Drawing Faces!

1. Trailer: Hey, guys, my name is Ramona McClean, and I am an illustrator and art teacher. If you struggle with drawing faces, you come to the right place. In this class, we will break down the head into basic shapes. You will learn how to add guidelines, where to position the facial features, as well as how to draw each feature. This class isn't about perfection or shading. It's about understanding heads and faces, so you can draw from reference, whether that's in real life or from a picture. Join me in this class. I can't wait to get started. 2. Head and guidelines: Let's get into drawing the head. So I'm going to simplify this instead of drawing it really realistic to start. I'm just going to do a circle like that. And a good tip for drawing circles to make them look kind of nice is thinking about using your whole arm. So instead of just using your wrist like this, you're using your whole arm. And I like to go over it a few times because you're kind of correcting that circle as you go. So let's just start out with adding some guidelines to this head. So imagine this is just a really cartoony head. I'm going to put a line straight down the middle. On both sides. And that tells me where the center of that is. So if you imagine this ball is our head, right? So this is the front, that's the middle. And this is what it looks like while facing forwards. So I'm just going to write front. Here. So I'm going to do another surfll. It's a little bit more rough, that's right. And if I was to turn this head a little bit to the right three quarters, I'm going to first add this middle line because it's not looking up or down. And then I'm going to start at the same parts, same points in the middle, but it's going to round like this. So if you imagine this ball has lines on it, one here, one here, as you turn it to the side, it's going to go around here and give you that curved line. So this is three quarter to the right. Same thing if we do it to the left. We've got straight across, and then we've got that curve right there. Now, what if we want this head to look up or down? We do that circle. First, we put in the middle one because it's not turned left or right. The middle one here is the direction that the head is looking, and then the one across is up and down. If I wanted this to look up and to the front, The same thing. I'm going to use the two middle spots, and I'm going to go in curve upwards. And then same thing for down except the opposite. So we have our front facing, and then we have our down curve. So what if we wanted it to look both three quarters right and up? We don't have any straight lines in this because first, we're looking this way. So let's add our three quarter to the right curve, and then let's add our upcurve. So that's what you're going to get. Three quarter, right? Up. And just to really illustrate the point, if you're doing that downwards, it's the same thing. So you have your down curve, and then to the left, and it's the same thing. Join me in the next video, and we're going to go over placing eyes, nose and mouth on these faces. 3. Adding facial features: Hey, guys. Welcome back. So we had just done the head direction, so we're imagining that this ball is turning, right? Got it straight, turning to the right, turning to the left. So now we're going to add some facial features. So, let's see. I'm going to add a circle here, a circle here, and those are resting just right on that line. So depending on your character, this could be higher up, lower down. But in that case, you're going to move this middle line down or up, depending on your character. I'm going to stick my nose just below that mid line there and just put a little line for the mouth. And then I will stick my pupils kind of in the middle. With eyes, if you put them directly in the middle of the eyeball, it can look a little wall eyed. I'll just draw it here. So it really depends. It could be a cute look or it could look a little wall eyed, so just be careful with that. I like to put it a little bit on the inside. They are a little wonky, but you get the picture. If I'm going to transfer these faces or this face onto the three quarter right, then I would have one here. On this eye, this is actually a little bit different. As you turn to the side, the eye is going to squish. It's going to be the same height. I'm just going to draw that line across, but it will be skinnier instead of a full circle that's perspective. I'm going to add that there. And there you go. So that's going to look right. If I did it the same size as this, something would look weird, and that's because you're not seeing that perspective. I at the nose in the same spot, so just under that line, and then the mouth over here. So I want to follow that line there. Pupils. There we go. Same thing on this, nose here. This one's going to be the larger eye. That one's going to be the squished eye, and then the mouth will follow that line. Now, for up, it's a similar concept. Put it there. But my nose, because I know this nose in a three D way kind of comes off the page. I'm going to put it kind of a little bit higher right in the middle of that intersection. And then for my eyes here, I'm going to follow that shape, but I'm going to do them squished like this. And that's because you're getting the perspective of it going up. So depending which direction you are putting your head, those eyes will squish. And then I'm going to put mouth right there. Forgive the wonkiness of this eye. So here, I'm going to add my nose there. And because I can still see a lot of this eye, I'm just going to make them mostly the same, maybe a little bit ovly and add that there. And here, add that nose there. I'm going to squish it just a little bit, but not too much because I don't have it looking super high. It really depends how curved that curve is. This, because it's curved, it's going to be smaller this way, and it's going to be the same squishiness as that side. Ad that here. It's pretty big. It's a little bit smaller. Hello. 