How to Draw Faces for Beginners [ Basic Proportions ]

hello everybody welcome back to my channel so in this video I'm going to be going through how I draw a face and this time we're going to be going through how to draw it from scratch using all of the basic proportions and I'm also then gonna be showing you how I would ink it and Howard shade it in as well so let me know if you want to see more sort of videos like this where I do it from scratch and take you through the whole process but anyway guys let's get started okay so the first thing I do when I'm drawing the face is I create two markings to represent the basic size that I want the face to be so the top marking represents the top of the head and the bottom one is where I want the bottom of the face to kind of lie so this gives me a rough guideline of how to draw my oval shape I don't really stick strictly into these guidelines but it acts as a guide and then I draw a nice oval shape for the head and once I've got that oval in I just erased bit and adjust it to make sure that I get the size of the head how I want it to be you can experiment with this because you can have lots of different shapes heads depending on what your character to look like so make sure you experiment with that once you've got your oval down split it in half vertically and then do the same horizontally and then with that bottom half split that in half again and then that lower quarter split that in half again now to add a hair line I just create a nice curved shape just below the top of the head and I keep that parallel to the top of the head as well so moving on to the features the first thing that I do is I create a guideline for the ice and so you'll want it to be in five equal sections and so what I do is I create a little dot for the tear duct and just to oval shapes on top and bottoms to create sort of a guideline where the eyes are going to be but I don't go into super detail at the moment now on that sort of middle line on the lower half that's where the nose is going to be so getting your nose I've got lots of tutorials where I just go through how to draw a nose and I can do more if you want that but this video is more about the basic proportions so the eyes go on that first half line and then the nose rests on the second one when you're doing the eyebrows I like to do it straight up from the inner corner and then go slightly slanted from the outer corner because the eyebrows rest slightly further away from the outer parts of the eye and I do a nice curve shape but again with eyebrows you can experiment with them depending on what expression you want your character to have but just make sure you get the basic guidelines of where they're meant to be so just put them a bit above the eyes you don't have to do them really far above the eyes unless you want to go for a surprised look but like I said experiment with this now onto the mouth so the mouth is halfway through the iris about so I like to draw a line down and also the nose rests about in line with the inner corners of the eyes as well so do two lines from the light middle of the iris and then do two dots and that's where the outer parts of your mouth is going to be and then the mouth basically consists of these curved shapes on the top and the bottom and I like to make the bottom mouth rest just a bit below that bottom line that we drew in but again you can experiment with this and the placement depending on whether you want your characters to have a bit more of a Cupid's bow or whether you want their mouth to be closer to their nose you can kind of adjust these proportions a little bit to make your characters look unique so I then also do a little line on the bottom of the mouth just indicate where sort of that chin and that shadow is going to be just below the mouth so now let's adjust the features a bit more once you've blocked them all in it's just about getting them in really and then you can adjust the shape and make it really unique to how you want it to be so I fixed the nose shape a little bit it's okay if you have to keep raising it but I really make sure that you do your sketch really lightly make sure you do it lightly because then you can erase the lines without seeing your kind of previous versions of it underneath for this tutorial I try to keep it so you could see it but in reality I would have done this a lot lighter and I recommend you do your sketch lighter as well once you're happy with the placement of your features go ahead and erase the guidelines before you go into too much detail on the face try and get them nice and erased now let's move on to the hair I'm going to be doing another tutorial on drawing hair so I'm not going to go too much into it but the important things to remember are go from that hairline so wear your hair stems from make sure it kind of graduates from that hairline and try to keep it nice and wavy keep it flowing do it in terms of clumps rather than trying to draw lots of individual hair strands because this will give it much more volume if you do it in terms of clumps and think about the hairstyle that you want your character to have and you can adjust it and the main tip that I have is to make sure the hair goes a little bit above that headline that you created so the top of the head the hair would expand a little bit above it and again this makes it look more natural it's not going to stick really strictly to your headline it's gonna go a bit around it and it also might curve a bit into the face as well so make sure that you get your hair looking nice and natural by making it flow really nicely so now let's add a bit more detail to the features so I'm working on the eyes first and I just colored in the eyebrows a little bit as well so the first thing that you want to do is you want to kind of fix anything that you want to so I'm just fixing the eyebrows I realized that I wanted them a little bit higher up so you can experiment with things until you get the look that you want don't be afraid to erase things and redraw them don't be afraid that it's gonna look worse and you're too scared to like change anything just experiment and you might get something even more that you like so I wanted them a bit higher up and a bit more curved and it's okay to keep adjusting until you get it right that's why keep your sketch really light is so important in orders so that you can do all of these little changes so I just erased some more of those guidelines