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There's a number of these guides floating around, but the more I get asked about how I got my elves looking so naturally attractive, the more I feel this is necessary to get here. I always took this stuff as being totally obvious as I'm an artist by trade, but I figure it's worth sharing!
Human (and demi-human) women's beauty isn't about how much makeup you can cake on or how sleek her hair is or how powdered and pristine her skin looks. Those certainly contribute to it if observed through a specific beauty standard, but by far the most important is accurate, realistic facial proportions.
I'm going to show you exactly how it's done. It's not rocket science - it's observation and proper thinking, mindfulness of the ratios between the elements of the face. And a little geometry and mathematics, but the easy kind.
Bear in mind that these are only meant to be taken as general guidelines to help your character editing - not as the end-all be-all rules of what they HAVE to look like. Variations and small deviations from these norms are a major part of human biology.
White lines: Vertical ratio. The head is divided into quarters, from top to bottom: Top of the head to the forehead/hairline, forehead to the eye level, eye level to between the lip and the nose, and from atop the lip to the point of the chin.
Green lines: Eye width and spacing. The space between the eyes should be the width of one eye.
Blue lines: In idealistic proportions, the nostrils' width is the same as the space between the eyes. A straight line should be able to be drawn from the middle point of the lips, passing the sides of the nose and running through the pupil of the eye to the highest point of the brow. This is something of a textbook case of perfect facial proportions.
Roughly all of the female EEO presets have been built to fit into these guidelines. It can be daunting to try and internalize at first, but it should be taken as more of a set of mental notes to help better observe your character's features and plan for an aesthetically pleasing whole.
Cinching the eyes downward, enlarging them, shrinking the nose and reducing the space between the nose and lips makes the face childlike. This is also often combined with making the nose too small for the rest of the face. This can work intentionally for very young characters, but can result in freakish looks for one with otherwise adult bodily proportions.
Spacing the eyes and nose too far apart is something I observe a lot of people doing. This is usually doubled with pressing the lips and nose very close to each other and recuding the chin. You should now be able to tell at a glance how disturbing this looks, deviating from the natural proportions.
As a general tip, I see many people choosing very flat, 'powdered' skins that look very lifeless as they don't really exhibit any signs of blood circulation in the face. A big part of realistic looks is visible signs of subtle hues in the ears (Neck slider for female EEO elves), the tip of the nose and on the cheeks. A small, barely visible dusting of freckles can also help make your character more lively if you don't want to be as outrageous with them as my elves tend to be.
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He is basically listing standard rules for drawing faces. You'll find it in any instruction book on human proportions (others being that a hand with fingers is about as large as the person't face, to get the proper proportion of the hand. Small hands is a mistake many people make, so this is a good guide). You do not measure in centimetres, inch or anything, you measure in the units you have: Eyes, nose, etc.
This is all not to get a general image of beauty, but rather to get a face that looks natural. An old woman, that not everyone would maybe perceive as "pretty" has the same proportions as a young one (apart maybe from the nose and ears, as those continue to grow even after the rest has stopped growing). By following these guidelines, you get a face that feels naturally beautiful, or rather comfortably natural as opposed to freakishly ugly/uncomfortably unnatural.
If you follow these guidelines, you can still make every kind of beauty. Choose a part to change, and adjust the rest to that. You choose a different shape of face, take bigger or smaller eyes, but keep the proportions mentioned above to keep them looking natural. There's many factors that are not even completely dependant on these proportions that can be changed. Just think what you have in your face lips, ear shape, cheekbones, chin, and whatelse. There's a lot more than these proportions - You can diverge from the proportions too (nature does too), but not to much, or you'll wander into the freakish area (ever seen a. But this is where you start. A set of proportions that has been tried and proved working over and over. In fact, the little differences diverging from these proportions usually make a face memorable and unique. Just don't overdo it, or you'll have something out of a nightmare. In fact, it is important to understand these proportions to know how far you can go before making it look wrong, instead of just unique.
A good example is in the movie "Splice". Google imagesearch that (maybe not at work, incase you get certain scenes. But most of them will be of the character "Dren"). The girl seen there, while you can certainly describe her as beautiful, also looks sort of alien. Open up one of the pictures where she's visible as frontal as possible (there's one where another character is behind her to the right). Now measure one of the eyes, and then take that measurement to see that the space between her eyes is slightly bigger than the size of her eyes. While not feeling repulsive or completely unnatural, this little diversion from proportions makes the face feel different, even a bit non-human.
Also, on the subject of "Perfect beauty", I suggest reading up on the term "Uncanny Valley". While perfection might seem desireable for some, it's hard to achieve. And sometimes, it is better not to achieve it, but rather go for imperfection to avoid a gag reflex by your audience.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UncannyValley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
(I do apologize for the wordiness of the article; you should be able to get the gist by skimming it, if you wish)
Though I thank you for pointing that out, there is a parallel I haven't seen before. Following that logic Galadriel would be a high elf (and technically is), the Mirkwood elves would be wood elves.
And of course the "D wemer" or "D warves", which are actually just as tall as all the other Mer and Menfolk. There's a story they once met a race of giants who gave them the name of "D warves", and it kind of stuck. I am not making this up.
So you have Orcs/Orsimer which are quite different from the standard elves, and the Dwarves/Dwemer which are also different.
And real life folklore elves are another story altogether, especially if you remember that traditionally elves and fairies are not the same thing. You know, the kind that steal kids and leave behind changelings, and cause Tuberkulosis and can't touch cold iron.
Sorry, I love Elder Scrolls lore. Also, different kinds of elves in folklore and fiction is one of my favourite topics.
(EDIT: Had to put a space between ever "D w", or I'd have a laughing smiley there. Forgot to turn off emoticons. )
I wholesomely encourage creating diverse faces. I just want to see more correct eye-nose-lip-forehead positioning ratios than I currently do. The quarter format and positioning the eyes at the exact vertical half of the face generally helps that.
I really cannot bear to see elves that personify the human definition of beauty be it Caucasian or otherwise. This is a very handy graph for making my humans look more human and keeping the differences between my elves and humans more apparent. Extremely useful and I appreciate your instruction along with the graph.