How to Draw Faces

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Jay French at jayfrenchstudios.com and I'm going to teach you how to draw faces. To start with on the human face you want to start with an oval for an egg shape which is inverted going down. Don't worry about being too precise because if you are drawing a specific person or at least trying to get a specific look you will refine this shape. Very few people have an actual curved oval face. Line down the middle line down the middle to separate the symmetry of the face. Line approximately down the middle to define the eye line, between the eye line and the chin there will be the nose line, between the nose line and the chin slightly above that you have your mouth line. Now right about in the middle, between the middle line and the outside you make lines where the center of the eye are going to be and these have other purposes as well. This is also going to be approximately where your mouth will finish and you will see how that works out in a minute. Get your eyes in and now the eyes are approximately, there should be basically five eyes or five eye widths, what you what is approximately one, two and a half, one, two and a half so you have a half on each side, one width in the middle and that gives you the approximate area of where you want your eyes. Of course people have different sized eyes, different shaped eyes definitely. You generally want a curve that is sharper on the inside, most eyes are shaped that way and then the bottoms variate quite a bit but generally an even curve or a slightly S'ed curve will do that. You almost never can see the entire iris in an eye unless they're very startled. A good quick way to do a pupil is to just do basically a circle with a circle with a circle, a white circle in it. Your nose bridge, of course noses are different widths so generally you want to show at least on one side depending on where your light source is coming from, it is coming from over here and we are going to have more shadow on this side. Some noses the point is lower than the nostrils and some the nostrils are lower depends on the person's nose but a good general rule if you are not sure is to keep them even. If you want a slight shadow under the nose the lips are of course slightly in the middle with long wide slant down, get the divot under the nose and this works in men as well. A good way to draw lips on men without making them look too feminine is to draw the divot, have the hint of the lip on that side and have the hint of the lip from the corner of the mouth on that side. Bottoms of lips variate in shape. We can have a bracket. We can have a curve similar to the top of the lip and there you have your general human face, add some chisel to the jaw and maybe a little straightness to the chin, a little definition to the chin and of course your eyebrows. That's the basic rules and schematics for drawing the human face."