Draw a face
Drawing human faces can initially feel like a difficult activity because novice artists lack knowledge of facial proportions. Aggravating this phenomenon is the innate human ability to detect even the slightest change from the face's expected appearance. Drawing aids exist to overcome these problems. Many facial features can be approximated with simple shapes such as triangles. Using such shapes helps you remember draw a face. Simple shapes also help you break down nature's complex visual information into simpler, easy-to-render lines.
Instructions
1. Make guidelines for drawing the oval of a face in front view: Lightly draw a vertical line at least four inches high, then draw a horizontal line through the first line's center. Make the horizontal line, which will be the eye guideline, two-thirds the length of the vertical line.
2. Lightly draw an oval surrounding Step 1's guidelines. Be sure the oval arcs smoothly through the top, left, bottom and right endpoints of the guidelines. This step completes the main face oval.
3. Make guidelines to help you position the facial features: Draw horizontal lines at the following locations:
Nose tip guideline: the midpoint of the lower half of Step 1's vertical line. Verify that this line is one-quarter up the length of the vertical line, measured from the bottom.
Mouth guideline: the midpoint of the distance from the face's bottom to the nose tip guideline.
Eye guidelines: a downward-pointing equilateral triangle whose bottom point is the nose tip guideline.
4. Draw ovals for the eyes. Position the ovals on the outside end of the left and right points of Step 3's triangle.
5. Draw pupils---circles within the eye ovals---such that there's a small space between the eye circle bottoms and the oval bottom. Also, the circle top should be slightly hidden by the oval's top.
6. Form the bottom left of the nose: Draw a short line segment whose bottom is the nose tip guideline from Step 3. Make the segment angle up and left at a 45-degree angle.
7. Complete the nose's left side: Draw a "C" whose bottom point is Step 6's top point.
8. Form the nose's right side: Hold a small mirror up to the face oval's vertical guideline such that the mirror's nose curve connects with the actual curve you completed in Step 7. Remove the mirror and draw the image you saw in it.
9. Form the ears: Draw a slightly tilted oval that spans the distance from the top of the eye oval to the bottom of the nose. Draw this tilted oval on the left and right sides of the main face oval.
10. Draw the mouth: Draw an elongated "U" that sits on Step 3's second guideline. Draw an elongated "M" above the "U" and connect the end points to the "U"s endpoints.
11. Add eyebrows by drawing slim crescents slightly above each eye.
12. Complete the face by adding hair. Hold your pencil nearly horizontal to the page to enable strokes with the full length of the pencil lead. Then, apply long, even strokes to the inside of the face oval's top half.