Esthetics Doing faceups vs. painting/drawing in 2D

I'd put it down to experience, but I have decades plus in drawing on a flat surface, but only a year or two worth of faceup experience, so I do have a distinct skill difference.

It's definitely fun doing the faceups, the challenges of a 3d plane and all, but a lot of a colour theory and layering still applies so it's not too different I think. I'm sure I'll naturally improve on the bit's I struggle with as I continue

 

As a traditional paint on canvas artist, for most of my life now, this is a question that stings and burns (I enjoy torturing myself, so it's fun!). I feel that as a traditionally trained artist from a young age, I am miles better (not trying to toot my own horn) at painting on a flat surface. I believe it would be extremely disappointing for me, if it were the other way around. I'm just so much more experienced at traditional painting, just from experience alone, it wouldn't make sense any other way

Painting on tiny 3D surfaces, both intimidated and fascinated me in my late teens, when I discovered people could customize Barbie (playline dolls, with small heads that are too big proportionately to their bodies, but tiny headed nonetheless). I later learned about giant headed dolls (earlier resin BJD), at a much bigger size you could customize so I was thrilled to dive right in thinking larger would be easier.

I then learned that I have extremely shaky hands, so the painting tiny 3D surfaces wasn't an easy journey for me, but because I do enjoy pain and suffering, I am still trying to this day! I hope I get slightly less sh1tty at it one day, but I do enjoy painting so much, I kind of don't mind redoing the work all the time. I truly love painting that much, I don't care if I suck at painting one type of canvas more than another. It's fun to me regardless. (:

 

Personally I'm not too experienced with painting, so there's a learning curve there in faceups as well, but as for drawing, I think faceups on a whole are more difficult than drawing. The 3D surface can be tricky to get used to, but there are also tons of reasons why the supplies might not work the way you want them to, regardless of what you use. I'm just now starting to get a better handle at acrylic paint but not enough to feel comfortable doing detailed eyelash work with it, for example. And there's also so many factors with the surface you're working with? If you don't spray it enough there's not enough tooth and wiping at it can sometimes rub the sealant off.

With faceups there are just a lot more things that can go wrong, up to and including the climate you live in and/or the weather, which is not as huge a deal with drawing and (certain) paints.

 

I don't believe I'm necessarily 50-50 equally good at both, but voted so anyway because both are slightly different skill sets and different aesthetically + materials-wise, and maybe therefore hard to compare. I have lots of experience and practice with drawing/painting in 2D and I'm happy with my faceups also - they just scratch a different itch in my brain. Then again - I would definitely be much worse at faceups if I didn't have any 2D experience, and I think having some muscle memory and understanding of tools is also the reason I've always found faceups fun to do and not a huge struggle. I wouldn't call myself a faceup artist, though

All in all, both can be just as hard as you make them, and depend on what kind of a result you are chasing after. Everything requires a similar amount of practice in the end, too. I think for me they walk nicely hand in hand and both help the other to improve.

 

I'm not a faceup artist yet, but I do commission 2D art, and I come from another background: Makeup artistry. I honestly think that helps tremendously. I can't imagine being able to make a faceup without understanding some makeup art unless you focus on doing realism, or animal/anthropomorphs or another niche.

This topic is really interesting and I loved seeing everyone's answers

 

My line art on face ups is still a work in progress, but I actually find the 3D surface of a doll easier to work with. Probably my ADHD brain; things in 3D tend to be easier for me than things in 2D when it comes to anything crafty.

 

I've technically been drawing for a few years but I am very inconsistent and should have progressed farther than I have, and I only started doing faceups recently and already find it a whole lot easier to learn. It's more like doing makeup than drawing/painting tbh. Eyelashes are very difficult though lol

 

I kind of agree with @cobaltconduct . I said equally good at both, but since they're similar yet related skills, it's a little hard to compare them directly for me. I'd definitely find faceups a lot harder if i didn't also do 2d art, but in some ways a faceup can be a bit simpler too because the features are already there and i don't need to try to draw the other eye xD (just the other eyebrow, which i find easier to do in 2d lol). That said I find it harder to visualise things in 3d than in 2d (and also often struggle with translating reference pictures into poses well because of it), so planning a faceup can be tricky for me.

