Ultimate, FREE Guide to Drawing Faces

There are many ways to keep your drawings lively, fresh, and dynamic. But there is one sure way to ruin an active and energetic drawing: by plopping a stiffly rendered head on top of an otherwise nicely drawn figure. The challenge of bringing life and energy into portrait drawings is easily answered once you get beyond the complexity of the subject. If you desire to master the skill of drawing faces and portraits, the pencil techniques in this download highlight expert tips to get you started.
Whether you are a veteran at face drawing, you’re just beginning drawing lips, or you want to improve your eye drawings, this free collection of tips is one you’ll turn to again and again. Discover expert guidelines and solutions to the complex task of drawing a face that is full of life. With tips from this free pdf, learn how to draw a face full of detail. Perfect your eye drawing skills and achieve attitude in your portrait drawings.

Have you wanted to learn how to draw noses that are realistic and proportional? Have you struggled with putting life into your art when drawing faces, drawing lips or drawing eyes? Get expert tips that outline many solutions that are appropriate for the beginner and advanced artist. Learn how to sketch faces that are proportional to the entire figure before perfecting your portrait drawing!

What’s inside this drawing faces tutorial?
This free download explains the importance of understanding all aspects of the human head if you want to impart a dynamic look into your face drawings. They suggest not concentrating exclusively on the front of the face and its features. Understanding the anatomy of the face helps artists successfully depict particular facial features. It is always good to approach drawing eyes with their basic anatomy in mind to prevent the eye drawing from looking like it is hovering above the face instead of securely seated in its socket. When learning how to draw lips, it’s important to understand the way the muscles of the mouth express the emotion of your subject in order to depict that emotion in your portrait drawing.

How to Draw a Face: Drawing the Head
The tilt of the head is equally crucial to achieving attitude in your portrait drawings. It should somehow complement or contrast the gestural movement that flows through the body from the toes to the neck and, finally, into the head. Perhaps the most powerful key to a stronger head is the most obvious one, which even advanced artists often miss in their obsession to get the features just right—that is, give your head attitude. Learn from renowned artists in this free download by starting with a proportionate head drawing.

Drawing Faces: Measuring Facial Features
First, partition the features into three equal divisions: The top partition runs from the hairline to the eyebrows, the second one from the eyebrow to the base of the nose, and the third one from the bottom of the nose to the bony point of the chin. This classically derived system of measurement has been used by artists to get their bearings on sketching faces since the Greek golden age, and it’s nothing more than an averaging of our collective facial proportions.

Mastering an Eye Drawing
The “oval, circle, dot” anatomy of the eye that we all first learned as children is far removed from how to draw eyes that are realistic or approach the “windows to the soul” ideal. But eyes can be one of the most challenging features to depict because its forms and colors are incredibly subtle and delicate. It isn’t just the eye that can give the sense of roundness or three-dimensionality to a face when sketching portraits. The cheekbone and brow ridge give a sense of the curve around the eye as well. Think of the eye as almost nesting between these two when drawing faces.

How to Draw a Nose
When sketching noses that depict the facial anatomy of your subject, this usually means first revisiting the size of the nose, since all the other features radiate off this central point. Indeed, when initially laying in the proportions of the face, it’s a good strategy to put more work into the nose once you start delving into the details. Of course, you don’t want to spend all your time drawing the nose. To maintain your objectivity and a gestural quality in your portrait drawing, always move around the face and figure when working on specifics. But once the size of the nose is set, compare all of the other features to it. If you have a difficult time seeing and drawing the nose close to the eye, try this exercise: Find a photo of a foreshortened face; draw it freehand, concentrating on the eye-nose relationship; then trace the photo and compare the two drawings, noting where you may have inadvertently increased the eye-nose distances in your first drawing. Keep repeating the exercise with other photos until you conquer your habits of distortion.

How to Draw Lips
This free pdf outlines the concepts and muscular structure of the mouth and lips so that you can have some general guidelines in the back of your mind when you draw your next model. There are many variables to consider when sketching lips. Everyone’s lips are unique; there are different sizes, shapes, and configurations that depend on the model’s size, age, ethnicity, and even eating habits. Luckily there are some common attributes as well, and they are helpful to keep in mind while you draw lips. Learn both the visual and muscular anatomy of the mouth in this free download to learn to sketch lips with structure.

Master Face Drawing Techniques!
Learn how to sketch faces by first sketching the head structure. After determining the global shape of the head, assessing the facial angle is the next most important factor in getting a likeness and keeping your face drawing lively. You can discover the facial angle of your subject by drawing a line from the
ear hole at the base of the skull to the bottom of the nasal aperture compare that line to one that runs from the base of the brow ridge to the upper dental arch.

Whether you are a beginner or an advanced artist who is continually faced with the challenge of drawing faces that express attitude, this eBook is an essential resource. To maintain your objectivity and a gestural quality in your face drawing, always move around the face and figure when working on specifics. The guidelines found in this eBook will have you drawing portraits with stunning proportions. This download could be the first step toward a stand-out portrait drawing.

