How to Draw Faces from the Side

Hey! I'm Darlene, and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. Today, I'm going to show you my new method for drawing faces from the side. It's more simple and realistic than my old version. I'll also cover different facial feature variations, and just for fun, I'll show you how to make your faces look older as well, which will be in a part 2 video. Let's get started. For my setup, I'm using the Cintiq Pro 16 drawing tablet, Photoshop, and a brush called Pixel Stains. Let's create a new layer called Construction, where all of our messy construction lines will go. And then create a new layer called Faces, where our finalized drawings will go. I'm going to select the Construction layer, and a blue brush color, so you can easily tell the difference between the construction lines and the actual drawing. If you're following these steps with pencil and paper, just keep all your construction lines as light as possible, because you'll need to erase them eventually. Okay, let's start with the male. Step 1 is to draw an oval that is somewhat close to the shape of a circle. Just imagine a circle that is slightly squished. Beneath it, let's draw a boundary line for the chin. Measure your oval this way, and then rotate it vertically. Draw the boundary line quite a bit longer than that. The exact length isn't very important, so try not to get hung up on that, because we all have unique bone structures, or width-to-height ratios. On the left side of our oval, let's draw a line going almost straight down, ending at the chin. And then draw a curve all the way to the other side of the oval, or the back of the head. Now we have a somewhat raindrop-like shape. This is the base structure for our male face. We're going to draw 5 lines going through the head, and then we'll get to the fun stuff. Draw a vertical line going down the middle of the oval, and then all the way through the rest of the head. To remove distraction, you can erase the bottom of your oval. Now from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, let's split the head in half using a horizontal line. We're going to do the same thing from here to here. And then let's also split this section in half. You can also use a ruler for this. Just measure the space, and divide your number by 2. These lines are for the eyes, nose, and lips. Right above the nose line, draw a small circle. To the left of that, draw another. The angle that they're positioned and the spacing will play a big role in the shape of his nose, something that you can experiment with. I'll give you a few examples later on, near the end of the tutorial. This would be an upturned nose. If I move the left circle down, we'll get a downturned nose. If you're working in pencil, make sure your construction lines are light enough that you can clearly see them, and easily erase them later. We can now work off of these construction lines to create our face. I'm just going to lighten this layer using the opacity slider, and then select the layer called faces. Now I'm going to switch to a black brush. Above the eyeline, draw a shallow curve that is concave. Extend the top part out, and then up, joining back with the construction lines to form the brow bone and forehead. Right here, I'm just making my brush smaller using the button on my stylus. Let's go back down here and draw the nose, which comes down and wraps around the circle. I'm going to end the stroke in between the two circles. Around this circle, let's draw a small bracket shape to form the wing of his nose. To draw the nostril, create a loopy shape, or a rotated number 6, that sits between the two circles. Next, we're going to draw the lips, resting above the line labeled lips. I'll start with the top one. Extend this stroke downwards, curve it out, and then in towards the face. For the opening of the mouth, you can draw any line you want. It can angle down, up, straight across, or up and down, like I'm about to draw here. You can draw a small curve at the end like so. For an average-sized mouth, try to keep your line fairly short. I usually don't like to go too far past the nose. Draw any shape you want for the bottom lip, making sure it sits above the line labeled lips. I'm bringing the stroke in towards the line that marks the front of his face, and then curving out again to form his chin. I'm just roughly following the construction lines. The construction lines provide a rough structure that you can follow, but you don't need to hold yourself to that exact shape. You can get really creative with your chins. It can go straight down, angle inwards, or resemble the shape of a boot. You can also do a lot with the lips. I'll show you a few examples throughout the video. Let's move on to the eye. Where the eye line goes through the face, we're going to draw his eye, and shape it like a triangle. If you visualize or draw a straight line from the wing of his nose going up, we're just going to draw to the right of that line. Create a curve or a line that is angled in at the bottom, and add the other two sides to your triangle. Add a few eyelashes. Draw your iris. I'm just making a dark U-shape. You can also add an eyelid crease at the top, which roughly follows the shape of his eyelid. Now the eyebrow is going to be right above the eye. Let's not extend