How to Draw the Nose

In this tutorial I will go over the structure of the nose and give detailed information about the bridge, ball, and nostrils of the nose. At the end, I will show a step by step of a nose drawing.
The Major Planes

When drawing the nose, I’ll usually start by indicating the 4 major planes - top, 2 sides, and bottom. Getting the angles of these planes correct is important to show the proper perspective of the nose in relationship to the rest of the head. Keeping it this simple in the beginning helps to ignore the details and focus only on the width to height relationship of the entire shape of the nose and to compare it to the rest of the features. Once the big shapes and the perspective are solved, it’s much easier to add the details on top.

Anatomical Information

I think the anatomical shapes in the nose are really interesting. It’s made up of interlocking pieces of cartilage and fat attached to the bone of the skull. Half of the bridge of the nose is bone and the other half is cartilage. The lateral cartilage on the bridge wedges between the two pieces that make up the ball of the nose. The nostrils connect to the ball like curled wings.

Bridge

The bridge of the nose is composed of the nasal bone, maxilla, and lateral cartilage. The nasal bone connects to the brow ridge at the glabella. The edge of the nasal bone and lateral cartilage has a thin, sharp ridge as it transitions to the side plane and then connects to the maxilla. The maxilla is usually slightly convex and gently transitions to the cheeks.

Ball

The ball of the nose (Greater Alar Cartilage) is actually made up of two halves with the lateral cartilage wedging between the two. This separation of the two halves is not always visible. The cartilage curves downward and tucks under itself to connect to the skull.

Nostrils

The nostrils (Alar Fat), made of fatty connective tissue are like wings attached to the ball of the nose. Viewed from the bottom, the nostrils connect to the face further back then the septum because of the protrusion of the tooth cylinder.

The Minor Planes

It’s important to memorize the subtle plane changes in all the different part of the nose. These subtle plane changes are usually seen as halftone shapes which to the untrained eye appear to be random. Once familiar with the minor planes, you can easily figure out what each halftone shape represents and how to design it in your drawing.

Minor Planes of the Bridge

The Glabella is shaped like a keystone. This keystone shape is slanted downward and will usually have some halftone on it connecting the eye sockets together. Immediately after the glabella, the nasal bone turns upward and then back down after the connection to the lateral cartilage. This area of connection between the nasal bone and lateral cartilage tends to be the widest part of the bridge and also creates a subtle ‘bump’ seen from the side.
Minor Planes of the Ball

The ball of the nose isn’t perfectly round, but has very distinct plane changes. It has a top, front, and bottom plane as the septum curls under itself and connects to the skull. The side plane acts as a step down to the nostril. The shape of the greater alar cartilage varies drastically from person to person. It can be soft, chiseled, large and bulbous, thin and pointy etc…
Minor planes of the Nostrils

The nostrils, also called wings, curl under themselves similar to the septum. The nostrils are not paper thin, so an indication of the front planes is crucial to give them some thickness. Don’t forget to show the curve by separating the top and side planes, usually with a gradation of tone.

The hole of the nostrils often appears as a sideways comma shape with a sharp edge at the top, and softer edge at the bottom.

Drawing the Nose

The reference photo

1. I start drawing the nose the same way I start drawing anything: analyze the biggest shape first. Make sure the placement on the face is correct and that the size and shape is working in relation to the other features. What’s the point in drawing any details if the underlying drawing is crooked, too big, and in the wrong place?

2. When I’m happy with the big shape I’ve established, I will lay-in some of the smaller plane indications and some anatomical information. All my lines at this point are very light, so that I’m able to easily erase them when making adjustments.

3. When beginning to shade, the first thing I do is separate the lights from the shadows. Stay simple and don’t lose control of your values.

4. At this final stage I’ll use a lot of the information we learned about the minor planes of the nose to shade in subtle halftone shifts in the light areas and reflected lights in the shadows. I try to visualize the interlocking anatomical shapes and make sure all the volumes look accurate:

Meet Aki Ra

"I poke my stick in the ground till I find a mine.
Then I dig around it, to make sure that it is not booby-trapped.
Then, I unscrew the detonator. And the mine is safe."


Aki Ra is a Cambodian guy who goes out into the jungle and disarms landmines with a pocketknife and a really sharp stick. While I feel relatively confident that I can probably just post that sentence by itself along with a picture of this crazy bastard unscrewing a densely-packed bomb of unexploded TNT with his bare hands and a seemingly-endless supply of raw bravery, over the years you guys have come to expect a minimum word count out of me on these sorts of articles, so perhaps a little further explanation is going to be required.

