Face Study: Proportions

In revisiting portraiture I have realized that I made errors in my facial proportions. There are something I utilized that were correct such as knowing that the space between each eye is equivalent of one eye. The main thing I realized I had wrong this whole time was that foreheads are half the length of a face. It baffles me and I think its because in my minds eye a forehead takes up such a small space because hair is covering it. With faces I think it is especially difficult to separate what our minds eye thinks a face is. Which seems counterintuitive to me because we are hardwired to detect faces easily and can even spot images that appear like a face even when nothing is present. Maybe because faces are so imbedded into our minds we tend to generalize them and therefore have a hard time separating our generalizations of what a face is supposed to look like from the realities of the actual structures of the face.

Somethings to keep note:

• From the top of the head to the top of the eye should equal the distance from the bottom of the eye to the chin
• The width of the face is equal to about 5 eye lengths. Two on the sides of the face and one between the eyes. 
• The eyes sit in the middle of the face, the nose is halfway down from the eyes to the chin and the mouth rests halfway down from the nose to the chin. 

I have included the progression of my study of facial structures from skeleton to portrait. I have never worked from a skull base first like this. At first this process hurt my brain because it challenged my usual approach to faces. After a while this approach actually helped me to observe the face as separate structures and not get bogged down into what my mind's eye kept telling me incorrectly about what faces are supposed to look like. As you can see after adding the features I had to make some major structural adjustments by adding to the forehead/top of the head, adjusting the chin and widening the neck.