Live Encore: Drawing Expressive Faces | Charly Clements | Skillshare

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Live Encore: Drawing Expressive Faces

teacher avatar Charly Clements, Greeting Card Designer and Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

11 Lessons (59m)
    • 1. Introduction

      2:16
    • 2. Drawing Eyes

      7:14
    • 3. Drawing Noses

      3:39
    • 4. Drawing Mouths

      6:33
    • 5. Creating Skin Tones

      6:43
    • 6. Pairing Colors

      7:40
    • 7. Drawing Figures

      4:57
    • 8. Adding Faces

      7:26
    • 9. Adding Hair & Clothes

      3:46
    • 10. Q&A

      6:35
    • 11. Final Thoughts

      1:51
  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

8,042

Students

188

Projects

About This Class

Grow your illustration skills and confidence—while having lots of fun drawing!

Illustrator Charly Clements truly believes that drawing faces doesn’t have to be scary—but she knows it’s something a lot of people struggle with when getting started on their illustration journey. In this hour-long class—recorded using Zoom and featuring participation from the Skillshare community—Charly will walk you through three fun exercises to help you get more comfortable with drawing faces and figures. 

You’ll start by brainstorming as many variations on basic facial features as you can, quickly creating a library of eyes, noses, and mouths you can pull from when you’re feeling stuck. Then, Charly will walk you through how she creates natural-looking skin tones, and pairs them with clothing colors that really make things pop. Finally, you’ll bring everything together to create a whole page of quirky characters, practicing creating different body shapes, combining different facial features, and adding a lot of personality through hairstyles and clothing. 

4c9876fd

Throughout the class, Charly will encourage you to remove any pressure to create something perfect and instead enjoy being creative and playing around with your drawings. Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned illustrator, you’re bound to learn something from Charly’s approach! Plus, students who participated in the live session were able to ask Charly questions, so you’ll get to learn more about her journey and process. 

_________________________

While we couldn't respond to every question during the session, we'd love to hear from you—please use the class Discussion board to share your questions and feedback.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Charly Clements

Greeting Card Designer and Illustrator

Top Teacher

Hey, I'm Charly!

I’m a greeting card designer and freelance illustrator from the UK, mostly known for my stylised portraits and fun colour palettes. 4 years ago I decided to sell all my belongings and travel around the world armed with only my iPad Pro. I now run my creative business full time from my laptop and iPad, working on projects that I love, collaborating with dream brands and licensing my work out to stores around the world.

You can find my work online and in stores internationally on mugs, greeting cards, apparel, and more. 

I love sharing my latest work, process videos and mini tutorials on Instagram and YouTube so feel free to check them out :)

