Q&A for How to Draw Human Faces

One of the top mistakes people make is they make the person look like they are on eye level, like you're looking directly into someone's eyes. It's better to draw the person as if they have bent their head down, or moved it to the right or the left, or are shorter than the artist or taller than them. Try to look in a magazine to find a photograph of somebody that actually has their face eye level with the person who they were speaking to... It's not natural, and it took me a good two hours!

It can really help to find a good art teacher in your area, as they can help you see what you're missing. We have a tendency to not actually see what's in front of us—you have to develop an artist's eye first. An art teacher can help you see more than you've seen in the past, whether you're looking at an object or a person.

Look at them. My favorite technique that I learned for drawing anything, but especially as a good technique to draw portraits, is blind contour drawing. This is an exercise where you look at your subject and you cannot look at your paper or lift up your pencil while you draw. You are training your eye to talk to your hand. This is a fundamental skill that really helps with drawing portraiture in particular.

Women generally have slightly bigger eyes, thinner lips, a shorter nose, and well-defined eyebrows. Try including some of these features while drawing. You can also add darker lashes. Lastly, try using more curves while drawing female faces, and more angles while drawing male faces,

Emotions are easy to create once you have mastered drawing the basic features of a human face. The eyes, position of eyebrows and the mouth can be modified and experimented with to crate expressions. For better results, try emulating the expressions in comic cartoons and then modifying them in the above styles suggested in the article.

Draw a soft v shape for the tip, making sure you have enough room for the nostrils. Make two small circles on the sides of the tip. Erase uneccessary lines. You should also take note that nostrils are a bit more like the upper half of a circle around your tip.

Just do the same thing, but instead of eyebrows, put the rounds of glasses, and on top of the ears continue the rest of the glasses, erasing unnecessary lines.

Under the chin and maybe around the nose. Say you have the sun on the left side of a paper, shade the right side of the face and under the chin until you see fit.

Look at yourself in the mirror. Many professionals have models to draw, you can use yourself as a model in a mirror.

You can draw a football shape, so it's more even. You can also use a drawing device or outline an object.

Adding wrinkles around the mouth and eyes will make them older. You could also try making the features bigger and using mature hairstyles (like avoiding pigtails).

It depends on what type of nose it is. For example, you could draw the top of the nose a bit wider, and space the bottom out a bit.

Make lots of short lines to make the small hairs an the head repeat until you are happy with it.

Shade the eye as you normally would, then use an eraser to erase a small section to create a white space. You can also use a white gel pen, but they can be tricky to work with, so I'd recommend sticking with an eraser to start out.

It's best if you could consult a picture of that person, whether an actual photograph or an image online.

There are some good tips in Draw Realistic Hair .

Just keep practicing, and soon your faces and other drawings will look amazing.

If you want it to be realistic, you can shade right under the nose to make it look like an indent in the face. Or you can leave it blank or cover it with a mustache.

You can look for tutorials for kids that break things down even more and that you can re-watch as many times as you need to.

I suggest taking a picture of yourself (or using a previously taken picture of yourself) and using it as a reference. A phone would be a good picture-taker because you can zoom in on the photo and get a better view of the details.

You can make the eyes get a little bigger or rounder. you can also put a slight arc under the eyes for the rising of the cheeks.

Just focus more on the picture than your drawing, and draw it several times until you get a good one.