it too far beyond the tail of his eye. Finally, moving on to the ear. It sits roughly between the eyebrow and the base of the nose. It's also usually a bit slanted. So in the construction layer, I'm going to draw a slant like so. Now the ear kind of has like an oval shape that's narrower at the bottom. I'm switching back to the layer called faces, and switching my brush color back to black. Let's start our first stroke where the diagonal line meets the eye line. This is roughly where the ear is connected to the head. The thing about ears is that everyone has a slightly unique shape to theirs, and so there's no one definitive shape. All I can say is that the top portion is usually wider than the bottom. So as we approach the earlobe, create a more narrow shape compared to the top. The end of my stroke is curved up. For the inner details, find the center of this diagonal line and start your stroke, creating a wavy shape like so. And then bring your stroke up and around the main body of the ear, and end it over here near the top left corner. I forgot to extend this one down. From here, draw a line that follows the top perimeter of his ear. We're almost done. The jaw is gonna run from the ear to the chin. Extend this stroke over to the right, close to the vertical line, and then curve it up to the ear. The rest of his head can be drawn by loosely following the construction lines to form the shape of the skull. When you reach this particular area at the back of the head, draw a line that goes almost straight down. From here, angle it in a little bit. And then around here, where you're sort of past the ear, curve your stroke out to form the neck. To figure out how thick to draw the neck, just measure his face from the front of his mouth to the bottom of the ear, or the vertical line. Transfer that measurement down here, and then draw the front of the neck along with a slight bump for the Adam's apple. Here's what it looks like without all the construction lines. If you're drawing this in pencil, you can erase your construction lines now. Before I move on to the female, I just want to demonstrate how you can make your character appear more masculine, less masculine, and a few other modifications. First, let's see how we can make him more masculine. And what I mean by masculine is how much the individual was exposed to the male predominant hormone called testosterone during the early stages of life, which affects how their bone and cartilage is developed. I'm just going to cover a few things. Now, the first thing that comes to mind is a strong brow bone. So that just means drawing a brow that comes forward more. The nose might also be bigger with slightly more bone and cartilage. The jaw is usually more defined with less fat tissue. This part might go straight down with a sharper, more angular corner. The Adam's apple might also be larger, indicating a deeper voice. This is unrelated to the testosterone thing, but his face doesn't really look balanced right now. And what I mean by balance is if you look at his face, your eyes might immediately focus on the nose because it's very large and prominent. So what I'm going to do is make his nose smaller so that your attention, your focus, is evenly distributed across the entire face so that there's no longer a single feature that steals the show. Let's remove that bump from the bridge of the nose and reduce the tip so his nose is slightly smaller. That definitely did the trick. I'm just going to take it a tiny step further and at the same time, how about let's try a pointier nose? I'm quite happy with that. I think it creates more of a balance with the rest of his face. You can modify other things as well. Just remember that the smallest tweaks will go a long way. So for example, I want to make his expression more serious. It's as simple as pushing the corner of his lip down by a few millimeters. Nothing major, but big difference. So far, we've made him more masculine. Let's do the reverse now. Push the brow bone back in, creating a shallower curve. Maybe bring that chin bone in as well. Introduce a little more fat tissue under the neck, creating a softer shape. Reduce the size of his Adam's apple for a higher voice. Let's give him a less angular jawline. The more fat tissue someone has around their jaw, the less defined it will appear. Which is what I'm going for here. To really take away some definition, you can lighten the jawline significantly. Let's make the nose a tiny, tiny bit smaller by reducing the tip. And you can even bring the bridge down, creating a curved slope instead of a straight one. Now let's have a look at the before and after. Let's draw the female now. I'm selecting the construction layer again. Again, draw an oval that is pretty close to a circle. I'm trying to make it the same size as his. Let's draw her face a little shorter than his. Remember how we measured the length of the oval and extended that measurement to get the chin boundary? We're going to do the same thing for her, except draw her head just a little shorter than his. You can play around with the height to width ratio if you want, or use the same set of construction lines we drew for the male. Just don't get too caught up in this step. Human head shapes are very different across the world, so one size isn't going to fit all. So