Age progression drawing skin#
The thinning of skin and tissue reveals forms unknown on younger people. If you like to explore faces, old people can make much more interesting subjects than the young. We’ll discuss these changes in the next and final section.
From this point we enter a long, slow process of decline which becomes noticeable by middle age. The body reaches maturity at around 18-21. Human diversity, such as in height, strength of build, and so on, becomes more and more apparent as individuals reach their fully-developed, adult condition. With different body parts growing at various rates, coupled with their uncertainties of self, teenagers can come across as gangly and awkward. This is why facial proportions are important to capturing a child’s age accurately. It is as if the lower features, and indeed the rest of the body, play catch-up with the cranium. By the time we hit our teens, our eyes are on the halfway level like an adult’s. The eye level shifts upwards in the head, while the nose and jaw get longer. The jawline and chin are receding and under-developed.Īs the child gets older, the bottom part of the face, from the eyes down, grows downwards and outwards in proportion to the cranium. The brow ridge and cheekbones barely show and the eyebrows are light and delicate. The nose is more turned up with a rounded bridge. The relative sizes of the nose, mouth and chin are much the same, but they are closer together. The face only occupies about a quarter of the head.
Age progression drawing full#
The eyes are already about 75% of their full size, but with smaller eye slits and in a smaller head – giving the baby its big-eyed cuteness – and they seem slightly wider apart. Whereas an adult’s eye level is about halfway down the head, a baby’s eye level is below the half-way mark. The diagram below maps out the facial proportions at up to 1 year old:Ī baby’s cranium is larger in proportion to the face, giving it the characteristic big forehead. They aren’t just smaller adults – their proportions are different, and getting those right is to crucial to drawing younger age groups accurately. There is effectively no difference between boys and girls at this age.Ī baby may seem challenging to draw, but you’re mostly only dealing with a different set of proportions. Children in particular can develop at very different rates, though most average out by adulthood.Ī baby’s skull needs plasticity to get through the birth canal and adjust to the rapidly growing brain, so it is composed of several parts that take a few years to fuse together into a single piece. There is no substitute for the careful observation of real individuals. We’ll confine ourselves to the head and, as always, the notes here are rules of thumb. and vice versa.įor convenience we will condense the long process of incremental changes into a few key stages. An old person will wear expressions you will not see on a toddler. Conveying someone’s age convincingly is also about psychological changes. A person in a very poor country who has been over-worked in the sun since childhood will likely ‘age’ more quickly than a scion of the privileged classes who’s never worked in his or her life, especially if the latter favours plastic surgery. We age in different ways, and the process is affected by many things, including genetics, working life, ethnicity, health, income and so on. What makes a face look fourteen years old rather than eighteen? Or twenty years old rather than thirty-six? To get these distinctions right, artists need to study how time affects our bodies.Īgeing isn’t simply about how many years we have been alive. As a human being progresses from newborn baby to old age, their appearance changes enormously, and it can be difficult to get a person’s age just right.