According to a poll I recently ran on our Painting and Drawing site, many people find drawing certain components of the face difficult. People found that drawing the nose was hard, but a large number thought that drawing all of the face was hard. So, here in this article, I will break down the process in some simple tips that will work for any portrait. BTW, these tips are for a frontal view portrait, not a profile.
The Eyes
First, let’s look at the proportions of the eye to understand how to draw it better. On the average person, the eyes are an eye width apart from each other. They are also halfway down the head.
Next, take a look at eye shape. Are the eyes you want to draw almond? Round? Slanted? Remember that the eye has many other parts than just the eyeball and lids. Draw all the rings of color and black on the eyeball itself. Also, draw the tear duct, the lashes, and the rim of the lid. Don’t forget all those telling laugh lines, either!
The last part to drawing an eye is observing the shadows and hues. The eye’s shadow is darker under the lower lid than on the upper. The creases in the lid are nothing more than saturated shading. Don’t ever use sharp lines when shading the eye.
One last thing on shading, the eyeball must be shaded around to look round. Shade by the tear duct and outer corner, making the very edges especially dark.
For a dramatic effects, make the black of the eye the darkest black in the portrait.
Nose
When I first started drawing the nose I used lines to try to define it. That was my first mistake. If you take a look at respectable pencil drawings you’ll see that the nose rarely has any hard lines. Usually, only the nostrils have dark, hard lines. The rest is all shading. Define the upper curve of the nose by continuing the line of the brow and shadow under the eye.
The nostrils aren’t always the darkest point in the portrait. Remember, the darker the area, the more it will draw the eye. Do you really want people to look at the portrait’s nostrils first?
Lips
Lips don’t seem as hard as the nose, but they can pose problems. The biggest part that you should remember is that lips are soft. The upper lip is usually a little darker than the bottom and the outer edges are not hard lines, but shadows (unless the subject is wearing lipstick). The upper lip is defined by the dips in skin between the nose and lips. Notice how this dip is darker in the middle and lighter on the ridges.
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