you should experiment to see what works best for the face you want to create. As for this tutorial, it's just a generalized method that you can learn to tweak as you get comfortable with drawing faces. Okay, let's move along. Draw the front of her face using a line that goes from the left of the oval to the chin. Complete the head shape by connecting the back of her head to her chin. Draw a vertical line down the oval center, and straight through the rest of the head. And then we're going to split the head in half, from here to here. And then again from here to here. And in between here. These lines are for the eyes, nose, and lips. Remember how I was talking about the different nose angles? When you draw the two circles for her nose, keep in mind that the position of the left circle, which is the tip of the nose, determines the nose angle. It could be pointing down, perfectly horizontal, or pointing up. I'm not going to go too deep into this because it's a topic for a different video. But if you play with the height, distance, and size of the circles, you'll get a bunch of really unique shapes. I'm going to show you a few examples later on when I do some rough sketches. Anyways, for this character, I'm going to draw an upward pointing nose. So it's basically the opposite of his nose. And I'm also drawing the two circles closer together, without touching, for a more petite nose. One with less height. Okay, we don't need any more construction lines for now. So I'm going to switch to the faces layer, change my brush to black, and let's draw her brow bone. Females with average levels of testosterone, which is a male-dominant hormone present in both sexes, might have a brow bone or ridge that is more shallow, less prominent. So when you draw her brow, you might want to create a very shallow curve. Start with a little concave shape that is located on top, or going through the eyeline. Then extend it around your oval to form her forehead. You can of course create a stronger brow, but I'm aiming for a big contrast between my two faces. Continue your strokes down towards the left circle, forming the tip of the nose. A large circle will give you a large bulbous nose. Wrap around and under, stopping right in between the two circles. To the right, draw a bracket shape that wraps around the right side of the other circle. And then in between the two circles, draw a loopy shape, or a rotated number 6, to form the nostril. Draw her lips in between the two lines labeled nose and lips. The upper lip is attached to the nose, so extend your stroke down to form the lip. And bring it back in towards the face, to form the opening of the mouth. For the male, I drew a line that went up and then down, kind of like the letter A. For her, I'm just going to draw a downward stroke. Under the top lip, start drawing the bottom lip, using any shape or stroke direction you want. I'm bringing my stroke in towards the intersection, where the blue construction line labeled lips meets the face. And then I'm curving my stroke out again, to form the chin. If you imagine a line going straight up from the nose's edge, the point where it intersects with the eye line is where we will begin to draw the eye. You can draw the eye a little more to the right if you prefer. The only thing I'm going to do differently here is curl her eyelashes. If you want a more feminine looking face, you can make the eye larger. So, less narrow. Let's draw her eyebrow right above the eye, and try not to extend it too far past the tail of her eye. We're going to draw her ear the same way we drew his, so I'm not going to cover the steps again. Basically, the top of her ear is roughly aligned to the eyebrow, and the bottom part is aligned to the base of her nose. The ear kind of resembles an oval, except the bottom portion of the ear is usually more narrow than the top. If you want to refer to a certain part in the video, all the timestamps can be found in the description. For her jaw, we're going to slant it down from the ear, instead of going straight down. I'm aiming for a softer, less angular shape. Draw the rest of her head by roughly following our construction lines, the same way we drew his. When you get down to about here, near the nose and lip lines, angle your stroke out to form the neck. Again, the width of the neck can be determined by measuring the distance from the front of the mouth to the bottom of the ear, or the middle of the head. Females also have Adam's apples, but it's quite subtle, so I'm only going to draw a tiny little bump there. Alright, once you're done, get rid of all the construction lines. Once all of those distracting blue lines are gone, you might want to have a look at your characters again, and make some tweaks. I'm only going to make a few changes to the female, nothing major. I'm just testing out a bunch of things, not sure if they'll work out or not, just seeing what looks good. And not everything will work, but experimenting is a big part of the learning process. The smallest changes that you make to a face can change it completely. It's my favorite step. Trying different noses, chins, jaws, lips, eyebrows, forehead slopes, the modifications are endless. And even if you don't quite know what you're doing, like me most of the time, just trust that you'll figure it out. So if you drew