Back in the dark days of the 1970s, when the hypnotic horrors of disco music held much of the world in its terrible, unbreakable death-grip, the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia was taken over by a group of soulless assburgers known as the Khmer Rouge. These epic totalitarian douchebubbles were totally evil mega bastard-machines hellbent on exterminating pretty much everybody in the country who didn't have a hearty appreciation for mega bastard-machines, and/or who owned either a pair of glasses, a book, or the capability and willingness to construct and vocalize at least one independent thought. These guys flipped out like crazy hard, and in under a decade they successfully managed to kill something on the order of two million of their own citizens for basically no reason at all. This is a significant number no matter what you're talking about, but it carries a little extra gut-punching weight when you realize that there were only like 7 million people living in Cambodia at the time that the Khmer Rouge started these Hitleriffic purges. You probably don't need Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys to tell you that living under Pol Pot's regime wasn't exactly most peoples' idea of a nice relaxing vacation.

Aki Ra's parents were part of the unlucky 28.5% of the population that ended up being brutally murdered with pickaxes (Pol Pot was a strong believer in the doctrine that axe-murdering your own citizens was a much more cost-effective method of executing your enemies, as it allowed him to save money on bullets), and Aki was conscripted as a child soldier in the Khmer Rouge army at the age of five. He was raised in a militaristic jungle training camp, and as soon as he was strong enough to hold a landmine he was put to work setting booby traps along the entire length of the Cambodia-Thailand border. He served the Khmer Army for nearly ten years, working on this massive mine-laying project while dudes jammed AK-47s in his back and ordered him around - a daily regimen that kind of bit a bag of asses. As you can probably imagine, however, it's a little difficult for someone like the Khmer Rouge to run a country when they spent all of their time oppressing their soldiers and executing every literate member of their own citizenry, so eventually in the 1980s Ho Chi Minh just came across the border and conquered Cambodia for Vietnam. Aki Ra was once again conscripted into service, this time in the Vietnamese Army, where he served for another decade. The Vietnamese eventually decided the situation was hopeless and got the hell out of there in 1989, and this time poor Aki went BACK to Cambodia's military.

Putting in twenty-plus years of service as a mine-laying peon in three different conscript armies by the time you're thirty wasn't really as awesome as you might think, however, and by the time the United Nations rolled into Cambodia in 1994 Aki Ra was getting pretty tired of blowing people up and turning his own countryside into one massive cascading explosion. So, when the UN decided to start giving people training in how to safely and effectively remove land mines, Aki Ra jumped at the chance to atone for his previous work and start undoing everything he'd been working on for the past two decades. He accomplished this in a pretty damned spectacular manner:

Just another day on the job,
which seems to involve whacking land mines with a pipe wrench.


The UN trained Aki in the proper application of protective bomb-proof armor, mine detector operation, and sweep-and-clear removal processes for dealing with dense fields of high explosives, but when those guys left town, Aki realized he didn't have very much in the way of money or equipment. Still, this unstoppable powerhouse of mine-clearing insanity wasn't going to be deterred from accomplishing his newfound goal in life simply by something as stupid as "not having access to the sort of minesweeping gear you need in order to not die while removing mines", and just decided to go out and start digging anti-personnel grenades out of the ground with a shovel and jamming sticks in them until they stopped being capable of blowing his arm completely out of socket and depositing the charred appendage in the South China Sea.

The head-smashing ridiculousness of what this guy is doing is only further demonstrated by the fact that this human bomb-clearing robot can dig out, clear, and defuse a standard land mine in about two minutes – a process that usually takes the United Nations bomb teams something more on the order of one to two hours. This guy busts through entire minefields with the same nonchalant attitude that he would have while raking a lawn, plucking mines out without thinking about it and somehow spotting the buried explosives just by glancing down at the ground through a thick underbrush of green jungle crap. If it helps, you can think of Aki Ra as like the guy who comes over to your house once, boots up Minesweeper on your desktop, breaks all of your scores on the first try, and then leaves and you spend the rest of your natural life trying to beat his times until such point that you finally give up and manage to preserve your tenuous grip on your sanity only by ferociously ragequitting and clicking the "Reset Scores" button so hard that it snaps a button off of your mouse. It's like that, except instead of clicking flags and smiley faces, this guy is actually clearing out real-life minefields with little more than his bare hands and what I can only presume is a planet-sized ballsack.

