Geddit? A-Head?

After several months of inactivity, Ryuu finally posted a couple new pics, one of which was The New Path Ahead. Ryuu calls it a practice piece, which is fine. Every artist needs practice, and goodness knows he certainly does. That doesn't mean I'm not going to pick it apart, though, because you're not going to fix mistakes if you aren't aware of them.

Surprisingly, the picture shows a little improvement. I was impressed, at first, that the line art was relatively lively and considerably easier to read, probably because the silhouette is clearer, he erased a lot of the sketch lines, and it looks like he attempted to use line weights.

From the looks of his other pics, though, this appears to be completely accidental. Pity.

The pose isn't very good. It looks okay from the waist up, but Ryuu's attempt at a strong, intimidating, determined walk is ruined by the fact that he's walking like a tightrope walker, with one foot exactly in front of the other, and with weight evenly distributed over both feet (which you can tell because his hips and shoulders are both parallel to the ground). Instead of looking strong, he looks like he could topple over with the slightest push.

Nobody walks like this in real life... except tightrope walkers. Maybe if Ryuu tried to learn about how the human body worked, instead of simply copying the superficial styles of one or two of his favorite artists, this wouldn't be so much of a problem.

It also looks like he's trodding over his own toes, by the way. Lern 2 perspective.

That sword is actually sorta kinda cool ish... which makes me wonder where he ripped it from. Sorry if you don't think that's fair, but when you've been shown to have ripped off every single thing that looks even the slightest bit interesting in your work, you've effectively wrecked the trust of your audience.

What interested me the most, however, was this comment:

_{Yes, I know his head is a bit small... I didn't try to do that, but his face came out well enough I didn't want to ruin it.}

The average adult male is usually drawn between seven-and-a-half and eight heads tall. The latter has Classical roots and is often used to give the figure an air of grace and nobility. Superheroes can be even taller, sometimes nine or even ten heads.

In Japan, depending on the style, adult men are often drawn a little bit shorter, at between five-and-a-half and seven heads.

Ganondorf stands at about seven heads tall, which is pretty average for Western art and puts him on the tall side for Japanese art.

Link -- in Ocarina of Time, at least -- is roughly six heads tall. Since Ryuu is supposed to be a clone of Link, you'd think that would make him six heads tall as well, but for some stupid reason the goddesses decided to pull him around like a Stretch Armstrong doll, because apparently Link was too much of a twig boy for Ryuu's taste.

Actually, despite Ryuu's complaint about the head size, Ryo seems to vary pretty widely in height from six-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half heads tall, probably more in pictures that I didn't bother to measure. He's seven heads tall in this one. As well as in The New Path Ahead:

Which, again, makes him either average or tall, depending on the style. Still well within reason. This makes sense when you consider that Link is only a few inches taller than Zelda, while Ryuu has stated that Zelda only comes up to Ryo's collarbone.

All in all, I'm not really sure what Ryuu is complaining about, since the head size isn't even unusual, and we don't actually know what a standard size for Ryo's head is, since Ryuu knows nothing about consistency -- except how to be consistently mediocre.

So then why does his head look so small?

BECAUSE THE REST OF HIM IS RIDICULOUSLY HUGE.

This is something that even Ryuu recognizes. For instance, look at the size of his hands and feet. Now compare them to the size of his head. Compare them to the size of Zelda's head. Squids and I often joke about how he could cup an entire person's face with one hand and crush/suffocate them to death. Those things are lethal weapons, yo. They're also twice the size that they should be.

Why is that?

Because if you shrink them down to a size that better fits the proportion of his head and height...

 ...it looks absofuckinglutely silly. Positively Liefeldian, even -- though I think Ryuu actually draws better than Liefeld, which is pretty hilarious.

Ryo's wrists and ankles are bigger than his hands and feet. He could hogtie a pair of linebackers and haul them away on those shoulders of his. There's absolutely no way that Ryo has a normal human's bone structure, because if he did, not only have his shoulders dislocated, but with that much muscle packed under his arms he wouldn't even be able to reach his own dick to pee.

This is all so obvious that even Ryuu knew that he had to compensate for all that width. So he gave Ryo a huge pair of ears, made the hands and feet bigger, and then made up an ad hoc explanation that they were for hearing and grip and stability, even though the cliché is that bigger hands and feet are a sign of clumsiness.

Okay, so what if we do the reverse, ignore the muscles, and draw the head to match the proportions of the hands and feet?

...I sure am saying 'hands and feet' a lot.

We get a short-ass Ryo who's barely five-and-a-half heads tall because half his chest is missing, is what. He's shorter than Link at this point.

Which, you know, in itself is fine. Being a short-ass person, myself -- a staggering three heads tall -- I think the idea of a short man bulking it up has the potential to be funny and interesting. But this is a little too clever for Ryuu, and would involve -- gasp! -- acknowledging a flaw. It clearly wasn't what he was going for, since he routinely presents Ryo as some kind of gentle giant who towers over Zelda and everyone else. And, you know, half his chest is missing.

All in all, this just demonstrates the problems one faces when you have no idea what you're doing and no concept of standard anatomy. You end up with caricatures of caricatures without even realizing that you're doing it. When your successes turn out to be nothing more than "happy accidents" it's little wonder that shit like this happens.

And by the way, while I understand the fear of erasing something you did well and having it turn out worse when you redraw it, that's usually a sign that you need to work on it. And you aren't going to get there by not drawing it. It doesn't matter how "nice" his face looks if it throws the rest of the picture completely off.