and now I'm going to really get into rendering those features a bit more to make it look a little bit more realistic and just to give it a bit more shading so first I just want to adjust the kind of shape of the face so again just a raised in those lines and I wanted to give it more of a natural look to the chin rather than it just being that really smooth overall just add a little bit of shape for the chin and I'm just fixing the Cupid's bow I want to make sure that I'm fixing everything that I want to in terms of the structure and like the shape of every feature before I go and shade it because if I was to shade it and then realize that I don't like the shape of something then it'd be much harder to try and erase all of that dark shading I'm also erasing the guideline for the head that's in the hair as well so that we can just see the hair we don't want to see that curved shape of the head for out the hair as well so make sure that you arrays all of your guidelines before you go in and try to shade everything so I'm gonna be showing you how I'd show you using pencil and then I'm going to be inking it and showing you how to shade it like you seen me do with like my sketch of me drawing videos so let's go on with the eye the first thing I did was I kind of indicated where that people would be I darken up the upper eyelid and the lower set of lashline and I also go ahead and add a few little eyelashes as well also make sure to create like an upper crease of the eye lid so that upper crease make sure you get that in because that will really make it look a bit more natural bit more sort of realistic and make it look more accurate try to include that and I did the same with the other eye it can be tricky to get them looking the same but just keep practicing and remember they don't have to look exactly the same a lot of faces aren't perfectly symmetrical so if it looks a little bit different that's okay most people's eyes look a tiny bit different but make sure that they're not super like off that you don't want them too slanted or the irises different sizes or one more open than the other try to keep it as close as possible I also think about where I want my shadows to be I want the main shadows to be sort of on the left hand side so I create some shading underneath the nose and on the top lip as well normally the top lip is a bit darker than the bottom one and for the bottom lip it tends to be more shaded at the bottom part of that bottom lip so now I want to go on to just rendering the hair a bit more I just really want to pull out the key sort of shapes that I'll be inking in later because at the moment there's a lot of these different lines so I just want to pull out the main ones that I'm going to be following and really just give him a darker sort of sketch so that you guys can see it a bit better and for this whole thing all I'm using is a HB pencil so a normal everyday school pencil and I'm literally just using printer paper so there's absolutely no reason why you guys can't get something very similar to this because I'm not using any fancy drawing surprise I'm keeping it really simple for you guys they're beginners and you haven't got many like art supplies to work with this is basically using supplies you can get around your house and that you all pretty much have at your disposal so again just fixing any little bits that I want to just want to get it right and I'm basically showing you now how you can adjust the features of the face and make them look different while still like using these proportions to make it look accurate like you can get so many different facial features shapes but it will still look accurate because it's still in those proportions as long as you make the eyes look the equal distance apart you make the nose line up with the inner corner of the eye and you make the mouth line up with the middle part of the eye then it's going to look accurate you can adjust sort of the width of the eyes like the height of the eyes how much of the Irish you can see the nose shape the mouth shape how full you want it you can adjust the features but make sure they stick within this sort of proportion guidelines that will really help you make sure that it looks realistic and like accurate so a lot of the time when you guys send me your work info critique the main problem that I see you have is your proportions because you don't really follow these simple guidelines but if you do then it'll instantly improve your work so much quicker just by following and realizing you guys might not have known these guidelines of where like each of the feature is relevant to the other features so you can see I'm just adjusting the mouth and the chin now I just wanted to make it look a little bit prettier really I just wanted to make the lips look a bit more curved and not so thick on the top but soon I'm going to be inking it in I'm just adding a few little flyaway bits of hair over the face I really like to add some hair over the face just to make it look a bit more natural and so that the hairstyle isn't so uniformed so now let's get onto the inking process for this I'm just using a normal like fine liner by fabric a style you can use anything you want and what I like to do is I just like to pick out the basic guidelines for the eyes I don't like shade with the pen I just basically go over the lines around the eyes the eyebrows I just make some markings for the direction that the eyebrows are going in I do the nostrils you can do the sides of the nose or nicer tomb and for the mouth I don't do the top the top sort of lid because this is a lot lighter but I do the middle and a bit of the bottom as well I'm gonna go around the chin the neck and I'm also going to be inking in the hair one thing I didn't mention is that the neck kind of starts just a bit inside those outer edges of the face so just start it a little bit within the edge of the head and then just go down and curve it out so with the inking process you want to try and make sure that you're doing it mostly in one continuous line you don't want to take your pen too much off the paper when you're like inking a line really just let it flow it doesn't have to stick or rigidly to the sketch that you did these can just act as guidelines try to keep it really natural and really flowy and for hair it's really nice to have those nice fluid curved lines so try not to start and stop because then if you do start and stop a lot through like