How I Practice Drawing FACES (Beginner Friendly)

what's up guys welcome back are you serious right now stop that stop it God I'm had it with these BBS oh all right guys do your faces look like poop not your actual face I'm talking about the ones that you draw I'm sure your face is beautiful anyway so I wanted to do a bit of practice in my Sketchbook this morning and I thought wait a minute why not share that with you guys so that we can learn and grow together so that our faces no longer look like poo anyways so here I'll walk you guys through the process show you guys some of the practice this work that I did this morning my focus was on faces because faces are tough as you guys can see the first page here the very first warm-up is a bunch of skulls understanding how the human anatomy Works plays a big part in being able to draw your face as well portraits of other human beings I would say is probably one of the hardest things that you can draw because our brains have this natural ability to recognize faces we are very sensitive to things that don't look right on someone's face we're very perceptive of other people's Expressions we're very perceptive of the way their faces are constructed because it's really life or death if you're one of our ancestors and someone's looking at you like they might be trying to kill you that's why when you're drawing faces if one tiny thing is a little bit off the whole thing is going to look off even after many years of drawing and practicing the human portrait I still find that my faces look off sometimes and I always have to go back and practice just to remind myself of the fundamentals that are required here so just to briefly talk about these skulls I try to draw them from different angles and you can see here that this whole sheet took about 10 minutes we're going to be going at a very fast pace for this and we are only using lines and very very basic shading the reason for this is because I'm not necessarily focused on rendering here I'm just focused on being able to draw something being able to capture it accurately and doing it comfortably cuz you know we all get uncomfortable sometimes sometimes you might see the face in this kind of angle and you're like whoa what the hell is even that so these are very nice and rough you know they're not very detailed at all there's a lot of lines here that are more gestural as opposed to Technical and this is kind of the way that I like to draw in my Sketchbook I don't like to use my Eraser too much in fact I don't think I erased anything that was on this page 3/4 front view 3/4 side view a back view and this skull right here is probably the most challenging one of the bunch mainly because we're seeing it from a very unconventional point of view and is important that when you're practicing do not run away from scenarios like this because uh you want to put yourself through some challenges look look you got to make yourself uncomfortable all right you got to do things that are challenging to you cuz that's the only way you're going to grow I want you to think of this kind of like getting your reps in at the gym each one of these pages is one of your sets and every single drawing is a rep and through these repetitions in these sets this is how you grow your artistic muscles that's how you get huge so after the first 10 minutes of skull practice I decided to move on to our next page while I didn't decide I didn't have a choice the page was full at this point um anyways so I felt pretty good I was warmed up I went straight into drawing faces and practicing a bunch of different heads you can see down here this took about 20 minutes to complete essentially what I do is I pull up a series of Pinterest reference images and I go through them one by one I try to get as many as possible it doesn't matter if I like the reference or if I don't like the reference as long as I can see all of the facial features and the reference images are relatively high resolution it will definitely work as a solid practice piece so 20 minutes for this means these were about 3 and 1/2 minutes each some might have taken longer some might have been shorter again we are speed lightning M when you're doing these repetitions in your Sketchbook you got to remember to keep up the pace you never want to get caught on one drawing and fixing it over and over again if it's just not working out it's time to move on definitely set a timer be aware of the amount of time that you're spending on each drawing so overall looking back at this page I'm pretty happy with this one uh this one I think this one's all right but there could be some improvements uh here in the jaw area I think I fumbled that a little bit this one here is decent but I do think some of the proportions on the face didn't really match what I saw in the reference I really do like the stylization in the front side of the face here but I felt like some of these lines were a little bit stiff but here's one thing that I noticed when I was doing this page of sketches and that is especially for this drawing and this drawing here I felt like I was getting a little bit more tense especially for these lines that outline the sides of the face here and even over here as well on this guy my hand my pencil it wasn't really moving in a way that was more free and free is how I like to draw you know I'm I like free I like me a bargain so because of that I decided to change it up a little bit so here's what I did next these drawings that you see right here are called contour drawings but essentially this is one of the most OP methods to get yourself nice and loose nice and limber flowing like Squidward a contour drawing basically means that you set your pencil down on one point of the page and you flow through this entire drawing without lifting