A self portrait in every face. Any advice?

[Kecreed]

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with sketching my human characters in that my facial features somehow end up on there. I've tried everything I could think of, from copying photos to going to figure drawing yet my face is still on there. If I'm lucky after 8 hours I can finally get the features right but otherwise my male characters look feminine and get mistaken for women as the women well...people say its me.

I know this is a silly concern and I should just brush it off as a "style" but I'm looking to improve. I don't want to give people the wrong message if I were to do a "serious" piece and people associated it with me.

[AnnaLandin]

Keep practising.

Force yourself to design characters that look different from you. If they look too feminine, pick features that are more masculine - larger noses, broader chins, bigger eyebrows, etc.

Designing characters can take a long time - as someone who suffers from partial face-blindness, I certainly struggle a lot with getting characters to look right, but I get through it by trying until I do. There is no quick fix for it; you need to build up a visual library of features that you can use when designing a character's face, and that's going to take time and practise.

[Kecreed]

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Alright thanks. I'll just keep doing that then.

[foervraengd]

It's a common thing for many artists! My best advice is to exaggerate certain features, my friend Calle is a tall and lanky guy so he draw many of his characters to be tall and lanky. But he also got a pretty small nose - but in his drawings the characters have huuuge noses. So do a 180 on certain features!

[whydocowsfall]

It's unlikely you'll ever get 100% away from this because all artists have a bit of themselves in their art bus as that above person said the best advice is to EXAGGERATE! :DD Sit down with a piece of paper and just draw a load of characters that aren't too realistic but are as different to each other as possible. Play with proportions, make some things ridiculously small and some things ridiculously large. Try copying other artist's works, particularly carnoony characters instead of copying photos. Also you can try using shaped - do one character with a triangle for a nose, another with a circle. Practice creating characters with just triangles circles and squares. Basically, just go straight back to the basic features of faces and build things up from there! Once you've got differing facial features down you can always go back to worrying about your own style or realism, but for now just try to get characters that are as unique as possible, even if you're never going to use them again! (:

[KSlinger]

Haha, I see photos of artists all the time and go 'HEY! They look just like their characters! Amazing!' My family say the same thing about me.

It's unlikely you'll ever get 100% away from this because all artists have a bit of themselves in their art

@whydocowsfall said it. You see your face every day, it's your best and closest reference, so don't worry if that carries over into your art. And, like @AnnaLandin said, practise will change it.

Try, as an exercise, taking two pictures of celebrities and doing a direct comparison. What makes Bruce Willis look like Bruce Willis? What's different between Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith? Examine the shape and direction of their eyebrows, or the length and size of their noses. Are their faces round or square? Are their eyes lidded or wide?

Or try this: Take a picture of someone distinctive, like Steve Buscemi. You must now draw him using ONLY 20 strokes of the pencil in 20 seconds or less. Repeat this until you can render him in a recognisable way using the minimal amount of effort. In time, you'll begin to recognise the basic shapes YOUR BRAIN picks up on when you glance from one person to another. You can tell the difference between two friends in two seconds flat, but why? Unlock the cooode!

[joannekwan]

Yeah, many artists experience this, hell, even Miyazaki isn't in the clear. Take away his facial hair and you'll notice there is a large distance between the base of his nose to the top of his mouth, a feature most of his characters share. The best thing you can do is as the others suggested, exaggerate first, over exaggerate, then try to bring those features down to more realistic proportions.

These two threads also contain tips you might find helpful overall.

"Same-y" characters?

Character Design Advice Corner

[SpavVy]

Just keep practicing and maybe experiment with different styles too.

[williamjbowles]

I try to give my characters specifically different facial features and body types. One character might have a little round nose, while another has a longer, pointier nose. This one is one is tall and thin, this one is short and curvy, and this one is big and stocky. Aside from making characters more unique, it forces you to draw things in different ways. It doesn't always turn out right-- and sometimes it makes my art look inconsistent, but it helps.
I'm not a pro or anything, but that's about all I can say.
I hope you figure it out. Good luck!

[Aetherwing]

Go out and draw people in public places! I had to do this ten times a day for one of my classes and it really helped a lot!

[DeadAccount]

Caricatures helped me a lot. I had a few jobs in back in the day where I had to draw celebrities, i feel like it helped me train my eye when it comes to facial proportions. That and just deliberately playing with proportions and shapes - I really like designing faces in profile, since you can get the nose, jaw and everything right without worrying about foreshortening and stuff. Though I still have a massive problem when it comes to sticking to the design and making sure it looks "on-model" in every panel.

[Kecreed]

Wow, did not expect to get this many replies. Thank you everyone for the advice. I've always had people especially artists say my characters look like me and yet they could never tell me why or how to improve so I felt stuck completely. I feel inspired to try again.