doing one strand of hair it's just not going to look really nice and fluid mostly it's just going to look really sort of clunky and you'll be able to tell where you start and stopped it so I liked to thicken up some of the lines normally just to make the main clumps stand out a bit more and I like to add a little bit of detail to show the direction of the hair just give it more volume and once I've done the whole inking process I go for out and I just arrays the initial sketch once you've inked it in you don't want to see all of that sketch underneath and you can see I basically inked all of the main areas apart from that upper lip but because I applied quite a lot of pressure you can still sort of see the ghost of where that upper lip is so now lifting the inking process I like to go in and shade it a little bit just to add make it look a little bit more sort of full and accurate and more like realistic to an extent so the only surprise that I'm using for this is my HB pencil that I used to sketch it out and a blending stump and I'm also going to be using a black colored pencil but you don't have to use that if you don't want to and I basically just lay down a bit the pencil and blend it with the blending stump or I just go straight in with that blending stump and add some shading and I'm just thinking about the areas that are going to be the most contoured in the face so just below the nose is normally quite shadowed and a bit on the sides of the nose there's quite a bit of shading on the upper part of the lip and like I said for the bottom lip it tends to be that highlighted part in the middle of the bottom lip I also like to add some shading around the head so kind of where the hair is covering up the face there's gonna be some shading there and why noticed was using this blending some on the printing paper was actually really smooth and it was very nice so the smoothie your paper is the more smooth or shading is going to be just below the chin so on that neck part there's gonna be a shadow cast from the chin and the bottom of the face so kind of like on below that jawline and there's also going to be a shadow just below the mouth as well and I kind of created the look of where the shadow around the chin would be so the main areas to keep nice and light is the middle of the forehead under the eyes the kind of middle of the nose and the tip of the nose and sort of that main part of the chin as well and just above the keeps bow and like that little middle part of the lips but this depends on the angle that you're doing it from the light source so I really recommend using a reference photo if you want to make it look nice and accurate you want to do lots of shading but you want your shading to still be like accurate you want the shadows to be in the right place then you can still use a reference photo just to figure out where the shadows would be asked in that certain position that you want your character to be in for the darker shadows like the pupils and a bit around the sides of the face I use a black color pencil just to add more depth to make it really stand out and again you can blend the polychromos pencil with the stump a bit as well and you don't have to clean the stump you can just use that straight over it and what I like to do then is just make sure that I raise any bits away from the hair that I wanted and I'll also create a few highlights so you can use the eraser to make sure that every areas that you want to be most highlighted and nice and clean so like those areas that I told you before you might accidentally smudge a bit of the pencil into these areas so you can just go in with a kneaded razor or just a regular eraser and make sure those areas are nice and clean I'm adding some more of the subtle shadows now I also go ahead and I do shade in the hair but I don't show this part I'm gonna be doing another tutorial showing how I draw this type of hair how I color it and ink it so make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss out on that video because that's going to be coming out tomorrow I think so yes they tuned for that one I'm really excited about that so the last thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go in with a white gel pen and just use this to create all of the shiny highlights so for example I'm creating some highlights within the eye so like the tear ducts on a bit of that pupil area and a bit on the waterline as well and on the sort of white of the eye and I create a few little highlights on the top lip and sort of the chin middle of the forehead and it's up to you where you want to place these kind of highlights planning on your lighting source that's really important but that is basically it for this tutorial I really hope you guys enjoyed it let me know if you do want to see more of these sort of basic proportion tutorials because I loved making this one actually it was really fun to make and I'd love making more of these sort of things do you want to see more of like a basic proportions and accurate drawing but more of a realistic type of drawing because this is quite stylized but obviously the proportions apply to realistic drawing even though this was quite stylized like all of the guidelines and proportions that I explained they would apply in like a really realistic drawing but let me know if you want to see the same sort of video but me drawing a really accurate portrait so I hope you enjoyed the video if you want to see more drawing tutorials then I've got lots of real time drawing tutorials on my patreon where I go through how to draw a really accurate portrait in color pencil graphite pencil charcoal using lots of mediums like markers and I show you how to draw animals so make sure to check that out if you enjoyed this tutorial make sure to give it a like and subscribe and I'll see you next time bye guys

Channel: Kirsty Partridge Art

Views: 1,026,021

Keywords: how to draw a face, how to draw faces, how to draw faces for beginners, how to draw faces easy, how to draw face proportions, drawing a face, how to draw a realistic face, drawing faces, basic drawing proportions, how to draw a face step by step, how to draw faces step by step, drawing faces for beginners, how to draw faces step by step for beginners, realistic face drawing, easy face drawing tutorial, face drawing tutorial, basic proportions drawing tutorial, face proportions

Id: smDbiGEsKlc

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2017