a character that you don't quite like, don't throw it out yet. Make some modifications to learn why you don't like it, what went wrong, or learn how it can be better executed next time. I found that when I started to view each mistake as a stepping stone instead of something embarrassing that I wanted to quickly sweep under the rug, I started to learn a lot more. Now drawing something that you're proud of might be a slight difference of only two millimeters here and there. So if you think your drawing is trash, it might just be a few millimeters from perfect. And also, this tweaking process is really fun. If you want to try it too, but you don't want to risk your drawing, just pause the video, trace your screen, and have fun. Okay, let's give them some hair now. To draw the hairline, pick a size you want for the forehead. Start your stroke somewhere here for a small forehead, or right here for an average one, or way up here for a receding hairline. Pick a starting point. I'm going to start here, bring my stroke in, and end it somewhere in between the eyebrow and the ear. Now angle your stroke down and out towards the tail of his eyebrow. Before I reach the eyebrow, I'm going to angle the stroke towards the ear, and then down along the side to form the sideburn. Create a thick or thin sideburn, and then wrap your strokes up to the top of the ear. Continue your stroke to the other side of his head. I'm drawing an L shape, but you can do something like this, or like this, for example. From here, you can draw any hairstyle you want, or just leave it as is, so it's like a buzz cut. To keep this video on point, I won't go into much more detail. Just remember to give it a realistic amount of volume. Follow a similar hairline for your female, except use light feathered strokes to draw her hairline, because these hairs tend to be a lot thinner, lighter, and shorter, creating a softened edge. When you get down to the sideburn, draw some stray hairs that kind of wisp together at the ends. I'm giving her a medium length hairstyle that will cover the nape of the neck. Now, if you want to tie your hair up or cut it short, remember that the edge of the hair should be less defined. Lots of baby hairs can be drawn to create that softened look, but of course, this doesn't apply to all hairstyles. A hairstylist can always buzz those small hairs off, creating a clean, hard edge. Anyway, I digress. After you're finished, the top and back of the head can be erased. If you want to learn how to age your faces, check out the bonus video. I'll link it up in the description. Don't be discouraged if your drawing doesn't turn out well the first time you try this. I'd recommend trying it a couple more times before calling it quits. I've started a new layer, and I'm just going to throw some ideas onto the canvas. I think it's a really fun exercise that helps stretch those creative muscles. Here's an underbite, where the bottom lip comes out further than the top lip. When drawing construction lines for the ear, you can use an oval to get the rough ear shape going. This one is very generic, which is kind of boring to do for an exercise like this. Playing it safe isn't very fun here, so I'm going to exaggerate features a little more. Here's an extreme downward angled nose. I've angled the mouth down for a big frown. When I'm drawing rough sketches like this, it's fun to draw features and characters that I wouldn't normally draw because there's less commitment involved with each sketch. So if it doesn't turn out, I don't feel as bad since I only committed about 10 minutes to drawing each of them. For this guy, let's try drawing a smaller circle for the nose tip. A large circle on the left will result in a larger, rounder tip. I'm also going to push his chin inward. I think this one is my favorite so far. I really like his unique features and his determined expression. I'm going to draw a female now with an extra large bulbous nose, large lips, and a very round chin. So do you guys want a challenge? Once you've gotten this method down and can reproduce it a few times, fill a page full of faces like I'm doing now. Rough sketches. Give yourself a timer of, say, 40 minutes and see how many faces you can draw in that time period. This is a speed challenge. It will help you distill the method and strip it down to only the most crucial steps that help you personally. Maybe you'll find that you can draw the ear without construction lines at all. Or maybe you can draw the head shape without taking any measurements. Or you can draw the nose without the circles. Heck, maybe you can draw the entire face without any construction lines whatsoever. Do the challenge as many times as you want. And when you're done, send me your sketches. I'd love to see all of your creative work. If you're a patron, head over to my Patreon blog and download some pre-drawn construction lines if you want something to practice on. Head over to part 2 if you want to learn how to make your faces older. It's actually very easy and fun to do. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please give that like button a click and share it with your friends. If you want to see more, click on my face to subscribe to my channel and then hit the bell icon so you can get notified whenever a new video comes out. Thanks for watching!