11 Levels of Self-Portraiture: Easy to Complex

Hi, I'm TM Davy.

I'm an artist living in Bushwick, New York.

I teach at the School of Visual Arts

and I've been challenged to create a self-portrait

in 11 levels of increasing complexity.

[cheerful instrumental music]

We're not worried about photo likeness.

In these levels, we will be working from a mirror.

We're interested in the way our mind perceives

the sense of volumes of the head,

the sense of light as it plays across time.

Good, bad, none of that matters here.

This is about discovery.

I'm defining complexity as the layers of thinking

that help us to build observational truths

that are necessary for a picture

that just somehow feels right.

This is my interpretation of the challenge.

Every level has infinite amount of space to branch off

and discover things that maybe haven't been discovered.

[pencils clacking]

[knife clicking]

Level one, solar head.

The solar head, it emerged on the walls of caves.

The solar head is a circle,

two eyes and a mouth.

If you were to ask a three year old to draw a person,

they'd most likely start with the shape of a head.

This is an instinctual archetypal structure.

Your child will arrive at the solar head at some point,

just out of the pure curiosity to reflect themselves.

As soon as that child begins to see the difference

between one person's nose and another,

one person's eyes and the next,

we're entering the next level.

Level two, identifying features.

At level two, language can be a guide.

When you understand that an eye has eyelashes

there is often a will to put those eyelashes in the drawing.

As soon as we move away from the solar circle,

we're playing this game of diversity,

this game of character.

People tend to get frustrated when their language is greater

than their feeling of reality in the drawing.

But this is just a matter of practice.

With a different shape of eyes,

I might become a visitor to South Park

or an adorable anime figure.

But while these worlds are endless,

some simple structures of reality

might seem to be hiding from me.

Level three, volumes and proportion.

The points of proportion on the human head exist really

in the basic structure of the human skull.

This is Skely, aka Mr. Bones.

The truth of the human skull is that yes,

the top of the skull might be circular,

but attached to the bottom of the skull is the bone

of the jaw.

This bone of the jaw tends to have

a sort of one, two, three angularity.

This is me as a Disney character.

You'll notice this method of circle and jaw

in the drawings of Disney cartoons.

It is a simple, but slightly more complex way

of understanding what it is that we're trying to get to.

We're beginning with three basic points of proportion.

The top of the forehead to the line of the eyebrow,

the line of the eyebrow then down to underneath the nose,

underneath the nose to the bottom of the chin.

There is a subtle proportionate difference

between those three spaces that will allow

a sense of personhood, of individuality to the subject

that you're drawing, and in this case yourself.

So what we're putting on the page is the circle

of the base of the skull,

the general character of the planes of a person's jaw,

and then we're finding the proportionate markings

that might get us immediately

to a sense of structure and likeness.

Level four, planes of the head.

The planes of the head build on the structure

we just discussed.

But what we're looking for is to create

more three-dimensionality from that structure.

First, we have to consider the anatomy of the skull.

Often the human head can be simplified into a side,

a transition plane, and a center.

We often think of the forehead as being a flat plane,

but if you really look at it in three dimensions,

what you'll discover is that there is really

a transitional plane on the side from the temple

moving towards the middle of the forehead,

and then a plane that is more flat than round

at the center plane of the forehead.

So side, transition, center, transition, side.

The cheeks themselves are not this sort of round form

that we often think that they are.

The cheeks have a lot of three-dimensional direction

moving backwards across the skull

and connecting the forward plane of our chin

all the way back to nearly the base, the back of our skull.

What you'll find is that the planes of the mouth

are often going to look like Mr. Potato head lips.

So we're not just drawing the mouth as we think of it,

the lips and the teeth,

what we're really drawing is the structure

underlying the mouth, the orbicularis oris,

the muscle group.

Some people refer to it as the muzzle shape of the mouth,

but I find that a bit disquieting.

The orbicularis oris, the mouth has a side and a middle.

And if you can understand the side and the middle

and the side and the middle,

and you can understand that also as having a set angularity,

you begin to understand that the lips sit outwards

from the jaw structure in a three-dimensional set of planes.

We somehow know that these structures differentiate us,

and we like that differentiation.

Often one of the common mistakes that people make

at this stage is that they will draw the eyeball,

or the eye, as too big for the socket,

or too small for the socket,

because they are thinking of the eye as being a symbol

of the face, rather than being a part

of an underlying structure,

as something that sits into a bone and muscular form.

If you look at comic book heroes, most of them,

many of them are really just perfect examples

of the planes of the head.

There's not much more to them except a slight variation

of proportion and maybe a little bit of character

in some of the features or in the colors of their suits.

What you'll notice is that their underlying drawing

is really just a set of angles that are determined here.

