 Hello everyone. Today's video is hopefully the first in a series that I am calling Portrait Roulette and you might be wondering what that is. So basically it is where I use the basic shapes and guidelines from my tutorial on how to draw faces and I try and draw different faces to both practice how to draw portraits and also escape the same face syndrome. So this is the first installment. Now let's dive in with the portrait roulette to see what face shape we have to draw. So I ended up getting long with a square draw line and a square hairline. So this would be categorized as a rectangular face shape. So let's draw the shapes that we need for the head, which is a circle and an upside down triangle. But because the face is supposed to be rectangular, the upside down triangle is shorter in height and it is positioned far from the circle compared to the shapes that I use to create the ideal face shape. From here we divide the head in half vertically down the center of the head and we also divide it into six equal spaces horizontally. So we start with the horizontal line on the top of the circle, which is the top of our head and another one on the bottom of the upside down triangle, which is the bottom of the head and halfway between those two. And then we divide the top half into three and we also divide the bottom half into three, which gives us a total of six spaces and seven horizontal lines. If you want to use a ruler for more accuracy, definitely feel free to do so. However, I would recommend that you practice eyeballing the guidelines as well. That's just always good practice. And now that we have the guidelines, we can start drawing the facial features. So let's see what my portrait roulette will tell me in terms of what eyes to draw. So it's downturned small close at eyes with deep set and straight eyelids. So here I'm mapping out the eyes and where they're going to be. So I usually think about dividing line four into five equal spaces. Two of those spaces are the eyes. However, because we have to draw close set eyes, what I'm going to do is I'm going to move the eyes towards the center. So they're closer to each other, just ever so slightly. I'm also going to change the angle in which I draw the eye shape to make it downturned. And I'm also just going to make it a little bit smaller. Now you could either draw out the original or the ideal eye shape first and then make those changes and alterations to it. But for this one, I'm kind of just doing all of that in my head. And then I'm just transferring that onto the paper immediately. Also, because I've made the eyes smaller, I'm going to be drawing it on top of line four instead of on line four. Then I'm going to add the pupils. And then for the eyelids, which will be a deeper concave line, that's a little bit further away from the eye since we're also drawing deep set eyes. And at this stage, I'm also leaving these facial features as their basic shapes, completely bare bone. We will add the details and we will refine later. For the eyebrows, I ended up getting straight brows of medium thickness. That's a good distance from the eyes. So I begin by mapping out the length of the eyebrows, which are often longer than the width of the eyes. So or the width of an eye. I also like to draw a diagonal line from the outer corner of the eyes as my visual guide. And then we start drawing the brows. And because it's meant to be straight brows, the arch is very minimal. I'm also keeping the thickness not too thin, not too thick. In terms of distance to the eyes, I'm drawing it just under line three, which is also how I would have drawn the eyebrows for an ideal facial proportions. The other option for this in my portrait roulette is that it's a little bit closer to the eyes. Next, let's draw the nose, which according to my portrait roulette, we have short with a round tip open and downturned nostrils with a wide base. So there's definitely more variety that we can add to these facial features. And if you think I'm missing some key options, let me know and I'll add them to my portrait roulette. But we're kind of just starting with the ones that I could think of. And this is pretty much it. So anyways, let's start adding the shapes for the nose, starting with a circle for the tip or the ball of the nose. And because it's going to be more round, we're going to make it slightly bigger than how I normally draw it for an ideal nose, I would say. And because it's a short nose, I'm going to draw it on top of line five. The other option for this is a long nose. And I would probably draw that on line five or below line five. Then I add the concave lines for the nostrils. And I'm angling it downward, so it's downturned. But this really represents a turned up type of nose where the nostrils are a lot more visible from a front view. Also, because we're drawing a wide base, I'm drawing the nostrils a little bit further to the sides of the circle. If they were a narrow base for the nose, then they'd be much closer together or maybe the curves themselves, like the width would be a little bit shorter. Then I'm going to finish it off by adding the C shaped curves to the side of the nostrils and two curves connecting the ball of the nose to the eyebrows. That'll be the bridge of the nose onto the mouth. So I'm going to draw the mouth on line six. And I ended up getting a small mouth with full lips, but the bottom lip is more prominent. So I usually draw the width of the mouth to be just a little bit longer than the width of an eye. However, because I ended up getting small, I'm going to keep it the same width of an eye. I'm also shifting the horizontal line that separates the upper lip to the bottom lip just slightly upwards to make the bottom lip slightly bigger. And take note that these changes that I'm making are also really small or really subtle, but they already create different facial features. So you can definitely go a little bit more drastic with these changes that will achieve an exaggerated or stylized faces. But because I'm aiming for semi realistic, I'm trying to keep them small or subtle. And those are the facial features that we're going to draw for today. I am now going to add the personal touches that I like to add to my portraits, which is for example, a circle for the chin, two ovals, like two slanted ovals for the cheeks and an oval for the forehead. From here, I can then use these as guides to draw the jaw and to draw the hairline also the sides of the face. So if