How to Draw Faces

Hey! I'm Darlene and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. In this video, I'll show you how to draw a male and female face from scratch. Then I'll demonstrate how some easy modifications can affect the overall look of the face. Let's start with a male face. First, draw a circle. Try to make your construction lines as light as possible. Next, make a line through the center vertically and horizontally. Measure half the circle's diameter and add it to the bottom to get the chin. Now draw the cheeks and jawline. Draw a line down the whole face vertically. We don't need the horizontal line anymore, so let's get rid of that. Now we're going to split the entire head in half by drawing a horizontal line going through the very center. Split the bottom section of the face in half and then in half again. Let's do the same thing with the top portion of the head. These lines are for the eyes, nose, lips, and hair. On the eyeline, split your face into five equal sections, taking the full width of the head into account. Draw your eyes in the appropriate spaces. For a more detailed tutorial on drawing eyes, noses, and lips, check out my other videos linked down in the description. I'm just going to give this guy some thick eyebrows, not too curved, and keeping them close to the eyes for a calm facial expression. Now let's add the nose. Draw a line coming down from the inner corner of each eye. This gives us a nice set of boundaries to draw within. For a medium-length nose, I'm going to draw the nose a little higher than the nose line. You can play with the positioning to see how it affects the way your character looks. I'll show you some examples near the end of the video. If you're stuck on this step, check out the tutorial above. For the mouth, draw your boundary lines coming from the center of each eye. Directly below the nose, draw a triangle that stretches down to the line labeled lips. Place your cupid's bow a fair distance from the nose. Below that, draw the opening of the mouth while staying within the boundaries. Define the corners of the mouth, and then connect them to the cupid's bow to form the top lip. At the triangle's base, draw the bottom lip. Finally, define the opening of the mouth by drawing a wavy line starting in the middle of the triangle. For the hair, start at the line labeled hair and draw the sides and sideburns. I like to draw the top part between these two lines. Males tend to have hairlines that are very angular and well-defined. Let's give this guy a cool, trendy hairstyle. Long at the top and shorter at the sides. I almost forgot about the ears. Between the eye line and nose line, draw your two ears. You can make someone look skinnier by defining their cheeks. Let's give him a chiseled jawline with a dimpled chin. And let's also give him a thick neck. So that's my method for drawing a basic male face. Now I'm going to have a little fun and change up some of his features to make him look more masculine. I think males generally have less prominent lips, so let's remove a layer of graphite to make the mouth really subtle. Adding some shading underneath the mouth to bring out that chin. That was actually really effective. Let's also give the nose some sharper angles and a darker nose bridge. And let's see what happens by changing only the mouth. Keep your lines fairly light so you can easily erase any part of the face when you want to. This is the thing I love about sketching. You can constantly revise your work until you're satisfied. By the way, my lines are usually lighter than this, but I'm just trying to make them really dark so you can clearly see what I'm doing. If you want your character to look more chill and relaxed, make the eyes narrower so you can see less of the iris. The more visible the iris is, the more alert or intense your character will look. I really like how chill he looks now. I'm going to bring that jawline out a little bit. And just gonna apply a bit of shading to bring out his chiseled features. Alright, let's look at his total transformation thus far. Okay, we'll go back to this later. Let's draw a female face. Draw a circle with a line going through the center vertically and horizontally. Measure half of the circle and then add it to the bottom. Except this time, draw the chin a little higher. Get rid of the horizontal line inside the circle when you're done with it. I usually like to draw females with narrow faces and small chins. Let's draw a line down the center vertically. Draw a horizontal line going through the center of the entire head. Split the bottom section of the head in half and then in half again. And do the same thing for the top portion. Again, let's split the head into five equal sections along the line labeled eyes. Remember to take the full width of the head into account when you're doing this step. Let's give her a pair of thin, curvy eyebrows. She doesn't look very happy, so I'll have to go back and fix that later. On to the nose. Draw your boundary lines again, coming down from the inner corner of each eye. Let's give her a medium length nose by drawing it above the line labeled nose. Compared to the face on the left, the lines used to draw her nose are much more smooth. No sharp angles. It's also more narrow. For the mouth, draw your boundary lines coming from the center of each eye and place your triangle directly below the nose, resting it on the line labeled lips. Start with the cupid's bow. Draw the opening of the mouth, the corners, and then connect everything together. For the ears, draw them roughly between the eyes and the nose. Now, moving on to the hairline. Females have softer, less defined hairlines. Let's draw a smooth line around the top portion of the head, giving the forehead a rounded shape instead of a rectangular one. Draw the rest of the hair. We'll give her a narrow neck. I'm going to erase these construction lines so we can swap out some facial features to make her look happier. You can keep these guidelines if you need it for reference. I just want to clean things up a little bit here. I think the reason she looks so sad and angry is because her eyes are squeezed together at the ends. So let's open those eyes right up. That is so much better. She looks more relaxed. She actually looks pretty serious now instead of angry. And all I did was change a single feature. You know what? In the beginning, I thought I'd have to change her eyebrows too, but most if not all of her sadness came from the eyes. This is a great exercise to learn about how each feature can affect a character's emotions, even through the most subtle changes. Just adding some more details and shading. I made the nose bridge look soft by giving it some light shading. If you compare the two nose bridges, the one on the left is quite a bit darker, making the eyes look deeper. And it also brings the brow bone forward. Okay, let's bring our focus back over here. There's no detail on the tip of the nose, and the lips are shaded in a way to make them look full instead of flat. Let's go back to the guy and turn him into a Southeast Asian. I don't know why, but I like drawing the guy more than the girl. Let me give him some eyes where the outside corners are slanting up. For the nose, I'll make the tip less pointy and smooth out the bridge. I'm Vietnamese, and from my observation, most Vietnamese men have pretty thick and defined lips. Kind of like these ones. And I could keep them, but let's just change it up for fun. Now, it's pretty easy to replace features after you erase them because they're still somewhat visible. So you can kind of use that as a point of reference. Okay, new character. Let's give him some subtle lips. Here, I'm trying to avoid all outlines. I'm gonna make him look younger by softening his jawline and making it a little narrower so his face looks less developed. I barely did anything and he looks a lot younger now. Let's give him some facial hair so he looks a little bit older. We can actually make him look more innocent by making his eyes wider, showing more of that iris. Add a bit more facial hair, see if we can make him look any older. Yeah, I think I only added like five years. Try to exaggerate features way beyond their boundaries and push the limits to see what you can create. Everyone's face is different, so don't be afraid to make things bigger, smaller, shorter, longer, or even further apart. The options are limitless. At the end of the day, don't take yourself too seriously. Just have fun and don't be afraid to venture off the path. A fun exercise you can do is to trace over a few photographs until you familiarize yourself with the proportions. I think tracing is a great way to learn, so give it a try. And I don't think this tutorial would be complete without showing you some more examples. Thanks for watching, guys. Don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this. And if you want to get updates every time I post a new video, hit that bell icon as well. If you want to vote on the next tutorial, you can do so by becoming a patron. Click the orange button on the top left to learn more.