 

i am actually learning to do my own faceups after over a decade of bjd collecting and a lifetime of making 2D traditional art on paper. it's wild how different these two things are. when i first got into bjd, doing my own faceups was one of the things i was really excited about. i assumed i would be good at it because i'd been making art for decades! but i vastly underestimated how different painting on a 3D sculpted surface and working on paper would be and i ended up hating both the experience and the results of doing faceups and was happy to have someone else paint my dolls instead.

for me i think some of the huge difference and difficulty was because of my personal art style and habits. my main mediums are ink for drawing, or acrylics for painting. my art tends to be heavily focused on strong linework, a lot of contrast, really bold color, and while it's definitely not abstract there is a good amount of stylization in how things are rendered-- i don't do ultra realism. and i have been drawing and painting this way for decades, so at this point it is How I Make Art. like, these are the things that happen when i pick up a pen or a brush.

however...none of that is how i want my dolls to look! i like realistic faceups, the kind where the doll's face almost looks like it would be squishy and warm instead of hard resin if you touched it. my art making habits don't lend themselves to this. i always ended up with eyebrows and eyeliner that were Way Too Much because of my tendency to go hard with contrast and do really graphic lines and shapes. and then all the pastel was a muddy, blotchy mess instead of nice luminous layers of color like i wanted, because i don't ever work with dry mediums or very soft color. i would either end up with too much faceup, or i'd overcorrect and come out with a faceup that had almost no shading on it at all. and because of the fact that i was fighting against all of my own art making instincts and muscle memory every time i tried to do a faceup, it was SUPER un-fun and not only was i hating my results, i was not enjoying the process enough to stick with it and practice. so when my daughter turned out to have a real talent for painting dolls, i was thrilled to just let her do them and go back to painting and drawing on paper. her faceup style was how i actually wanted my dolls to look!

over the years, though, she's gotten busy with other things and moved away from doll painting, and i've acquired a couple of dolls since that need faceups. so recently i asked her to teach me how to do my own so they look...not like my 2D art on a doll's face

i finished my first one with lots of hand-holding and step-by-step critique a few weeks ago, and it's the first time i have ever been happy with a faceup i did! the thing that had been so frustrating before is that i knew i had art skills-- i mean, i've had my regular art exhibited in local art shows more than once over the years-- so surely i should be able to paint a doll face...! and yet, nope. not with the result i wanted, anyway. for me, what worked this time is separating my traditional art in my mind from painting a faceup and viewing them as two completely separate processes with entirely different procedures. that way i was finally able to get my personal art habits out of the way and focus on "these are the steps to making a 3D resin face look realistic".

the whole thing for me was a bit weird, because of course i could have just embraced the way my personal art style looked on a doll and run with that! but i had a really specific idea of how i wanted my dolls to look when i first started collecting them, and it was...NOT that i was drawn to bjd in the first place because of seeing dolls that looked super realistic and alive, and that was what I wanted, not a little 3D installation of my own artistic idiosyncracies. i just really underestimated the difficulty of transferring my skills to a completely different medium, style and hobby, so i had a lot of frustration along the way. it's been pretty cool to actually start learning to do the faceups i wanted, tho, and i'm glad i tried again. i am interested to see how i will do on my next one, and also to see if painting faceups will bleed over into how i draw/render faces and people in my paper drawings!

 

Well, a couple years ago I would have told you that I think I am equally good at both. Currently I have severe artistic block/poor self esteem in trying to do any "serious" creative work. I haven't really made any 2D work in over a year, but there are a lot of factors going into this problem right now and I probably shouldn't answer from that mental space.
Now, I have been painting since I was 13 and studied painting at university. I've been doing faceups for 15 years now at a maximum rate of maybe 10-15 per year (most years way way less than that). I do not want to say that faceups are easy. I find them easy now in most respects, but learning them (just techniques of application) was quite challenging and took a couple years of practice and experimentation. My background was in watercolor and portrait painting so I already had experience with color theory and layering transparent colors for topical color blending, both of which are very important to be confident with in faceups. I do think that all these years of painting faceups has affected my 2D painting attempts...

Spoiler: More on that if you're interested

Not really for the better once again remember I'm just feeling a real lack of confidence right now, though there is still some truth to this-- that the mental practice of painting dolls has maybe tarnished my ability to look at a lovely human face without trying to "correct" the features I see. Distorting features and correcting less than ideal parts of the doll's appearance is extremely fun for me with faceups and I would say a big part of my success, because I can take some slightly dorky older dolls and freshen them up with a polished look that brings out the best of their beauty, but taking the same approach with human faces often homogenizes people who were already worth looking at and makes them boring and less beautiful. There is a fine line to walk when distorting facial features between "correcting" them to match some imposed personal standard of beauty and exaggerating them in a pleasantly caricature-like fashion where you overstate some imbalances to highlight personal charm. It's two sides of the same coin I just think I need to get back to remembering the other side and remembering how to see features differently.

Anyway one thing about faceups being completely different than 2D art is in mental labor, it's generally much less strenuous. Faceups are mostly about technical execution and not about high concept, not like trying to make fine art. I mean they can be of course, or they can be more like just trying to apply make-up nicely. In this way they are easier once you get your skills established.