you remember, I ended up getting a square jaw and a square hairline. Now, when it comes to square jaw and square hairline, especially in a semi realistic art style, they're definitely not as boxy as the name suggests. So I'm just going to add a bit of taper to these shapes, especially to the hairline. I don't need to do any of that for the jaw because that's already kind of established with our basic guidelines. Next, we have the hair. And I ended up getting a micro or a pixie length and with a half up hairstyle or half updo and a wavy hair type. What I was thinking when I made this portrait roulette that I have to can mean anything. It could be like a hair clip, it could be a headband, or it could be like a cute micro pink tail or or ponytail. What I actually kind of just opted for is I just slicked back one side of the hair and called that the updo. Anyway, so I started establishing my partition line when it came to drawing the hair. And then if you've heard of beauty grooves, they say that you want to line it up with the arch of your brow. So that's kind of around the area that I placed it at. And then I started to add the S and the C curves to draw the bunches of hair for the fringe and for the rest of the hair and also for the area where it's kind of like swept to the back. And also to just give it some more volume, I draw the top of the hair just a little bit above the circle of the head. So it's not too flat onto the top of the head. I also draw the neck. And for this, I establish the width of the neck by drawing a horizontal line just under the mouth. And where it touches the lines for the jaw, that's roughly the width of the neck that I draw. If you think this is too thick or you think it's too thin, you feel free to definitely adjust it accordingly. I feel like a lot of people have different opinions on how wide a neck should be. But I think this width is pretty semi-realistic. And that's what I'm going to draw for today. So now as I add the details to the face, I also add a sun to remind myself the light source, which according to the portrait roulette, it is on the right side of the face above and in front. So as I shade the face, I will keep in mind that the light areas will be located on the right side of the face and the facial features and the dark areas will predominantly be located on the left side. So I also have a tutorial video on how I shade faces. That is something that I also need a lot of practice on. But if you want something more in depth, then definitely click that video in the card section above. I'm also using a very light hand to build up the shading, keeping my pencil at a low angle so that my pencil marks are more spread out instead of thin hatching lines. This also allows me to create more of an even tone around a large area. And as I do this, you might be wondering what portrait roulette is. Let me explain. One of my art goals for 2024 isn't only to get back into art and be more consistent with it, but also to practice how to draw portraits once again and actually not just practice drawing portraits, but to master drawing portraits. This will then help me achieve a bigger goal that I have, which is to use portraiture to create artworks that reflect my inner thoughts, my deepest emotions, and things that I just want to say through art. And the art that I want to create definitely heavily rely on humans as the visual representation of my human emotions. So it just makes sense for me to draw people. But on top of that, it's also the thing that I enjoy drawing the most. And portrait roulette is an exercise that I devised for myself to help me practice and eventually improve. So I created a slot machine type of device that randomly selects what face I'm going to draw so I can be challenged in that way. Since this is only the beginning of this venture, it's definitely not perfect. There's a lot of things missing in my portrait roulette, which I didn't include. For example, I could have included gender, age and other typical or rare facial features or other factors that actually affect humans. However, I didn't want to bombard myself too soon too fast. I'm taking it one step at a time going with something that's more achievable so that I can feel a sense of reward or a sense of achievement with each portrait that I draw and then leveling up from there. I feel like that's just a more sustainable slash rewarding route. So in this version, I also included hairstyle and lighting to help me practice how to draw hair and how to shade faces as well. I feel like that's a little bit more achievable for me. And if you are actually interested in using this same method to practice how to draw portraits for yourself and you also want to use my portrait roulette, that's actually a slot machine, but the name portrait roulette has a better ring than portrait slot machine. Anyway, let me know in the comments below and I can upload it as a video resource and we can probably do this together. If you have a better name suggestion instead of portrait roulette, then also let me know in the comments down below. Now back to this drawing. So the face, it's now starting to take form and I do apologize that the shading isn't as visible on camera since my camera just automatically adjusted and now it's overexposed. I haven't used my camera in ages. I'm still working on my filming skills because just like drawing, it is also a skill that I completely ignored for almost two years and it's unfortunately deteriorated. So with each video I make, I'm also practicing how to film and edit and hopefully slowly improving. So I'm pretty happy with how this practice session turned out. It may not look like it in this video, but I certainly felt challenged and I'm glad that I drew something different to what I normally draw, although one could argue that this face is still pretty much beauty standard. I don't know, but I think that's because it follows majority of the ideal facial proportions and the changes that I made were subtle. So hopefully with each portrait roulette practice session, I'll just keep improving. And if you want to do this with me, like I said, let me know and I will upload that resource. Hopefully you keep improving too. And whilst I don't have other portrait roulette videos just yet, feel free to watch more portrait videos here. And if you're watching this in the future, you can watch the next one here. And that is it for this video. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in my next one.