"I will do anything to make my country safe. Sometimes I get nervous, but that is rare.
In 20 years I've never been injured."


From 1994 to 2007, Aki Ra grabbed a shovel, a stick, and a knife and personally went out into the jungles of the densely-populated Siam Reap region of Cambodia to remove Soviet, Chinese, and Vietnamese-constructed land mines. He almost single-handedly cleared out all the explosives surrounding Cambodia's primary tourist attraction – the incredible Temples at Angkor Wat – before turning his attention to local playgrounds and farmlands that had been off-limits for decades. For this guy to do this shizzle without wearing any kind of protective gear (he usually just went out in a pair of sandals and a button-down shirt) is so mind-flayingly insane that I kind of want to vomit a little. Thanks in no small part to the work of this one man, the number of accidental landmine casualties in Cambodia dropped from 3,047 to 1,109 in the three-year span from 1996 to 1999.

Eventually Aki Ra had removed so many landmines that his house was overflowing with the shit, so in 1998 he opened the Cambodian Landmine Museum as a place to displace the unexploded ordinance and educate people on how much landmines seriously suck balls. The place is now a registered NGO, and Aki spends less time personally removing mines and more time training everyone from local villagers to Cambodian Army soldiers in his insane, completely-unlicensed and largely-unapproved-by-any-rational-human-being strategy of digging up and disarming mines with his fists. He now has a team of over 1,000 people working in de-mining operations across the country, and claims that in the 16 years he has been on the job he's personally removed and cleared over 50,000 mines by himself.

A small selection of the mines in Aki's Cambodian Landmine Museum.


When he's not running a successful non-governmental organization, curating the museum, or flexing his pulsating iron ballsack, Aki Ra also takes in homeless, (often-times drug-addicted) local kids who have had appendages blown off by land mines and provides them with adequate food, shelter, and education. Aki provides for his twenty-plus "children" by going out into the jungles and hunting wild boars with a crossbow. I wish I was making this shit up.

Aki Ra is a real hero of Cambodia and a true badass - not because of his service rocking faces on a military level, as so many others on this website demonstrate – but because he has dedicated his life to single-handedly neutralizing Cambodia's once-crippling landmine problem. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he seems to have found the most badass way of accomplishing the feat, either.

"There are still over one million landmines in Cambodia. At the rate they are going now, it will take 50-100 years to finish.
If they give me a license then I could teach villagers to de-mine the way I do. It is fast, easy, and cheap.
I believe we could have the whole country de-mined in 3-5 years."

Archiquarium. A Modern Swedish Fish Tank By Karl-Oskar Ankarberg.

At the Home Fair Exhibition earlier this month in Stockholm, the Swedish Aquarium Leasing (Akvarie leasing) company debuted something very unique - a spectacular modern aquarium, designed by Karl-Oskar Ankarberg, known for his collaborations with Orrefors glassworks.

The new aquarium named Archiquarium is something really special for both aquarium and design enthusiasts. The spectacular aquariums are reminiscent of ultra-modern architecture, rather than traditional aquariums. The clean rectangular shapes and surfaces are hallmarks of modern Scandinavian design.


above: the frame is made of solid sawn wood, aquarium glass and Corian®.

Archiquarium is the work of increasingly high-profile designer Karl-Oskar Ankarberg. When the sketches were presented to the Aquarium Leasing AB, they quickly decided to go ahead and produce a prototype - which was presented to external design agencies in Karl-Oskar's booth No. AO4: 53 on the Home Fair, 7-10 October.







Aquarium Leasing AB leases and operates aquariums in over 2000 workplaces in industry and public sectors so that people can enjoy the serene spectacle that is the aquarium's signature. The company is based in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmo and Copenhagen.

13 Coolest Airplane Paint Jobs

Aviation geeks know Japan as the home of aircraft--like the one above--painted with Pokémon, a distinct Japanese cultural creation.






In 1997 British Airways adopted a new livery. One part of this was a newly stylized version of the British Airways "Speedbird" logo, but the major change was the introduction of tail-fin art. Also known as the Utopia or world image tailfins, they used art and designs from international artists and other sources to represent countries on BA's route network. The signature of the artist was carried near the design on the tail.

The new corporate logo was created by the London-based design agency Newell and Sorrell, who also oversaw the implementation of the tailfin designs.







