Face Tutorial

 Hello once again, 

After a couple weeks of just letting my creativity fly and creating whatever I want, I decided to bring it back to the other main idea of this project, improving my drawing skills. I have always struggled with creating the humanoid face, which I’m sure everyone has, the face is probably the hardest thing to draw on a human, even in front of hands! Between the complex eyes and drawing lips that don’t look like they’re from rue paul’s drag race (unless you are trying for that), the face provides many challenges to the artist, unless you have a good tutorial.

I used this youtube video tutorial to improve my drawing skills, it detailed the step-by-step process to draw human faces which I will try to show you, but I would recommend watching the video if you are interested. I have looked at a couple drawing tutorials in the past and they all were pretty similar so I’m going to assume that this is the basic method for drawing realistic faces.

First of all, you start with a circle and a plus through it. This circle will become the top of the head and the plus outlines the center of the face (the vertical line) and where the jawbone starts (the horizontal line). Then you take a second to think about how long you want your face to be and draw a small horizontal line where you want the chin to be. Then you connect the horizontal plus line and the chin line with two jawbone lines. You can make these very geometrical now and stylize them later or you could try and shape out the face now. A lot of these steps are kind of vague in this way, allowing you to make your own decisions about what you want your face to look like. Next, you erase the horizontal plus line and the part of the circle that is now inside the face. Then, you draw a horizontal line from the top of the jawline or wherever you want to put your eyes. You also need three more lines for the bottom of the nose, the bottom of the lips, and the hairline. Next, you draw two short parallel lines on either side of the middle of the face line, these are the sides of your eyes. You then draw the eyes in the bounds of these lines with the ends of the eyes touching the parallel lines and eyebrows above them. Don’t erase the parallel lines just yet, you need those to draw shadows for the eyes in a later step. Next, you extend the middle eye lines straight down to the nose line and two lines stemming from the intersection of the eye line and the middle of the face line, going down to the intersection of the nose line and the extended eye lines, you then draw your nose in between these lines. I noticed that this tutorial is to make a face with perfect proportions but if you want to make your face look more like a real person then try messing up purposely. Like extending the nose outside of the guidelines, moving the hairline up or down, making your eyes lopsided, all these things add more character to your character and give them something noticeable which I believe is very important with character design (but more on that in another entry). The hairline is supposed to line up with the ears and the outside parallel line but taking liberties with how you draw it will make the character look better.

I ended up really liking this tutorial and will definitely use it in the future. Until next time, Character Design-Time.