portrait drawing tutorial

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I want to share a comprehensive guide to drawing the human face with you, my dear readers. Before you even think about picking a subject to draw, you need to know the basic proportions of the human head and facial features. I’ll show you a method of drawing the human face from the front, the profile, and the three quarters view. These rules will become second nature to you, with practice, and drawing a portrait will be 47 times easier afterward.

Grab some pieces of paper (the larger the better, because it’s always easier to draw bigger rather than smaller), a light colored pencil (I like light blue), and one graphite pencil, get a board, easel, or other angled drawing surface. It’s never a good idea to sit at a table with your paper flat on the table in front of you. Your eyes will see a distorted perspective while drawing and when you pick up your paper to take a good look at it everything will be elongated.

1. Get started by drawing an upside down egg shape, very lightly with your blue pencil, centered to fill nearly your entire paper.
   
2. You need to break your egg shape apart to know where to place your facial features. Draw a light dashed line down the middle of your egg, and draw a solid line half way down across your egg. Think of the area from your line across down the egg, and break this area up in half again going across. One more line is needed 1/3 of the way down from your last line to the bottom of your egg.
   
3. Ignoring the dashed line down the middle, break your egg up into 5 equal parts vertically. It’s good to think of the width of the human face as 5 eye shapes going across.
   
4. In between the top two lines going across, you will draw basic ear shapes outside of your egg.
   
5. Now you are done laying the ground work for your facial features, so put away your blue pencil and grab your graphite pencil. You can be a little bit stronger now with your line work. The top line going across is going to go right through your eyes in the middle. Here is where the vertical lines breaking up your egg into 5 parts will be helpful. Using the horizontal line and the vertical sections 2 and 4, draw your eyes in.
   
6. The nose falls in between the eyes in vertical section 3 and stops at the line that holds the bottom of the ears. Use the dashed line to center your nose. Draw the nose using lighter lines for the bridge shape and only use darker lines at the bottom of the nose.
   
7. Next is the mouth. The last horizontal line you drew closest to the bottom of your egg shape is going to go between the lips of the mouth. Draw your mouth delicately and stop the edges of the mouth in the middle of the eye pupils.
   
8. Draw in the ears and add details like eyebrows and color in the pupils.
   
9. To draw the bottom of the jaw and chin you don’t have to follow the bottom of the egg shape exactly because everyone’s face shape is different. Also draw in some hair going above the top of the egg shape because hair sits above the skull. Be careful about where you draw the hairline, too high and it will look like it’s receding, and too low will look like hair is growing down the forehead.
   
10. You have now completed drawing a proportional human face viewed from the front.
    

Stay tuned for my other portrait drawing tutorials for the facial proportions from the profile and 3/4 views. After you have the proportions down, I will go into the details of drawing each of the features. Remember to keep practicing!

Related posts:

1. 3/4 view portrait tutorial
2. profile drawing tutorial
3. how to draw noses
4. how to draw eyes
5. rusty at drawing

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under art & design tutorials.