How to Draw Faces

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura Pace. I'm here at Asel Art Supply and today I'm going to give you a quick lesson on how to draw faces. This is a very formal like way of drawing faces, but you'll find that these proportions work pretty well, even though there's a lot of variation in human faces, most of them are going to comply pretty well with this diagram of proportions. What I drew first was just an egg shape that's broader at the top, narrower at the bottom and then I divided my egg shape into four equal parts. I drew a vertical line and a horizontal line and then, I divided those lines by drawing a dot right there, and a dot right there, half way across both of those segments. And, then I divided the face again by drawing a little line about half way between the middle of the face and the bottom of the chin, and then I drew another line that's half way between that dot and the chin, so that one's about a quarter of the way down. So, next I came over here and on my two marks on my horizontal line I drew in two little eyeballs, or pupils, they're really small enough to be eye pupils. On my mark that's about half way down the bottom part of the face, I drew in a little detail for the nose, that's where the nose is going to sit. And, my other mark that I made, that's about a quarter of the way up from the chin is the bottom of the bottom lip, and then I drew another line above that to tell me where the mid line of the lips is going to be. I came down here to my next face and gave it a little bit more detail, like I drew in more of the mouth shape, gave the nose a little bit more definition, drew in a neck, I detailed the eyes by drawing upper eyelids, and the iris of the eyes and also making those two little shapes for the bridge of the nose. And, then I located the persons ears, which is you'll notice, the top of them is just at the top of the eye, and the bottom of them stops at the bottom of the nose line, and I also drew in a little hairline for this girl. On my next drawing I gave her even more details by coloring in her hair, drawing a cast shadow underneath those bangs, drawing in eyebrows, gave the eyes some more details, like eyelashes, and continued to give some more contour and definition to the nose and the mouth, she's beginning to look like a real human face now. When you see the face from the side, you can kind of diagram that out by drawing a circle that intersects with the square here. And, you can see that this circle expresses the roundness of the top and the back of the skull, this square encloses the nose and the chin and this mouth line is about half way down the square. The eye line is about half way across the square. So, that's a short lesson on how to draw a face. A good way to draw faces is to practice, practice drawing faces when you're waiting for a bus, when you're people watching, draw some faces from still photographs that you might have, get photographs out of magazines or catalogs of models and make tracings of them, and you'll see there's a lot of variations in the human face."