And if you've ever wondered how comic artists

are able to draw in three-dimensions so fluidly

and have it still seem like there is a certain kind of

realistic depiction there,

it's because they've just learned the planes of the head

well enough that they can imagine it in three-dimensions,

and the structure is advanced enough that it convinces us

of a more elaborate reality.

And in some ways I might as well be wearing a cape.

There is a feeling of this reality

as having a heroic structure that is not exactly

what we're seeing when we're looking in the mirror.

And the trick now is going to be

always looking for these angles

and yet always looking for even a more observable truth.

Level five, the block-in.

As I've been drawing the planes of the head,

I've been drawing this kind of

frontal symbolic set of planes.

Blocking in the head, it's really just remembering

and forgetting that we have angles and straight lines

that might give us a sense of structure.

I wanna encourage, if you're following me along,

that you find a place that you can look at your page

and look at the mirror without moving too much

because what we're trying to find is a way of getting back

to looking and looking without having to do

too much shifting around.

If my head is tilted like this, I know already,

yes, I'm looking for one, two, three, four,

but what I'm trying to tune into now is the block-in

that angle, angle, angle, angle, angle.

This specific angle.

I can just sort of mark it out on my page

in long, fluid, gestural marks

that are straight and angular.

In some ways, I like to think of it as really drawing

the space around the face, or they're placeholders.

It's like telling somebody the directions

before they actually go on the journey.

You're giving yourself a map

of what the face is going to be doing

on a basic, undifferentiated level.

This is your opportunity to measure in the mirror

using the tip of your pencil and the slide

of your thumb.

You're gonna put the tip of the pencil

at the top of your forehead.

You're gonna move your thumb down

so that it is now at your brow.

And you're going to just use that same measurement

and compare top of the brow to the nose

and nose to the chin.

And you're going to assess what the subtle difference are

between those proportions.

And now you're gonna take the tip of your pencil

and move your thumb to assess the same differences

in your drawing.

The most common mistakes when we're blocking in our head

is that even if the angle of the eyes is like this,

we just somehow want it to be like this.

If the head is turned a little bit like this,

rather than seeing that this proportion is going to be

much bigger than this proportion

of the opposite side of the face,

the back plane of the cheek is disappearing around the side

that we can no longer see,

we will somehow just will that cheek

to be apparent in the drawing.

We'll want those eyes to be the same size

so that we just don't want this eye to be bigger

and closer and more prominent on the face.

I would challenge you to draw van Gogh's

Self-portrait in a Straw Hat from 1887.

Notice how much the eyes are out of tilt,

how close that nose really is to the side of the face.

And my guess is your first try you'll level out those eyes.

You'll bring that nose to the middle,

but try it and see.

[upbeat instrumental music]

Wow, Jordan really picked up on the displacement

of that right eye, the way that it's sort of set below.

She might've dropped it a little bit too low.

And if we notice she's also doing a slightly common mistake

where she's just maybe bringing the eyes a little bit

even more towards the middle of the face.

That idea of the head being turned

and the features moving all the way to the side of the face,

that's something very difficult to get.

But she she's doing a great job, I have to say,

Jason did what we were maybe expecting.

Just a little bit bringing the eyes more level

than the van Gogh's tilt.

Lucy got a different feeling in that van Gogh

that I really like, but that leveling's in there.

If we can notice it, the brow is more horizontal.

Pamela did a good job of keeping a van Gogh's head

feeling like it's turned in that central form.

Sarah is really bringing that nose more towards the middle.

Sarah's really bringing that eyes

and making them more central in the face

so that they take up really the same amount of space

in relationship to the middle of the head.

It really takes us even further back

towards that solar head, in a way.

Even though there is all of the sort of centerings

and levelings and shifts of the drawing,

there is still by the fact that we know

what van Gogh looks like, a recognizability in Sarah's work.

Look for these places where you are centering,

where you are leveling,

where you're creating some sort of symmetry

that may not exist in actual observation.

If you keep making smaller and smaller observations

in block-in, you can really achieve

a fairly high degree of realism.

I'm going to copy it over in a much lighter tone,

so you can see how the block-in can be

a sort of map of structure.

And I'm going to begin now with the next level.

Level six, contour.

As the head turns away from the line of sight,

there is an edge.

That edge can be traced and we call that line the contour.

This contour is a way of really expressing

the subtleties of shape.

The instinct at this point is to start

with a kind of scratchy mark.

We think that maybe we're gonna get it more right

if we make scratchy nervous marks.

We can allow for our pencil to flow

and be marvelously attuned

to what it is that we're observing.

Now, this takes practice.

When we look at a beautiful eye,

we don't see a hundred nervous marks.

