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Feb 2023

I think it depends on what style you are doing

There are series that avoid front views because it looks uncanny.

In some works, the nose will sort of "disappear" and all you see is a shadow.


Other works will depict the nose always appears as a 3/4. It avoids the uncanny looks of the Simpsons's nose however it creates a more cartoony/stylized look.

Then there are some work where the nose is sort of a mix between the two. The nose doesn't disappear but turns into a U shape. I wish I could find a better example of this.

Some anime will just put a line down the middle of the face. Sort of similar to the 3/4 nose but you would only see it when looking from the front


The shape of the shadow needs to be consistent with the form of the face and the direction of light.
Lightsource always ends up winning in the end

To be fair... it does work the same way for men, with the more detail added to the face, the older they'll look. It's just more acceptable for a male character to look older and still be considered an attractive and viable partner due to mysogynistic views prevalent in society that often lead to Hollywood movies where a 50-something male progagonist has a 25 year old female love interest rather than somebody his own age... :sip:

Nice comment but yes.

Also I don’t see how the rule is “keep it simple or she’ll look old” because why is drawing the woman as older inherently a mistake? What if it’s my own intention?

And a man with wrinkles isn’t younger looking than a woman with wrinkles, people are just more accepting of older men.

Unsure how it was a rant, or how it was incorrect?

Adding more detail to a female character's nose does make her look older. Adding more detail to a male character's nose also makes him look older.

Generally guides on drawing comics, like say the classic, "How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way" by Stan Lee will tell artists that if they want a female character to look attractive, you should give them a smaller, less defined nose.

...Which is a characteristic that makes them look younger. Yes, on average, cis women might have slightly smaller noses, and a lighter facial structure than cis men... but our noses and ears do still grow over time, just as men's do. Women with small, and not strongly defined noses are considered attractive for the same reason as blonde women, women with wide eyes, women with full lips and without wrinkles, women with perky boobs... it looks youthful. It's more acceptable for a male face to be a bit older-looking and craggier in the media, as evidenced by...well... Hollywood casting and also how we draw comic characters.

Hollywood actresses playing love interest characters are, on average, and we have pretty clear, concrete statistics for this, considerably younger than the leading man in any given production, to the extent it's not unheard of for women to play the mother of a man who is actually around their own age or sometimes older than them.

There are a lot of socioeconomic reasons for this. It's historically been more acceptable for an older man to marry a younger woman, for example, because men have a wider window for fertility and more opportunity to have things other than fertility going for them (like money and power)... It's a whole mess, but the upshot is this idea that youth is a much more important asset for a woman in terms of being attractive than it has historically been for a man. Of course, there's now evolution of that (not necessarily all for the better) and we see a lot of men getting treatment to prevent hair loss, or loss or virility, or even getting botox and plastic surgery.

But at the end of the day, my point is... older women have big ol' noses just like older men and older enbies. We all end up with a bigger nose than we started with (except the book version of Tyrion Lannister, I guess...) and some of us even start out with a big nose to begin with, and it's a shame that people can't just appreciate the beauty in that.

It depends on which angle you want to draw and like @NickRowler mentioned which style you want
to draw. The Simpsons characters don´t look up or down, they usually have the heads in the same
angle. The character that you drew on top has the head in an angle facing down which is a more
complicated thing to draw than a straight on view. This can get very complicated very fast and
it depends on how much time you want to spend to learn this. A lot of people learn the Loomis
or Riley method to draw the head and to understand how to draw them in angles and then simplify
it to match to the style they want to draw.

This is the structure that I try to imagine / or sketch when drawing the nose. You have to put that
structure in the angle you want to draw. This is from a straight on view

1 month later

closed Mar 26, '23

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