that tip up so basically each one of these portraits here are constructed from one single very long and twisted line and this method here does absolute wonders to just help you loosen up and get your hand moving in a way that's a little bit less rigid that's another important point when you're practicing you don't want to just do it brainlessly you guys see how I noticed my stiffness in the previous page so I decided to change directions and go for a different different style of drawing just to get rid of that stiffness I still have the stiffness in my hips though God it's no but this is one thing that I like to call mindful practice okay you just keep your brain open observe what you're doing and if there's something in your drawings that you're actually not happy with you got to make a note of that be like okay this is what's causing the issue and what can I do to potentially address that so in the previous pages I noticed stiffness in my lines in the next page we are doing a contour drawing to eliminate that stiffness in my lines and throughout this entire process something else that I really wanted to work on was simplification and stylization so that's kind of what I moved on to next after I finished loosening up with some nice contour drawings and this little Contour drawing detour here only took about 10 minutes lightning mc now on my next page of drawings this page we spent about 13 minutes on and the focus for these drawings was supposed to be stylization but I really wasn't happy with this first one uh the second one has a little bit of charm but it's still it wasn't really the best the third one this one I actually really liked I felt like this worked pretty well and um one thing that I did differently here than the other drawings was I focused more on the overall shape of the head I think there was a little bit more thought put into this one it was just a little bit more intentional now coming down to the fourth drawing I feel like I kind of lost my way there a little bit even though it is stylized it's not really done in a way that I really enjoyed you know I tried to really go for that weathered look but instead of that I got constipation fourth drawing is okay I tried again to be a little bit more intentional with my shapes but I don't think this was the right shape to use for this drawing I feel like all of these drawings aside from this one here left me wanting a little bit more like I know I can push the stylization more but I wasn't really pushing it in the right directions so guess what we had to make another pivot this is the next page I was going to just scrap this page but I was like you know what I got to face my responsibilities so what I did is I pulled up some reference images of Disney concept art so I just tried to refresh my mind on the way they stylized the characters on the way they push their proportions and I tried to apply some of that to the references that I was using on Pinterest of real people yeah I mean this this one's all right but I do feel like again the shapes could be a little bit more intentional and then after I finished this drawing I was like ah I don't like it I just tried to copy the proportion of the Disney face and you can see I have uh failed miserably here this looks like it was drawn by a toddler I'm sure my ancestors saw this and were like oh shame for dispray here's the real gem okay let me show you guys the next page I mean if yall have a Sketchbook I'm sure you guys have Pages like this too where it's just failure and pain but I was like halfway through and I was like this ain't it I again was not intentional enough with my shapes and I think at this point I started to realize I was like I got to do something a little bit different here I got to start with a clean slate uh I'll come back to this page eventually I'll fill it up with other things but right now I just just I I can't please so with a heavier focus on stylization that brings me over to our next 10minute page so that's about 2 and 1 half minutes for drawing and in this one I tried to be as intentional as possible with my shapes and I think it definitely made a big difference here something else that also made a big difference was that Contour drawing page it just loosened me up I became limber and you can see that with a lot of these lines they really just start to flow into each other take this one for example there's a sense of energy in these lines that just was not there before and I'm really happy with this page because you can definitely clearly determine the shapes of these characters the shapes of their heads stylization on this guy for example squishes the front of his face and accentuates this largess of his head as well as his uh second chin the stylization here is a lot more purposeful it's it's not just stylization for the sake of stylization and I tried to really carry that into these other drawings as well so this one for example I really wanted to emphasize the roundness and to accentuate that I shrunk her facial features down inwards a little bit coming over to this one here I wanted to really capture this expression and this powerful shape of the mouth I do think this one works really well there's a lot of life to this character this man here is going to be a lot more rugged he's got much more angular shapes in his face and there's a level of hardness to this character that I think you can tell from the stylization as well so I think this page worked really well and I really wanted to carry this momentum forward with another practice sheet onto the next sheet you can see uh I've I don't know I think this drawing here on the right it's got to be my favorite drawing by far the middle one's okay the one on the left I think I focused too much on the expression and less so on the stylization I