We see, ah, the rhythm of the eye, this elegant flow.

Most people instinctually, because of our symbolic values,

will go, Ooh, I gotta draw the eyes now.

Move across the face,

allow yourself to observe around the face.

Explore the way your eye might move

so that you might move from the ear and down to the jaw

and then up to a brow and down through a nose.

We're not worrying yet about light and shadow.

What we're really worrying about is the forms

that feel like outside edges.

This is one of the great joys of portraiture for me.

I have never encountered a face

that wasn't a pleasure to draw.

The contours have defined the outside edge,

but internally we may feel

that there is a certain flatness that we do not feel

when we are observing our faces from life.

That brings us to the next level.

Level seven, light and shadow.

The thing that we are trying to understand is

where does shadow begin and where does it end?

What we're trying to first think about is

what is the light source and where is it hitting our faces?

Because our heads are not linear block-ins.

There is a contour that will describe the edge

of that shadow.

And if you squint your eyes at your face in that mirror

as it's being hit by a single source,

you'll see a shape that just appears

just a little bit clear.

And that's the shape that we're going to map in now.

We are still in some ways looking for a contour,

but this contour is no longer on the outside edges.

There is a terminator line

where the light can just no longer hit.

It's like thinking like Andy Warhol.

We're just trying to create the most basic tones

to give us the illusion of a kind of simplified

poster-like reality.

Pop art is really this game right here.

Another thing to consider,

what's the angle of your light source?

The main point of my light source

is somewhere around a 45 degree angle.

Now the light source can be moved

and free to move it wherever you want.

In Caravaggio's self portrait as Bacchus,

you'll notice the light source

is a little bit more from above.

In most of Frida Kahlo's portraits,

she's illuminating herself with a light source,

but she's almost hiding it,

which is the same for a lot of the flash photography

that is used as a reference for Warhol's pictures.

To finish this level, all we're going to do

is put in an average, not the darkest element of the shadow,

not the lightest element of the shadow,

just a kind of middle.

So we're coloring it in, in a sense.

In the next level, we're going to be drawing

more nuanced information across this.

So we want the line to be sort of tight.

In classical terms, we are beginning the chiaroscuro,

the effect of light and shadow across observable reality.

It feels like we're under a very bright light

that is a little bleached out.

Like there is not this understanding

of all of the other planes that exist in the light.

That brings us to the next level.

How do we get to all of the volumes

as the light is moving across our face.

Level eight, highlights and accents.

So as we are continuing the path of light and shadow

and developing a chiaroscuro,

we are going to find the most reflective points of light

and the most obvious points of dark.

The highlights are where the forms of the face,

and anything really, are being hit most directly

by the light source.

The accents are those points that are so deep

inside the shadow that there is no bounced light,

no room light, no other light able to reach them.

take a look at this value scale.

Within our human vision we have a range

from white to black.

Value is every gradient in between.

There is an infinite number of values.

In terms of major steps between values,

different systems say you can cleanly see

10, 11, 20 steps of value.

The value scale that I learned is the same number system

that is used in the Munsell System.

Zero is black.

The absence of light, no light.

10, the peak volume, is white.

By creating a set of steps,

you're beginning to train the eye to see

the nuance differences between values.

Every color of skin will reflect in different ways,

but almost every complexion will have a point

that can reflect the light source

in a way that reaches our bright value.

And as we go to the other end of the spectrum,

our shadows will exist near the bottom.

And already at this stage,

there is a feeling of a certain kind of finish.

Level nine, gradients and value.

At this point, we are really carving out structure

through the use of light and shadow.

Since we have our highlights,

in some ways we can begin to just follow the white

as it diminishes, as it gets darker and darker and darker

up into that shadow line.

Now, the point to remember is it's never going to be as dark

in the light as it is in the shadow.

So the tendency, as we look at around the highlights

is to see the much darker values.

But If we keep squinting her eyes,

we can start to see it in relation.

So it might be useful actually to begin with the halftones,

that gradient, just the softening edge

between the light and the shadow.

Now, suddenly the face is no longer

this kind of Marvel Comic

or this feeling of posterized reality.

It becomes a softer reality.

From there, now we have the tone of our halftone

and the tone of our highlight.

The rest is a journey of discovery about smaller forms.

If you discover the point on the highlight on the cheek

as it moves away,

you are finding the careful discovery of really

what is the shape of that cheek?

How does it get darker?

This is the joy of advanced drawing.

This is where we get to say,

Ah, this nose is very complex.

There is a complexity to life that unfolds

in these nuanced discoveries of value.

If we're careful and we take our time at this level,

we can create a drawing that is what most people

would consider finished.

But at this point, as you're looking in the mirror

and you're looking to your page,

there is a pretty glaring difference.

