Time-lapse: pareidolia as a tool for face drawing

Warning: the video contains some flashing lights. Do not watch if you have epilepsy.

This one is less about the art and more about the technique. This time-lapse is a demo of how I draw seemingly-convincing anatomy from scratch with no visual aid other than my own “instinctive” sense of pareidolia (i.e. whatever’s going on in my own fusiform gyrus), so it may serve as a guide for those who draw faces.

There are a lot of techniques for drawing anatomically-convincing faces. One involves plotting some geometrical shapes using compass and straightedge in order to have a visual reference for facial proportions.

But, then, the human brain has this funny ability to see faces where ain’t none. And the “uncanny valley” allows us to feel whenever a seemingly-human face isn’t that human.

This mechanism usually goes this way: we see a visual pattern that triggers our “it’s a face” perception, then the more specialized facial recognition mechanism kicks in, only for it to perceive how this “face” have some unexpected details (e.g. glowing irises, sharper canine teeth, etc) and/or proportions (almond-shaped eyes larger than expected), so it gets uncanny.

One can leverage it by going the reverse way: crafting an external visual pattern until it maximizes this perception, fine-tuning it for either uncanniness and/or accurateness, depending on the intended goal.

This explains the main flow going on in my mind as I’m drawing a face fully from scratch (i.e. no rotoscoping). I often start by drawing a pair of circles (meant as either eyeballs or eye sockets) to trigger my initial notion of size, then (inspired by owls) I draw the eyebrow ridge going from the silhouette for the nose slightly below the median point, then the forehead, then the mouth cavity, then the cheeks (meant to have some blushing), and the zygomatic relief, and chin, and then… well, it’ll depend on the how the drawing is triggering my fusiform girus. You can see me getting back quite often to previously-drawn details as I fix these to better adjust my current perception, sometimes redoing things from scratch. I try to draw the hair as soon as I can, because it’s one of the main references for this specific face.

The final shading ended up a bit “flatter” than I originally wanted to draw. I have a previously-drawn “mugshot art” where the shading ended up imbued with better 3d depth, but I didn’t record a time-lapse for it, so I made another drawing.

That’s pretty much everything for this post, feel free to ask if you got any questions…

Alt-text: a time-lapse disclosing the drawing of a feminine face (meant to depict Lilith, with large almond-shaped eyes, long red hair, expressive eyelashes, soft-yet-sharp chin, blushed cheeks and tender red lips with sharp fangs), seen in close mugshot. The drawing starts from a gray shape akin to a Venetian mask, then it gradually evolves into a feminine portrait.

@artshare@lemmy.world

  • acockworkorange@mander.xyzEnglish
    6·
    9 days ago

    Yeah, putting a flashing light warning in the text without a spoiler/NSFW tag is useless. Next time, post the finished picture and post the time lapse as a tagged reply so people have a chance of not seeing it.

    • Dæmon S.@calckey.worldOP
      4·
      8 days ago

      @acockworkorange@mander.xyz @artshare@lemmy.world

      The NSFW tag, as implemented by the platform I use (Calckey), while having some interop with Lemmy (hence one of the reasons why I use a Calckey acc instead of a Lemmy acc), ends up hiding my post even from myself as an OP.

      I mean, last time I NSFW-tagged a post of mine, I couldn’t see my own thread from Lemmy.world, as Lemmy requires login (signing-in with a Lemmy account, which I haven’t) to turn off Lemmy’s default NSFW filtering. Therefore, marking my post as NSFW rendered me completely unaware whether there were any pending-federation replies and/or reactions, because NSFW-tagged posts can’t be found as a Lemmy guest.

      Also, “Not safe for work” is too broad of a label, often mistaken for “pornography” and/or “violence”, hence why Lemmy (and most social media platforms) hide these by default…

      Ideally, I’d use Calckey’s “Content Warning” field, where I can explain where the sensitiveness is. But, then, Lemmy doesn’t recognize Misskey’s CW field, just the boolean sensitive key, hiding it even from myself and potentially breaking federation for reactions.

      Then there’s the char limit, which in my case necessarily includes the title and the CC (the mention to the community handle). Lemmy uses the first line of the post body to derive the title for posts originating from non-Lemmy platforms, so the title accounts for body length. If you measure how many chars my post has, including the formatting and the handle mentioning the community, you’ll realize I topped the 3000 chars configured in the Sharkey instance I’m in. I can’t help but write a lot due to my AuDHD nature, so I needed to prune things from my originally lengthier text; if I pruned more things to fit a NSFW in the title as well, the text would end up incomplete (and the title would end up lengthier).

      Finally but more importantly: when showing a thread, Lemmy (and most Fediverse platforms) usually brings the text content before the attached media, especially when it’s a video, which initially appears as a still of the first frame.

      My textual content isn’t sensitive, nor is the “video thumbnail”, just the way the video flashes for being a sped-up recording when (and if) it’s played.

