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Summary: Proportion can be used in artwork to illustrate a realistic representation or to exaggerate certain features, as proportion can be manipulated to fit the mood and style of a drawing. Play with proportion when drawing, either from life or from the imagination, with art instructions from a professional cartoonist and illustrator in this free video on drawing.
Danny Page is a professional cartoonist and illustrator. His work has been featured in many art galleries, exhibitions and conventions across the West Coast. Page has worked steadily...read more
"In this clip, we're going to talk about how to use proportion when it comes to drawing. Whether you're trying to draw something more realistic or something completely, you know, out of this world, in the cartoon genre, keeping in mind certain types of dimension and proportion are...that is very important. Obviously, the more and more you get into the surreal and not-at-all dimensionally correct world of cartoon animation, you...you know, have the license to stretch these boundaries a little bit. But even in those circumstances when you're not drawing something that's diametrically correct, there is a...there are certain rules that apply when it comes to proportion. For instance, once you've sort of established the size of, say, a character's eyes, from there, it stands to reason that just based on the placement and size of those eyes, certain other features of the face, such as the nose, mouth, and eventually the ears and hair will have to relate to that starting point. And they all fit together proportionally that way, sort of like pieces of a puzzle. Some artists like to take more of a mathematical approach where the distance between the forefinger and the middle elbow joint is the same amount of space between the kneecap and the waist. This is, I suppose, an important thing to know if you intend to get into diametrically and anatomically correct artwork. But other than that, it's really not mathematically important, I guess, to know those exact specifications unless you're just a detail freak, in which case, I'm not exactly sure why you want to become an artist because working as an artist is more about visualization and being able to step back and look at the puzzle and see where all the pieces fit without having a ruler tell you. So you ought to know and be able to visually spot, you know, the relationship between the arms and the legs and how they both ought to proportionally be, you know, relatively comparable. That is basically the process of learning how to use proportion when it comes to drawing."
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