Join our amazing creative communit... See full profile

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Introduction: I know that joined faces can be quite intimidating. I think a lot of the time we got so much pressure on ourselves to have a finished project. We'll have something that we have to show people. I wanted to try and put some exercises together. So you guys just sit back, relax, and just enjoy some drawing. Hey guys, I'm Charly. I'm a greeting card to designer and freelance illustrator from the UK, I'm currently in Thailand, I specialize in greeting cards, but also create sculpture classes and I also have fun [inaudible] that I do on east to them as well. So in today's class, I wanted to walk you through three fun exercises. We're going to start with drawing some fun features and exploring [inaudible] characters. We'll then be moving on to skin tamed in exercise two, I'll just be sharing my traces on how I create my skin tones, I know that is something that you guys stronger grip and not in my other class. In the third exercise, we're going to bring everything that we've learned in five exercises together. We're going to create some more [inaudible] [inaudible] and explore and create movement and passed [inaudible] shoulders. That's another thing that you guys [inaudible] about my last class that you've found your artistic quite rigid and steps I want to try and create an exercise that we'll use in you up and most importantly, have fun. I think getting started is always really hard so I love the fact that we can just be forced to start tour in here together. I hope after you take this class, you gain more confidence in drawing faces. I know it's an intimidating topic, so when each just have fun, let go of any perfectionism you have with your illustrations and enjoy the class. This class was recorded live and I've got to interact with the audience as well as creating, working, and enjoying. There was so much fun. Drawing characters doesn't have to be scary, so let's get started. 2. Drawing Eyes: My name is Tiffany Chow. I work on Skillshare's community team. I will be the host for today's live class with Charlie [inaudible]. Hey, guys. I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited to have this community where I can share some of my knowledge with you guys. In today's class, I'm going to be sharing the three fun exercises for you guys to just stretch your creative muscle. We're going to start with drawing some fun features and exploring some stylized characters. Thank you so much Charlie. Why don't we go ahead and dive right in. Brilliant. This is going to be excise 1, and I want you guys to start exploring different features. I've just divided my page into three parts, eyes, nose, and mouth. I want you guys to try and fill up the page as much as possible with different style of eyes. You can follow along with how I'm drawing them, but I'd also like to maybe see you guys trying to use your imagination and just play around with different styles of eyes, nose, and mouth. Once we've created this, we can move on to exercise 2. I'm going to start by using my 6B Pencil Brush in Procreate. This is a really nice brush that has this nice textured feel to it, and we're going to go in and start drawing different features. With this exercise, I love to do it to unwind and stretch my imagination a bit. I'm not going to look at any reference photos, I want you guys to maybe sketch out maybe 10-15 different eyes, and then if you're really struggling, either follow along with me or maybe go in Pinterest and have a look at some cartoon eyes. I'm going to explore different shapes, and start to draw different characters. With these eyes, I like to have this cat-like eye and some, and then I'll bring this arch up like this, and then I can create the iris. When I'm drawing eyes as well, I could explore with doing a circle now, and then having the iris to the side to indicate the direction of the character's gaze. I'm not going to spend too much time on this because there are a few things that I want to show you guys today, but I want you guys to get in the habit of loosening up. Getting rid of that perfectionism and drawing for the sake of drawing rather than worrying about the outcome. If this person's really tired, I could give them some really droopy bags under their eyes, straight away you know that person is tired. Then if I'm having this down eye, you can see this sinister look just from a few different marks. It's amazing from these little tweaks that you can create in your eyes, you can completely change the emotion of your character. I'm going to play around with different shapes. If I've done a more simple shape, I could go in with having the eyes like this and then play around with having some of the eyebrows going up like that, and having that suspicious look for your character. When you're creating your characters, there's so many ways that you could create a stylized character just from changing up the features. You can try with really big eyes and having this eyelid come over like this. I want you guys to spend about maybe 10 minutes trying this out. I could have some eyes like this where you have the tear duct in the middle, and having these lines to emphasize the eyes a bit more. We can go as detailed or simplistic as you want with this, and add some little lines, and play around with all of the different shapes. I'm going to go in with these dotted lines here and having some eyes. Also when I'm creating my characters, I normally add some wrinkles or play around with the eyebrows, so the thickness of the eyebrows as well. Then you can have sleeping eyes like this, really simple again, or you can have eyes that curve in an arch to illustrate someone who's laughing or who's really happy. If you have eyes going down like this, with the eyelids drooping down, just by changing the slope of the eye to downwards and this way, it shows that your character's really worried or scared. Those small tweaks can make such a difference. There's a question from the audience on how to do puppy dog eyes. Puppy dog eyes. Wow. I'm not actually used to drawing animals that much. Maybe you can go for a cute character. I suppose having those puppy dog eyes that always look like they want something, and you can maybe go for something like this, where the eyelids are looking quite cute. You could have the eyes or having folds of skin coming over the eyes to show that skin fold. But I think puppy dog eyes look cute, so I think as long as you keep the eyes quite cute and have that reflection as well going off, gives that really sulky look to a dog character. But hopefully, that answers your question. That's awesome. It's pretty amazing how you could do that in just a few strokes. I'm amazed at myself too. You should hopefully have a few eyes to play around with in exercise 3. I want you now to move on to the nose. If you are struggling or feel like you need some reference photos to help you out, that's not a problem. Hopefully, you've come up with some of your own ideas as well.