Looks Matter
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Aviator Irelia - League of Legends |
The unfortunate (or fortunate) side effect of being an
artist is that the entire profession predicates around how the surface looks.
However, what works and what doesn’t is entirely based on who you’re showing
your art to.
Let’s have a discussion on proportions then!
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Little Witch Academia |
A training artist might have been exposed to the idea of “ideal”
proportions for the human body. Since I’ve already established what might be
ideal depends on who you ask, why is it that all artists learn this? I urge
people to not be offended by the idea of “ideal”. There’s a great reason why it’s
set at what they are even if there are slight deviations from each source.
People might be familiar with the idea of the “Golden Ratio”
or the 3.14. It’s a ratio that is somehow universally appealing to everyone.
Nature has an incredible way of putting this ratio through every facet of life.
While it’s a hard ask for every single person in the world to be perfectly “3.14”
(you might want to consider going to Hollywood as a career if you are), ideal
proportions are simply a hypothetical situation if all a human being consists
of is the golden ratio.
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Leonardo Da Vinci |
The ideal proportions are as if you were to construct a
human being with math, without any subjective input. Given nature tends to work
in golden ratios, you simply cannot fail to create something that looks “human”
if you follow the ideal proportions, hence why it is “ideal”. In actuality, all
of us humans will have deviations from what this construction is, some more
than others.
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Titian |
This isn’t something based upon one person’s opinion on what
looks nice; it’s through hundreds (if not thousands) of years of study from
people much smarter than I am!
It doesn’t mean someone can’t be beautiful or handsome if
they were off of golden ratio. In fact, you risk making a figure look robotic
if you followed it number by number. I would be hard-pressed to find anybody
who would find that their most attractive ideal would be a mathematically
perfect figure.
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Overwatch |
Ideal proportions are objectively neutral by default; good
designs will always have parts accentuated by building off of what’s ideal. In
other words, ideal proportions are great to learn off of but not something you
want to follow if you want to push your style. The most realistic painters and
sculptors choose to accentuate certain areas they wish to, even if it’s subtle.
Since we’re artists, we’re not here to create boring messages. We’re looking to
create something better than reality. We want to show the world what we prefer. The deviations are what creates interest
in your work, not following the rules word by word.
I’m not going to say how you could do this. Every style is
different, and you might have a clue of what works and what doesn’t based on
what you need to portray. I’ll leave it off with me urging others to study why
and where artists choose to deviate from the ideal.
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