If you desire to master the skill of drawing faces and portraits, this FREE download highlights pencil techniques from the experts to get you started.
Whether you are 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 to the complex task of drawing a face that’s full of life. With these tips, you’ll learn how to draw a face full of detail. Perfect your eye drawing skills and achieve attitude in your portrait drawings.
Download Your Free Guide to Drawing Faces Today!
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’s always good to approach drawing eyes with basic anatomy in mind to prevent the eye drawing from looking like it’s 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.