The Face

1. The Face: Many people complain about not being able to draw the human face realistically. I am occasionally one of those people. Although I consider my face drawings pretty good, that doesn't mean it's easy for me. It usually takes me a long time to get it right. The trick to drawing a face is to draw shapes of shadows, instead of drawing lines. Drawing very light lines in order to get the general shape of the features down is a good idea, but make sure you don't draw them too dark. Then, just focus on what the shadows actually look like and where they are. Once you have a light outline of where the eyes and eyebrows will go, start drawing the shadow that is underneath and on top of the eye. Don't worry about leaving the light spots light, since it'll be more efficient to erase them out once you're done shading. Remember that when drawing eyebrows and eyelashes, individual hairs are seldom defined. See how in my drawing below only a few of the tips of the eyelashes are defined? The rest should just be shaded dark. For eyebrows, color them in dark, and then use a kneaded eraser to erase out a few tiny little lines near the inner eyebrow. Don't forget that eyes are not all shaped the same! It's important to really study the small angles in individual eyes, because the shape of the eyes can change who your entire picture looks like.

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When drawing the nose, start by lightly drawing the curve in between the eyes up to the eyebrows, and the straighter part of the bridge just to get the length of the nose right. Then draw the bottom of the nose by drawing the middle part as a small u-shape whose ends extend into ovals for the nostrils. Then shade the shape of the shadow underneath to define the shape of the nose.

It is particularly important to use this shapes instead of lines strategy when drawing the mouth, because lips do not usually have a natural outline to them. They are just shapes whose outline is defined either by the very thin highlighted area around the top lip, or the dark shadow underneath the bottom lip.

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Then start by the corners of the eyes and continue shading down to define the cheek bones. Towards the beginning of your drawing, it will probably look a little funny, and you may think it could not possibly turn out well, but the further you get, the more it will come together, like so: :)

P.S. Remember that when drawing a face realistically, the lighting will not always allow every feature on the face to be defined perfectly. Like in my drawing, how the left side of the nose is not as defined as the right. But that's okay, because that's what makes it look more realistic.