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“spa-ghetti”

I've always loved drawing people and especially portraits. Your art is so inspiring! Do you have any advice on drawing portraits with accurate proportion? What aspects are the most important in portraits, do you think? And what are good exercises? I'm sorry for bombarding you with so many questions! :3

Thank you! There’s one thing about drawing portraits that I don’t think I’ve ever touched on, and it’s the technique of constraining features.  Basically, it becomes easier and more intuitive to rotate the face in 3D space once your mind grasps exactly where the features are located and, furthermore, where they can’t be located.  

I use a weird double trapezoid shape that I’ve depicted below in red to keep track of facial feature placement every single time I draw a face.  It follows the top of the eyebrows, touches the corner of the eye, traces down to the corner of the lips, and finally ends at the bottom of the lips.  

The shape of the constraint will change depending on the person’s features, and it works for every angle of the head.  For me it really internalized where each part of the face was, as well as where it started and ended. It kinda helps moderate your drawings; i.e., you’ll stop drawing features that are wildly misplaced or off-sized.  I don’t literally draw this shape out every time I draw a face, but I see it in my mind’s eye 100% of the time.

If you’re still learning proportions, a good exercise is to grab pictures of people and trace this shape over them (either digitally or with a marker or something) to get an idea of what realistic constraints looks like.  Then go back to studying faces, and constantly check your drawing by tracing along the eyebrows and down to the bottom of the lips to make sure that things aren’t off (e.g., the constraint isn’t terribly asymmetric).  It takes a while to get used to, but it might help you get a good feel for portraiture.  

There’s one other unrelated thing I like to do with faces, and if you’ve seen a lot of my pics you’ve already picked up on it.  If you kinda add some shading to the area on the cheek just below the eye and down to the nose, I think it adds a decent amount of depth to a face.  Don’t go overboard of course but there’s another little tip that could be of use.

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Vivec is so dear to me as a character and looking at your art of them makes me so emotional :') Your work is always delightful to look at, thank you for sharing it

AGHHH that's so sweet ;-; !! thank you!!!! here's a happy vivec swooning over your kind words 💛💙

“(Warning! Long post! Also, Trigger Warning for discussions of rape, violence, gender, and sexuality!) Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian goddess of love, war, and sex is a complex figure. She evolved from the goddess Inanna in the earliest civilization in the world; ancient Sumer. (Modern day Iraq.) Her figure is at least 5,000 years old and her worship enjoyed popularity throughout all ages of Mesopotamia. (Unlike many other goddesses whose popularity waxed and waned.) She had many aspects, that added to her character over the ages. It was because of this some scholars theorize that Ishtar may have originally been a combination of several local goddess, which explains the complexity of her character.

While the mainstream academic view is that of Ishtar being a spoiled “brat”, trying to get what she wants, and that of a capricious teenager in mythology, this view ignores what could be garnered from modern  feminist interpretations. Looking at it from an ancient perspective, Ishtar is an independent woman in patriarchal societies that frowned upon that sort of thing. 

In a modern perspective, Ishtar stood up for herself when she was raped, back in time when rape wasn’t always a big deal,  owned her own sexuality, was independent of men, and remained an important figure of fertility in nature.It was because Mesopotamians didn’t like demonizing and oppressing their goddesses too much, even if they went out of the gender norm, that the wild aspect of Ishtar’s lust (Killili) and violence seem to have contributed to the myth of Lilith, a more popular feminist figure of the modern age. Lilith (Babylonian Lilitu) became then, and subsequently in cultures who inherited the myth (Israelites),  a woman that was used towarn other women about the dangers of being independent woman in a society where women were owned by the males of their respective families. (In fact the Babylonian word for “prostitute” and “independent woman”, both of which Ishtar and Lilith typically identify, are similar for such reasons because both ideals are looked down upon in their respective societies.)

This essay will explore Ishtar’s character and myths in the ancient world, while offering a modern feminist interpretation of such mythology. She can be used a modern symbol of female empowerment, much in the same way her maiden Lilith is used by feminists. (The main reason why Ishtar is not viewed in the same lense of Lilith, is because Lilith enjoyed being interpreted by Romantic artists of the Victorian period and evolved into a symbol of modern Jewish feminism. Whereas, Ishtar became hopelessly lost in the veils of time, mostly.)”

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