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Creation

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It's all about proportion. If one thing is off, the entire thing is, and there's no remedy but to obliterate the whole thing and start over. Nobody likes a shitty repair job.

The skull is the first part. The most important part. If that thing is right, then the face is sure to be correct, but one has to draw the skull first. Delicate outlines. Just because you screw up thirty times in the process does not mean you can get irritated and start pressing down more, because if you do then under the face the skull will grin at you. Mocking you for screwing up.

But if drawn correctly, the skull is invaluable. Draw a straight line from the middle of zygomatic toward the skull cap and viola! You are at almost dead center with the ear. In fact, that little flap on the ear lines up with it perfectly. You need more? Straight line from the orbits generally gives you the upper boundary of the ear; the bottom of the zygomatic lines up, more or less, with the lowest lines of the ear. And, luckily, one really only has to trace over the jaw to make a jaw, because there isn't any weird muscle stuff that screws up the lines. Viewed anterior or posterior, there's the issue of connecting the cheekbone to the jaw, and that's more a gut thing than anything. The nose is a simple matter of arching correctly once the nasal bones have run their course.

Lips are a pain in the ass. There's no convenient bone there to trace, and they just sort of float there. True, the top of upper lip and the bottom of the lower lip line up with about the middle of the teeth, and in sealed lips they come together at right about the gap between both pairs of incisors, but their shape is difficult to master. And although, yes, they do end right at about the premolars or first molars, they also have lines which arch from about there to the nostril. But if you draw it too deep, you've aged this person about thirty years. Too light, and the face looks blank. That's the nice thing about doing an anterior or posterior view—there's not so much blank room on the face to deal with.

And then, of course, there are the eyes.

You can't depend on the orbital bones, so just throw out that thought right there. There are muscles all over that area. The eyes sort of float inside the orbits, around rings and rings of muscles. The more tired a person is, the more you see those muscles. If you stare at a person, a thin person, long enough, you can start to see the fleshy areas between eye and the zygomatic. But doing that all the time is fairly disconcerting, so don't do it. All you need is to see skulls everywhere you go instead of faces.

At any rate, from a side view, eyes are like cones. Lashes sort of flair up from the ends of the cone, but you're more likely to notice the thin gab between the top of the orbits and the eye, where the eyelid sits, rather than the lashes themselves because generally this area is heavily shaded—either because the subject is female and wearing eye make-up or because there's heavy shadowing in the area.

Or, you know, you're drawing Johnny Depp.

Moving on.

Ears, even with the helpful bone markers, can be a pain. They oftentimes look too large when you've been staring at them too long—sort of like the skull cap—and there's often an impulse to reduce the size, but that's not smart. The bottom of the ear is about where the jaw ends, and right around the top is where the hairline loops. Mess that up, and the whole face looks wonky. Wonky faces make irritated investigators. Or they garner a raised eyebrow from Brennan. Trust me, it's not worth either of those things. And then there's the matter of the weird crinkly thing they have going on. And when you don't have the advantage of taking artistic liberties—like heavy shading—you've got to be careful.

Hair is another pain. Eyebrows are actually usually erased somewhat to give them a more faded look, or they're drawn so that they looked slightly fuzzy and thin. In theory, it's an easy thing; in practice, when eyebrows are weird, everything is weird. And eyebrows are easy to mess up because their borders are ambiguous. True, you can line the ends up to the end of the eye—a little past that, really—and they end right around that arc for the nose; but getting that "eyebrow" look can be difficult. If you're sloppy, they look like fuzzy caterpillars. Fuzzy caterpillars hanging over people's eyes is never a good thing. Don't let those weird impressionist people fool you. Even if I was the one who told you to do it in the first place.

Anyway, the hair. The real hair. The hair on the head. The one we have to pull into pony tails. Getting that thing shaded correctly without wearing down a pencil is a job only for the masters. Hair's tricky. It flows all over the place, and with free lines, it's easy, but with the constrained lines of a sketch artist, you gotta be more careful than simply scribbling. How do I do my hair? Trade secret. And no, I don't always leave it unshaded for convenience. Sometimes I do not have time.

Shut up.

The neck is the next thing, although, honestly, it's easy. Lightly draw in where the vertebrae belong, mentally cover 'em with muscles, and you've got the back of the neck, which rounds out very very nicely with the back of the skull. There's also an important muscle here, the sterno cleido-mastoid, which shoots from the mastoid—that little bump right after the mandible—to the ends of the collarbone. A lot of the times, in women especially, and even more so when they're stressed, this thing sticks out like a rope, so make sure to draw it. Under that is the delicate lines of the throat and its tubing—though in guys this place tends to bulge a little. Save the delicacy for the females. Males tend to be a lot more harsh with their lines.

After all that, the lines of the shoulders are a snap, and clothing can be lightly indicated. Shade. Shade well. Cover up all your mistakes. When you're a master like me, there won't be any, but if you're not then there are bound to be five to thirty of them.

Done? Good. Now draw it again—

"Angela?"

The artist looks up.

"What are you doing?"

"Angela's teaching me to draw a face!" Parker exclaims, the back of both his hands gray with graphite. Papers are scattered about him, piled up high in crinkled bundles, and the trash can sits nearby, empty.

"Oh, that's nice, bub, that's real nice," Booth says. He's grimacing. "Come with daddy. We'll clean you up."

"Okay! Thanks, Ange!"

The agent, tossing a glare Angela's way, leads his son out.

"What motivated you to do something like that, Angela?" Brennan asks, her back to the door-frame.

"The mother in me, Bren," she replies, rising and slapping her hands together lightly.

She cocks her head, "Sure it wasn't just the need to feel superior?" She raises an eyebrow.

"Since when do you believe in psychology, honey?"

"Since when do you feel like explaining the subtle nuances of art to someone who can barely draw stick figures?"

"Touché."

"I thought so."

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