      And, when it comes to a typical Lemmy UI, the video will only play if, and only if, the person deliberately clicks it (that is, when auto-play is turned off, which is the default for web UIs from most Lemmy instances). Given how the text comes before the video and the warning got this pretty visible, bold font format, I guess it’s enough for someone who’s sensitive to flashing lights to consume just the text while refraining from watching the time-lapse.

      I see you’re neither this community’s mod (Zombiepirate) nor the lemmy.world’s admin (ruud, who’s also the admin of calckey.world), so I’ll let it for actual mods and admins to decide if my post is sensitive: if they decide my post isn’t adequate and must be removed, okay, fair enough.

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyzEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        Do whatever you fancy. I’ll just have to block you, because I do have epilepsy and the first thing I saw when opened Lemmy was your gif flashing on me.

        • Dæmon S.@calckey.worldOP
          41·
          8 days ago

          @acockworkorange@mander.xyz @artshare@lemmy.world

          Seeing from the Web UI of the Lemmy instance you’re from (Mander) yields a still frame of a paused video (hence, neither a GIF nor auto-played; the video being brought as GIF is a Mastodon thing, and even there, it’s not auto-play-enabled by default) which, despite appearing above the text in your instance, is sitting right above a bold-stylished “Warning” line, the text’s second line which couldn’t be the first line precisely because the first line is meant for the post’s title.

          Maybe you’re using some third-party app for accessing Lemmy, but even then, there are settings to turn off auto-play and, for most Lemmy clients (such as Voyager), it’s turned off by default just like the Lemmy’s original WebUI, except if you deliberately changed the settings and turned it on.

          Screenshot of this thread, as seen from Mander Lemmy instance, with the video as a still frame inside a HTMLVideoElement, neither a GIF nor auto-playing. My second line "Warning" is highlighted by me to show how visible it is within the post.

  • Dæmon S.@calckey.worldOP
    4·
    8 days ago

    @artshare@lemmy.world

    As per requests, the final art is included below.

    Alt-text:
    Picture of the final art originally drawn in the time-lapse, depicting a close mugshot of a feminine face meant to be a safe depiction of Lilith (demoness-goddess in occultism; here, Her more potentially disturbing features such as horns, wings, blood and hollow dark eyes are replaced by a more womanly anthropomorphic depiction which has just the pointy canines, a.k.a vampire fangs, but without the blood, as the most explicit supernatural trait).

    She is depicted as having brown skin, soft triangular face with tender blushed cheeks and round nose, dark red lips from an open mouth that reveals both her subtly-vampiric teeth and a tongue whose tip slightly touches the middle of the upper teeth, large almond-shaped eyes with expressively feminine eyelashes, wide pupils and reddish-brown irises (looking directly at the viewer), as well as a long and almost vivid red straight hair cascading onto Her shoulders (which are partially visible, featuring the clavicle bone and subtle relief from muscles and tendons in the neck).

    The background is just a solid black color.

    Picture of the final art originally drawn in the time-lapse, depicting a close mugshot of a feminine face meant to be a safe depiction of Lilith (demoness-goddess in occultism; here, Her more potentially disturbing features such as horns, wings, blood and hollow dark eyes are replaced by a more womanly anthropomorphic depiction which has just the pointy canines, a.k.a vampire fangs, but without the blood, as the most explicit supernatural trait). She is depicted as having brown skin, soft triangular face with tender blushed cheeks and round nose, dark red lips from an open mouth that reveals both her subtly-vampiric teeth and a tongue whose tip slightly touches the middle of the upper teeth, large almond-shaped eyes with expressively feminine eyelashes, wide pupils and reddish-brown irises (looking directly at the viewer), as well as a long and almost vivid red straight hair cascading onto Her shoulders (which are partially visible, featuring the clavicle bone and subtle relief from muscles and tendons in the neck). The background is just a solid black color.

    • Dæmon S.@calckey.worldOP
      11·
      8 days ago

      @CallMeButtLove@lemmy.world @artshare@lemmy.world

      Sorry, I didn’t quite understand what you meant due to the seemingly irony in the way you phrased your reply… are you asking for the picture of the art I drew in the video or, to the contrary, you’re saying that the drawing I made during the time-lapse ended up as overly unsettling? (when the alt-text beforehandedly told how my art was meant as the depiction of an entity Who’s originally from occultism and demonolatry)

      If it’s the latter, well, this depiction of Hers is the most family-friendly one my mind could conceive, the only potentially triggering thing being Her fangs… Maybe the eye contact can be triggering to some people? (but, then, I explicitly mentioned my art as a “close mugshot” of a “feminine face” “meant to depict Lilith”) In any case, that’s why I wrote the post so the alt-text is duplicated (both as actual alt-text for the media, and as a explicit disclaimer before the embedded media can be played, as I mentioned to another person in the comments).

      If it’s the former, I didn’t initially post the final art because this is post is more about the technique (described in-text and illustrated in-video) than the drawing per se but, sure, I can post the final art as a reply to this thread if you people want it :)