feel like the proportions and the shapes that I used here were a little bit less purposeful when compared especially to the other two portraits on this page so that was the final sheet of practice that I did and there's definitely a lot of room still for growth and I'm going to try to keep this up I'm going to try to do a little bit of practice every single day just to you know get my brain going make it a little bit more challenging for myself but if you guys want to do this yourselves you want to do some kind of practice similar to this you don't have to focus on stylization you don't have to do what I've done here you guys can pick something else that you're interested in maybe it's Expressions maybe it's Anatomy whatever the case pick a subject you want to focus on and be very mindful of what you like and what you don't like about your drawings as you're drawing them so that during the duration of your practice you can kind of pivot in different directions to meet your own needs needs and if you are truly a freshly born a new art baby you're slimy like a tadpole there are a couple things here that I think can help you out for the tiny babies out there okay this is how I like to construct my heads we start with an oval shape okay find the center line coming down shield for the front of the face that's the shape of your head you're going to see a lot of other artists do this as well this is just one of my favorite methods it's always worked for me find that Center Line find the shield shape and that'll be the front of your face so always be aware of this round shape for the top of this Cranium cuz this is where your brain's going to go I see too many people draw their characters uh with just the face and then the top of the head you know looks like that and it's like dude what what is huh are you drawing the Easter Island statues you know if you want to drawing to be a little bit more believable you want to draw a little bit more accurately you want to give your characters a good old big Cranium boom some other things to keep in mind as you're practicing is let's say you've drawn a absolutely beautiful eye and now you're freaking out you're panicking you're like what do I do for the the next one well first of all you shouldn't have done this in the first place but if you did okay just measure the length of this eye over here and that's going to be the start of the corner of the other eye now we going to take the length of this eye and move it over and the length of the other eye should be equal to the length of this eye you can draw some lines here to support where the top and bottom lid would be and you should be able to mimic the other eye what I don't want you guys to do in this case is use the Symmetry tool okay never use your symmetry tool I want you to actually practice trying to make facial features symmetrical it's a good skill to have and because our brain is so good at recognizing human faces if you do use the Symmetry tool it creates such a stiff look that it's not even believable okay so please don't do that this is only your last resort though if you are going to draw eyes i' recommend finding an ey line here okay and then just drawing your eyes one at a time if you're going to draw the upper lid draw the upper lid on the other eye if you're going to draw the iris draw the iris on the other eye if you're going to shake shade the iris shade the iris in the other eye now if you want to draw the double eyelid here also draw it on the other eye so you're kind of just moving between these two at the same time and this is one of the best ways that I find to make your eyes look consistent on your characters other things to keep in mind as you're drawing your Sketchbook is to avoid chicken scratching your lines try to make it as purposeful as you can you know you can practice this in your own Sketchbook now I personally love drawing messy all of my lines are messy I never have super clean lines where it's just one single smooth flowing line I that's not really how I work so you got to figure out how you like to work the best way to do that again is just with a lot of repetition and one final thought that I want to leave you guys with is to just not butt your head into a brick wall both figuratively and literally do not do that maybe you want to learn muscles but you don't want to just sit down and SLO through hundreds of Pinterest references of muscular men but think of ways to make it fun you know maybe instead of just random muscles go find that one dude in the krama who's just ripped and just draw pictures of him non-stop because you love him and you're obsessed it's a you know what I mean maybe you want to draw portraits but you just can't find the motivation to sit down and draw a bunch of portraits that's fine go find that one character that you really love from your favorite anime or your favorite movie try to draw them you know make it fun for yourself do something that you're genuinely passionate about I think that's the most important at the end of the day you got to enjoy it and if you're not already drawing right now close YouTube down stop it okay pick up a pencil what are we waiting for here hm you want me to come over there and destroy you what is it just do anyways hope you guys enjoyed watching this video I hope it was insightful I hope it was helpful and now it's up to you to make some beautiful drawings or drawings that look like poo you know whatever floats your butat but remember you never have the masterpieces without the Poo every single Masterpiece that you see is built up on a mountain of poo remember that I'm serious oh what you stop it

Channel: SamDoesArts

Views: 698,971

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Id: 5VCiTcOYado

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2023