Original subtitles

Let's now take a look at the fundamental form of the ears, and then look at a very quick shorthand way

of drawing ears. The great thing about the ears in terms of the detail elements, is that they're actually

pretty straightforward to draw.

And you can learn it off by heart,

the basic, kind of, structure.

So the first form we want to learn is really just there's a very squished cylinder, right.

So it kind of looks maybe like a speaker or something and kind of showing us a little bit of a side

view there.

Here's a plane, here's a plane and we can see through, in the drawn through section here, the side plane and

this area here, is where it would attach to the head.

So this is of course the basic form, right, it's not really that anatomically informed. It's just to give us that

kind of, volume that we want to get. And what we want to do, is kind of shave away a section of the form,

so we're going to, kind of, cut a cross section through here, something like this.

We're going to cut that piece off, right.

You can imagine slicing through it, and it's going to give us a form more like this, in structure.

Right.

So this is curving, that's drawing through.

That's the back plane there.

We've cut a section off of that shape, so that we get something that, kind of, protrudes a little bit

in its basic forms.

And let's just adjust this and straighten it a little bit

here.

And it gives us more of that overall shape.

Right.

Which is looking a little bit more like an ear.

But we want to get that structural form going in there.

And before we look at anything further in detail, there's some important things to realize about the

ears, and that, the ears don't really fly off the side of the head in this kind of fashion.

You know, this is kind of something you may typically see. They don't really fly off in that kind of fashion

per se, although you do get people whose ears do stick out quite a lot.

What I mean is, it's not just a matter of this thin flap, you know, if we were to draw this exact thing

in a side view, you know, it's not a matter of this, kind of, thin form just, kind of, winging out over

here like that. What we want to keep in mind when we're thinking about the ear, is definitely this form

because when the ears come out of the side of the skull, or out of the side of the head should I say, they're

kind of like a speaker or a horn, in the sense, that there's skin you don't really see, at the back, then the

opening area, and what we tend to see, is the front section, that swings around.

Like that, right, swings around that, and then the ear connects down here. And as we know, you know, elements go

inside the ear and so forth, so on and so forth.

But we want to remember that there is really this form, and this structure, coming out of the head, just

very much like this basic form shape here.

And then we have the ear shape coming out of that and on top of it creating a rim, if you wish.

Alright. So that really is the basic the basic, basic forms.

Right. Now when we look at the shape, the shape of the ear, you know, typically speaking, you have this type of shape

happening for the ear. And it will vary.

You can get ears that are, kind of, have less curvature in them.

And people who have ear lobes that connect, as I colloquially call them "connecties". There ear lobes kind

of connect down, they don't swing very much, just genetic differences and genetic differences between

people who have more rounded ear lobes, and people have connected top of ear lobes.

All right, but what I want to actually show you, apart from that basic form structure, is how to easily

learn the interior lines of the ear, and to get yourself into a mode where you can just kind of grasp it

very quickly and very easily.

A friend of mine had taught this method to me, and it's, it's almost too easy, and you think "Well this

can't be the professional way to do it!".

Well I'll admit that I've been drawing ears like this for years.

And really it is, that you learn this very flat 2D, kind of, pattern off by heart.

So first you have this ear shape, very much like that, and then you draw in another arc here.

Very much like that.

Right.

Let's in fact do this in different colors, right.

We do,

Step 1 will be this.

This is very much a "how to draw book" type of way of teaching this, but it's just really effective.

Step 2 you do that arc and let's put that to over here.

And you'll see why now.

And then step three, we put in a line there, and we bring this line down, and this is quite important.

Where we want to create, effectively, a type of bottle shape here, like a bottle, then curls in and around, like that. OK

I've drawn that a little bit too far out.

Let's just keep it in a little bit, have the bottle shape, come down here, in around

like that. Let's say that's step three. Step four, we can pull another line down here, sometimes, depending on

the view you might pull it from under here and have that overlap giving that sense of form.

Step 4.

And then step five, you can, let's do this in like a purple.

You can then indicate these two lines. And in a nutshell, at least you know for general use purposes, unless

you're going crazy in doing ear portraiture, or something you know, pictures of just ears, where you really

want that anatomical depth.

Generally speaking, this will get you as far as you really ever need to be when drawing ears, because when

you start shading these zones, and of course when you're doing advanced anatomy studies, you start understanding

just how brilliant this simplistic model of drawing the ear really is, just learning these parts in these

steps.

And so I definitely advise re watching this particular video, so that you grasp these individual steps,

and just draw this basic, flat, 2D model. Because essentially what you will do is, when you're drawing

ears, and let's get an ear going over here, let's draw an ear, using the same, very same theory, but we're just going to do it

on a, kind of, a three quarter view.

here.

Let me get a head in.

Right.

Let's draw an ear in three quarter view.

I will place it there. You can see that I immediately tilt the ear out a little bit, and that's because

of that cone shape, that's sort of, what am I saying, cone shape! It's speaker shape, that we kind of shave

the section off so it tilts at an angle.

And we also want to remember that, what we learned in the side view of the head, in terms of proportions, that the ear

doesn't sit straight up like this against the head.

Right.

That would be it's like, sort of, vertical axis. No it tilts slightly to the to the back.

Something important to remember, right, it tilts slightly to the back, and so I'll kind of, just put in an ellipse.

I usually imagine this section, because it's usually covered, and then I go in and draw in that ear shape.

I'll just rough it in here, and doing all those exact steps. OK that one in, that line in, and pull that

down into a bottle type of shape, curl it around, bring in this other line, and put in one line there, another

one there, and that's pretty much it.

Right.

And usually this section is actually a little bit more narrower, this bottle section or at least in terms

of the scale of the ear.

But that's pretty much how I would rough it out.

Just bring it up a little bit more give it a bit more ear lobe.

And again you can easily use this same theory if you want to do different styles of ears.

For example, if we want to do an elf ear, all we do is we take the same theory. Let's draw an elf ear over

here.

You start with the normal ear shape.

But I'm just going to make it pointier.

This is more of a Lord of the Rings tough of elf ear, and I keep the exact same theories, I just, instead

of now putting the line as an arc,

I'm going to make, put it straight and pull it down here, same interior ear structure, I really just kind of

folds down into this bottle shape, turns around goes into a loop, here by the ear hole, and add that extra

line there, pull in this line here, and indicate that line there, and boom there's your elf ear.

Right.

Just for example purposes.

Let me just draw a normal 3D ear.

One more time.

So if this is our head over here, it's the side of our head, and we want to draw the ear in, you get that ear shape in

remembering that we've got that drawn through, kind of, speaker shape happening there, that form coming through.

Get the basic ear shape in, put in this curved line, now at a three quarter angle, it wouldn't be directly

straight like this, or directly arced like that.

It's going to kind of curve around.

And then there's going to be some kind of overlap and you can see how the overlap shows the form of

the back, round section of the ear, right, of the back rim in a sense, and draw in this line,

this one, and once again, pull it down into that bottle shape, get that little interior little flap going, and

put it in the line there,

put in the line there, and we're done.

Right.

Basics of the ear are in.

And it was really just a matter of learning this off by heart.

All right.

So that is it for the ear.

Let's move on.