How to Draw a Face

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French, of Jay French studios.com. Today, I'm going to show you how to draw a face. First, let's get a basic of a head, of course this is your, essentially your, egg shape, or your irregular ellipse, large on top small on bottom. You can get to precision of features of a jaw line after you get, at least, the basic shape down, but just to give you the basics, you want a line down the center, vertically, then this gives you the symmetry of the face, you want to line, pretty much down the center, maybe slightly below center, is your eye line. Pretty much between half way between that line and the chin is your nose line,half way between the nose line and the chin is your mouth line, these, of course, can variate between person to person depending on their features, some peoples mouth and nose are closer together, some people have longer or shorter noses. Half way in between the center line and the outside, you'll have the center point of where your eyes are going to be. Now, an eye is approximately, the entirety of the eye, is approximately, four of them should fit across, so essentially, what you want is the length of one in the middle and then a half of one on the outside, on each side, and that will give you your approximate eye size. This also, gives you your measurements from your nose to the center eye line is where your ears go. Now eyes have a muirette of shapes, so we're going to do just a basic one. You almost, never see an entire iris in the eye, unless someone is really startled, just doing a basic there, don't forget the tear ducts have a little indent for realism, upper eyelid is always present, but always more common is the lower eyelid, eye brows generally, not always, but generally are thicker towards the inside of the face, and thinner on the outside of the face, almost always come down a bit on the outside of the face. Now, your nose is controlled, what you see of the nose, is controlled by your light source. If you have a straight on light source you'll actually get shadows on both sides, but that's very rare and difficult to draw, of course, there are usually multiple light sources, but we're going to do a standard left side, up and slightly forward, and that gives us more of a shadow of the bridge of the nose on the right side against the light and less of one facing the light, and just like any feature noses come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes the tip of the nose can come lower on some people, sometimes the nostrils come down lower to the tip of the nose it all depends on the person, these are the basics. And mouths are the same way, usually, this is a good standard shape, but sometimes, the mouth, actually, appears straight. Some people, even when their mouths are at rest they look like their smiling, that's just the way that their mouth is shaped, some people just the opposite. Now, we're going to give this more of a strong jaw, and we're going to give it kind of a squarish chin. Something that is often missed, you want that edge of realism, is to get some shadow between the bottom lip and top of the chin. There you have your basic lesson in how to draw a face."