Kakage Tests Social Media Face-Drawing Tips and Says Learners Should Start With Glasses

INDEPENDENT — Independent artist Kakage spent a two-hour stream on Sunday testing drawing tips that circulate on social media, concluding that glasses are the best first step for learning to draw faces and that the written guides beginners skip usually explain more than they get credit for.

The stream was a segment of checks on “ira-teku,” short for illustration techniques that people bookmark and never try. Kakage asked viewers to post links to techniques they had saved under a recent post, took face drawing as the theme, and began by searching the phrase “how to draw a face” aloud. The first pick was Palmie’s beginner guide to the basics of face drawing, and Kakage sketched both its wrong example and its model example by hand.

“絵は物理なんだよ” — Kakage, on why the far-side eye looks compressed

The comparison produced the first finding. In the wrong sketch, the cross guide lines read as the center of the face, so the eyes land too high and the face comes out long; in the model, the cross marks only the center of the eyes. Kakage went on to the idea of treating the head as a box, which beginners find hard to use. Kakage held that the line where the front of the face turns to the side is the thing to find, and suggested pressing a palm against one’s own face to locate it. Glasses, Kakage argued, show that front-to-side turn so plainly that they are a beginner’s item, and drawing them should come before drawing faces.

Later segments covered why the eye on the far side of a turned face appears smaller. Kakage drew the same box straight on and then angled, to show that the half farther from the viewer shrinks, and said the lesson was to learn where features sit before worrying about their shapes. Along the way Kakage also covered the layered structure of the eye and where lower lashes sit.

A turning point came when Kakage reread the model and found the red lines were labeled as guide lines for the head’s form all along. Kakage said the guide was not at fault, but that readers had not read it, and the chat piled on with apologies. A second guide, on drawing mouths, followed: Kakage went through how the lower jaw moves while the upper one does not, and a three-step method for a smile.

Chat responded warmly to the lessons, and the stream drew Super Chats. At the two-hour mark Kakage stopped, saying a longer session would be too much, and said the series would return sometime the following week with mouths as the next theme.