways you can go about fixing it.

Today, we’re covering the nosey vertical.

You see, the thing about a vertical is that your brain distorts the information and plays a trick on you.

Take a minute and run your eye along these lines (actually run it along the lines, don’t just glance) and consider...
 

Most people will see the vertical as longer than the horizontal even though they're the same size because we tend to elongate the vertical and shorten the horizontal.  (You may even see the horizontal shrinking slightly if you run your eye along it.)

This means when we go to draw or sculpt the most vertical part of our face, the nose, we often elongate it and therefore place it too far down the page.  

But there are ways to outsmart the brain:

• If you're drawing from a reference image, rotate the image and drawing 90 degrees so both are now horizontal and check to see if the distances look right or need to be altered slightly.  

• Draw a horizontal line to position the bottom of the nose, avoiding any verticals 

• Use some form of measuring, whether grids or taking the measurement of a feature (say the width of the eye) to compare distances.

These are super quick things to check when you're approaching a painting or sculpture, but if you want to go a bit deeper into improving your Artwork, take my FREE Bundle: 5 Days to Better Paintings with Colour Theory 101 Cheatsheet

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• 8 Ways to ‘See’ Like an Artist.

• How to build a Solid Painting Foundation

• The Simple Shift to become a more confident Artist

• The One Major Thing that will Improve your Art

• 6 Effective ways to Practice your Art.

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