Smooth Ink Lines... HOW??

[trebuchet]

Goooood. Make sure you got them on when Billy Joe (Dee) and me come over Sundee. You got that, boi?

[MadCat]

Well, I don't want to start another 'looking for artistic advice' thread, so I'll just stick my next question in this thread, turning it into a sort of 'asking questions to other artists about how they do stuff' thread.

So my next "HOW??" is: how do you draw profile shots? (as in, the head from the side view) These still seem to drive me nuts. I'm practicing them and studying proportions, etc, but I wondered if anyone out there had some advice, esp. on how to get the profile shot to relate properly to the proportions of the head-on shot. Bleh.

[Dave]

skeleton sketches. No way around it. If you want to draw a profile of something and keep it in line with whatever you normally draw, you HAVE to draw a base sketch of your character. For something as cartoony as the Squishy Dan, I start with a circle, dent in the area where the eyes would be, tack on the round Super Mario nose, and draw his chin before I slap on the stache and beard. For something more "realistically" proportioned like Bianca (not counting the eyes), I do the basic head structure, line out where the eyes, mouth, and nose are, draw out the nose and jaw, and then work by adding and taking away the details as needed. There's no easy or quick fix for this, just have to do it until you can do it better and faster.

[MadCat]

So I guess it is just a question of practice and repetition, then. I've probably been overthinking it, measuring the spaces between features and how they relate to each other on the face, drawing lots of guidelines, etc etc. Somehow I just can't seem to get the profile shot to look 'right' compared to the other views. Maybe I'm just not accustomed to the fact that the face looks so different from the side than from the front. I dunno. I keep finding references that are almost exactly what I want my side shots to look like; I just can't figure out how they do it.

Thank you for the look into how the drawings of Dan and Bianca are done, too; I'll try keeping that in mind while practicing my profile shots.