How to Draw a Person Looking Up

Draw faces in perspective using foreshortening techniques.

An artist must foreshorten the features and proportions of the face in linear perspective to create the illusion that the features are turned toward the sky. The eyes of a human face seen straight-on are halfway between the top of the head of the chin, the nose is halfway between the eyes and the chin and the mouth is halfway between the nose and chin. These proportional distances are compressed in a drawing of a person looking up.

Things You'll Need

• Pencil
• Paper
• Eraser

Instructions

1. Draw a person looking straight ahead to become familiar with proportion. Draw an oval to the left of the center of a piece of paper. Bisect the oval with the vertical line. Bisect the vertical line with a horizontal line. The vertical line represents the middle of the face; the horizontal line is the eye-level line. Draw a horizontal line slightly above the halfway point between the eye-level and the top of the head to represent the hairline. Draw a horizontal line halfway between the eye-level line and the bottom of the oval. This is the nose-level line. Draw a horizontal line halfway between the nose-level line and the bottom of the oval. This is the mouth-level line. Sketch the eyes, hair, nose and mouth of the face seen straight-on.

2. Draw an oval to the right of the first oval. Add the guide lines as before. The bottom of the oval represents the chin, which on a face turned up will be level with the mouth-level line. Draw an upside-down "V" with a rounded apex touching the mouth-level line and a wide space between the bottom ends to represent the chin and jaw of a person looking up.

3. Add the mouth. Draw a small arc bulging upward at the nose level line to represent the center line of the mouth. Draw a thin bottom lip and a thicker upper lip to give the illusion of foreshortening.

4. Draw the nose. Sketch a round-cornered triangle slightly above the top lip to represent the bottom plane of the nose seen looking up. Draw two thin ovals inside the triangle to represent the nostrils. Add the contours of the tip of the nose and the outer nostrils to complete the nose.

5. Draw the eyes just above the tip of the nose. Draw the bottom and top eyelids curved like sad mouths. Draw the pupils and irises as horizontal ovals to represent the foreshortened perspective of their circular shape.

6. Draw the eyebrows just above the upper eyelids of the eyes. Add the hair and hairline the same distance above the eyebrows as the space between the bottom eyelid and the top of the eyebrow of the foreshortened face. Erase the guidelines and darken the final lines.

Tips & Warnings

• Practice drawing people looking up by tracing photographs to get a feel for foreshortened perspective.

References

• DrawingLab.Evanstown.edu: Perspective Applied to the Figure
• DrawingLab.Evansville.edu: Standard Human Facial Proportions
• Media.AcademyArt.edu: How to Draw a Head: Proportions

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• "Drawing: Faces"; Walter Foster 2003