Air India Express Boeing 737-800.






African Airlines have always had a simple professional and elegant look but South African designers changed that with some really revolutionary livery like the Mango Airline.

Frontier Airlines, an airline based out of Denver, Colorado, have the company slogan “A Whole Different Animal,” each of their planes depicts a different animal.






Alaska Airlines 737-400 Combi Aircraft in Barrow, Alaska.






This plane is from GermanWings. It was photographed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.






When Southwest Airlines wanted to represent California on an airplane, it painted a big bear. But how do you represent the state of Illinois?
Well, they didn't paint a picture of a reclining Abraham Lincoln, which was my first thought. They instead painted an eagle with a shield.







Disney characters on a themed Alaska Airlines jet called “Spirit of Disneyland II.” The plane is adorned with the faces of Disney's most recognized characters – Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto.






The Simpsons Jet, Western Pacific Air.






Taiwanese airline EVA has repainted one of its jets with giant Hello Kittys. Surprisingly, the plane's interior is much worse.






Southwest Airlines unveiled the newest addition to their fleet of aircraft: a Boeing 737 with a gigantic painting of swimsuit model Bar Rafaeli.






This is a great new infographic paint job on a Kulula Airlines (a South Africa airline) Boeing 737, informative and humorous. With labels detailing many of the plane's features, this looks like a a training plane.

Vac From The Sea. Electrolux Turns Marine Debris Into 5 Vacuums.

Vac from the Sea is a project initiated by home appliance maker Electrolux, aiming at raising awareness about the immediate need for the world to take better care of plastics and support the heroes that do.



From Electrolux:
The environment is a concern and responsibility of everyone and marine plastic pollution is an issue much too big to just leave to politicians. Electrolux is in the homes of millions and can help raise awareness and affect many consumers. Plastic is the main raw material when making a vacuum cleaner. From a sustainable business point of view, Electrolux relies on an increased global supply of recycled plastic.

A limited number of vacuum cleaners will be made from marine plastic debris – harvested from the Pacific and other sites where the plastic problem is immense.

Below is the "green" Ultraone vacuum by Electrolux followed by 5 of the vacuums produced with the debris garnered from the aquatic environments (individual images below courtesy of inhabitat)





Depending on the local plastic situation the gathering of plastics will vary – from diving among coral reefs, clean-ups closer to shore to scooping up plastic directly from the water surface. The vacuum cleaners that are to be produced from the material gathered will be put on display for the world, decision makers and consumers to see.



At this point, there is no plan to actually sell the units produced. Separating the plastic cocktail is a great challenge and plastics in the ocean tend to act like sponges for other toxins.


The locations where plastic will be collected are in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.

The gathering of material will be documented on their site.

www.facebook.com/electroluxappliances
www.twitter.com/vacfromthesea

Frameworks Posters By Moxy Creative Celebrate Famous Eyeglass Frames.

Framegeek.com, a blog about Men's eyewear, sunglasses and glasses, has just issued a series of posters celebrating 'Eyewear Made Famous' by Moxy Creative.

The collection consists of six different aesthetically pleasing graphic art posters. Five of the posters each feature one iconic outline of recognizable eyewear frames on the subdued colored silhouettes of Andy Warhol, Johnny Depp, Mahatma Ghandi, Kanye West, and Yves Saint Laurent respectively. The sixth poster is a compilation of iconic white frames with call-outs beneath each of the face to whom the glasses belong.

The Warhol's:

The Depp's:

The Ghandi's:

The Ye's:

The YSL's:

The Frameworks poster:


01. Woody Allen 02. Kanye West 03. Buddy Holly 04. Michael Caine 05. Kurt Cobain 06. John Lennon 07. Geordi LaForge 08. Malcolm X 09. Johnny Depp 10. Dame Edna 11.Stephen Colbert 12. The Blues Brothers 13. Austin Powers 14. Yves Saint Laurent 15. Elton John 16. George Costanza 17. Bootsy Collins 18. Elvis Costello 19. Terry Richardson 20. David Hockney 21. DMC of Run DMC 22. Andy Warhol 23. Mohandas Ghandi 24. Steve Urkel 25. Napoleon Dynamite 26. Clark Kent 27. Shock G of Digital Underground 28. Truman Capote


Each of the six 11.75" x 15.5" prints costs $30 and is limited to a run of 50.
Buy them here.