How to Draw Faces

Capturing a person’s appearance in a drawing is a three-fold task. On one hand, an artist needs to understand the anatomy of the head and how it is positioned on the neck and in relation to the rest of the body. You must also be able to effectively render the features of the face, knowing how to draw eyes, nose, lips, and hair so that all these parts integrate into the whole. But artists also need to realize that drawing faces isn’t an exercise in minutiae. It is more a matter of accurately rendering a handful of facial planes, shapes, and proportions that distinguish each one of us.

This topic page will guide you towards links, resources and youtube tutorials to help you on your way to mastering drawing faces.

Face drawing techniques

Drawing eyes
Eyes are almost always halfway down the oval shape that is the human head. It is easy to forget this and place them too high up, forgetting to account for a forehead and a hairline, which takes up most of the top half of a person’s head.

Drawing lips
By learning the musculature of the face, you’ll be able to better understand how to draw lips because you see them in the context of the human anatomy. This is especially important if you draw without a life or photographic reference, since many facial expressions involuntarily cause the lips to change ever so slightly.

Drawing noses
It’s crucial to get a person’s nose right, since everything else on a face radiates out from it. This should be one of the last portions of the face you add, as it requires time and attention unlike any other aspect of drawing a face. While every face is different, there are some simple tricks: the eye is usually about the same width as the nose, and the edges of the nose usually line up with the eye’s inner corner.

Common face drawing mistakes
There are many small adjustments you can make to improve your face drawings, if you know what the common mistakes are. These include: misplacing the ear, shrinking the skull, drawing the nose and eyes out of proportion with each other, getting the angle between the forehead and nose wrong, and forgetting to register the thickness of the eyelid.

Another common misstep is putting too much effort into colour and tone, and not enough into drawing facial proportions.

Method1

Adult Female Face

1 .1 Make a light outline of a face. Heads are never circular, they are oval shaped, like an egg. So sketch an oval outline that tapers down at the bottom.

1.2 Add dividing lines. The easiest way to start is to use dividing lines to map out the proportions of the face. Firstly, draw a line down the center of the oval. Then cut the oval in half again, this time horizontally.

1.3 Add the nose. Divide the lower half again with another horizontal line. The point at which this crosses the vertical line is where you should begin to draw the base of the nose. Sketch out the base of the nose and a nostril either side.

1.4 Add the mouth. Divide the bottom quarter in half again. The bottom of the lips will rest on the dividing line you have just drawn. Draw a line for where the lips meet and then draw the top lip. Now fill in the bottom of the lip.

1. 5 Add the eyes.

Draw two big circular balls to make out the eyes across the central horizontal line. These will form the eye sockets. The top of this circle is where the eyebrow is and at the bottom is where the cheekbone sits.

Draw the eyebrows along the top.

You then need to work on the shape of the eyes. Eyes are almond shaped, so bear this in mind as you sketch them (eyes come in every size and shape, so feel it out). As a rule of thumb, the distance between the two eyes is the width of another eye.

Inside the iris, the color inside the center of the eye, draw the pupil, which is the darkest bit of the eye. Fill most of it in black and leave a little white. With your pencil flat, use a bit of shading for the base. Shade variant from medium and light in the iris, using tightly spaced short lines from the edge of the pupil to the white of the eye. Draw lighter in some areas to give it a nice effect. Draw eyebrows above. Now rub out the guidelines below the eye.

Next, draw the top of the eyelid over the top of the almond. The base of the eyelid comes down over the top of the iris and covers the top of it slightly.

Shading under the eyes. Now, add a little shading underneath the eye and where the eye meets the nose to define the socket. For a tired look, add shading and swooped lines at a more acute angle to the bottom eyelid.

Add the ears. The base of the ear should be drawn in line with the bottom of the nose and the top of the ear in line with the eyebrows. Remember, ears should be flat against the side of the head.

Add the hair. Make sure that you draw the hair from the parting outwards.

Draw the neck. Necks are thicker than you imagine. Draw two lines coming down from roughly where the bottom horizontal line meets the edges of the face.

Add the details. Add a bit of shading under the nose and accentuate the chin. Put expression lines around the mouth, and shading in the corners. Then outline the ridge of the nose. The more prominent you make these features, the “older” your face will look.

You may want to draw clothes using a style such as cross hatching.

Clean. Use an eraser to remove any guidelines.

Method2

Youth Female Face

 

Draw the shape of the head you have in mind.

2 Add lines to determine the center of the face and the position of the eyes.

3 Sketch lines to define how wide, tall, and the placement of the eyes, nose, mouth and ears.

4 Sketch the shape and appearance of the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and eyebrows.

5 Sketch the shape of the hair and neck.

6 Use a smaller tipped drawing tool to add the finer details of the face.

7 Draw the outline using the sketch as a guide.

8 Erase and remove the sketch marks to produce a clean outlined drawing.