And the difference is simple.

Your face has color and the drawing does not.

Level 10, establishing a flesh tone.

Color really has to be three basic principles.

It has value, it has hue, and it has saturation.

The relative chromatic strength of that color

so that this orange is a very chromatic orange.

Orange can lean a little bit yellow.

It can lean a little bit red.

So when we begin to understand hue,

we wanna think about the rainbow.

Light contains the whole rainbow.

It contains red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,

if you love Newton, as I do, and violet.

Violet mysteriously loops back in the mind, back into red.

We have this infinite loop of color.

Theoretically, if we can just understand

that there is this scale of placement of hue,

it will help us in our observation of color.

And we saw how white gradates toward shadow.

We can see how flesh tone of our face

might lean towards red,

it might lean towards yellow,

and it might lean all the way

from a slightly reddish version of our flesh tone

into a near blue or violet version of our flesh tone.

And the reason I'm beginning on a tone page

when the pastel has a kind of loose pasteliness,

a kind of brokenness,

we don't have the effect of white of the page

always sort of bouncing through.

We just have a kind of neutral middle

that's going to allow the color to sit in a way

that feels like the color itself is the most vibrant,

not the spaces between.

Now we're looking for what we think of as

the color of our flesh.

All of us are pigmented by basically the same particles

and those particles protect us from violet and blue.

They're trying to keep ultraviolet from destroying our DNA,

but in the same mechanism,

they steal away some of the blue wavelengths.

So if we look at our color wheel and we take away blue,

we're left with yellow and red,

and that is essentially the two colors that make up

what we think of as the average of skin.

An orangy, some people are a little pinker,

some people are a little bit more yellowish,

but we are all not blue.

If we could just sort of look for where we sit

in that general idea of light and dark,

in the average, we can find what we feel

is the middle of our flesh.

And we're gonna just kind of lay that color

into the average of the light.

And we're gonna lay now the shadow tone

into the average of the shadows.

I'm not digging in too much with the pastel

because I don't, at this point,

want to make it too dense of a material

so that I can't draw on top of it.

I'm just kinda give myself color.

Level 11, color as value.

We have our average skin tone.

What we're trying to find is

where the color comes forward as more saturated,

where it gets redder and where it moves across that spectrum

into silvery, grayish greens, blues, and violets.

Light is, in some ways, predictable.

Red light is a very weak wave length,

and so if it has to travel far away

to be reflected back to the eye

through lots of pigmented flesh,

there might not be a chance for that red to make it out.

However, there is a thin amount of capillaries

and flesh right next to a bone.

That light doesn't have so far

before that bone is hard enough to help it reflect

back to the eye,

and so we wind up getting what we think of as ruddies.

Ruddies is an old term, the idea of rouge, redness.

Ruddy moments of red flesh.

And you'll find those on the edges of knuckles, elbows,

on cheekbones, the bridge of noses.

You find that often right where

there's a thin amount of flesh against bone.

If you're looking for pinkness,

the first place I'd say to look

is look for those traditional ruddy places on the face.

Blood is red,

but by the time that light moves through that vein,

it just can't make it out as red.

It comes out as the strong wavelength, which is blue.

Skin is complicated,

but if you can begin to sense where it cools,

where it leans into the blues or the neutral grayer values,

because orange and blue make a kind of gray,

and where it begins with red,

you can begin to almost notice that the face

is essentially rainbows. [chuckles]

The game of pastel really is to start

with that fleshy middle and to just now pick up

on all of the ways that color

not only gets lighter and darker,

but moves through the spectrum

and get stronger in the reds and maybe a grayer red

or a more yellowy yellow,

or maybe just a little more yellow.

If I were to suggest that there's a mistake

of observation in color,

it's mostly that the value of the color becomes too dark

in a red rather than seeing the way that a red on the cheek

needs to be a red that is light enough

to exist near the lightest point.

We often will make it a dark red so that it flattens

or distorts what we feel is the elegant form of the face.

I almost wanna say level 12, if you want it,

freedom to live, to discover life on your own terms.

These levels can really apply to any medium.

Taking these levels into an oil painting,

to explore the same ideas with just a little bit more time

and a little bit more freedom to layer

and to correct as I go.

Oil painting just gives a little bit more space to find

and discover more nuances and more subtleties

and more shifts of light and little bits of detail

that emerge with the slow reveal of the process.

I hope to let myself, as I make a picture, be wowed by life,

be wowed by new discoveries of what's just right there

moment to moment.

The be-here-nowness of painting.

And at the same time, maybe the ways that they bring up

emotions and subtle connective thoughts

that somehow I believe make their way into the picture.

Thanks, Wired.

[cheerful instrumental music]