4. Realistic Head Shape: We've just drawn all the facial features on our simple heads. That's if your character's head looked like this, a three D ball. However, when you're doing portraits of real life people, they don't look like this. That's just to get the main concept. But if we're going to do a real life person's head, we are going to draw it a little bit differently. There's more than one shape involved. Let's just do a oval here, and this is going to be for the back of the head. Imagine this is a profile shot, so somebody's looking to the side. Now I'm going to add a mask on the front. And that's going to make up our side view of the head. Depending on your person, this is going to be larger or smaller, same with this, the shape might change, but this is the back of the skull, and this is the face. When we add in our neck, it's going to come somewhere around there. Next always go forwards like this. It would be super weird looking if you had it like straight up. Yeah. It just it's not accurate to a person, and you really don't want to draw that going backwards like this. It doesn't even look human anymore. You want to have that neck going forward just a little bit. You can pull the neck back, but that's only if your character is specifically doing a movement where they're pulling in their chin. But this is the normal one. Let's add the ears to that. The ear is going to sit right on that middle line. And then the front one here. Then this will just even out. The chin will look a little bit different depending on the character. Let's take that basic framework and draw it in a front facing pose. I'm going to draw the skull. It's going to be a little less long, and then I'm going to draw this mask in front. Just imagine that this is a mask that you would put on your face. You might see a little bit of that side there, but mostly that's just going to melt in together. And then you have your line there and this is your middle line. Same concept, but the shape is different. Let's take that and let's put it in a three quarter view. Now I want to go here. Here's my three quarter person's head. That's where the years would go, year. There you go. Then if I can add my neck there neck here, you're not going to see it going forward because of the view that it's in. Say I wanted to make this character look up or down. So let's show the front view. Add in our face. But what we're going to do instead of having it be this tall is we're going to squish it a little bit. So it's going to come up like this, and this is going to go up just like we did in the previous ball. Depending how far up this character is looking, This head is going to get smaller and smaller. And you're going to see less pointy of a chin. If you go really high, you might even see the underside, say it's the nose of this person's chin. But I wouldn't worry about that. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yes, you might see the underside of their throat and chin. But I wouldn't worry so much about that right now. The main thing you want to focus on is doing this front facing, three quarter facing side facing, and then turning it three quarters to the side, but also a little bit up. Let's do that. I'm going to angle that a little bit upwards, now we're going to place the mask. The. This is a profile side. Let's do that first and then we can do three quarters. That neck would be coming out of there. Obviously, we don't have any facial features on this at the moment. We will be adding that in when we go a little bit more into nose mouth and eyes. But for now, this is the basic pose. We're going to do that here, we're going to show more of that head. There you go. 5. Eyes: Get into eyes. So what I like to do when I first start an eye is do a circle of the basic shape that I'm seeing. And I'm sort of imagining the eyeball a little bit underneath the eyid. So in this first reference of the fricki red head, I do kind of an oval shape like that because she's kind of almondy shape eyes in this one. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut into that shape. I'm going to look at where the folds are around her eye coming from her eyelids, and I'm going to do a line coming up like this and then another one cutting down like that. Depending on the shape of the eye, that point might be a little bit farther this way or farther this way, it just depends. Then on the bottom, I'm going to cut in there and I'm going to go up like that. I'm going to grab a new. That gives us the basic eye shape. From now, I'm going to look at where the eyelid is. Some people have no eyelid that you can see. Some people have a large eyelid, but this person just has a nice small one, so I'm just going to add a little line kind of going on the top, and then a little the bottom. So here, I'm just going to define the shape a little bit more. We have this little bit that comes out and there's a little bit of skin that kind of folds over. I'm not going to get too into the detail of that because that's not something I want to bring out, but mostly I want to focus on the actual eye shape like that. So now I'm going to look at where the pupil is. In this one, it touches both the top and the bottom, and it's very much in the center of her eye. So I'm going to sketch that out. Something like that. Then I'm going to look and see where that middle circle is. I'm just going to sketch that circle. In there. Nice. Okay, so with the eyelashes, you can do a couple of things. You can do all the individual eyelashes or you can sort of build it up so it's really thick at the top and then more individual at the bottom. So for this to make it a little bit more realistic, I'm going to do individual eyelashes, so you can see. So those eyelashes are going to come from right at the base there on the top. But on the bottom, they're going to come a little bit lower from the skin. So I'm going to hold those out. They're always going to be curved. They might curve crossing over each other sometimes, but you're not going to have straight lashes like that. I'm just going to make sure I cross over some of these. And over here, the perspective of the eyelashes are coming more towards us instead of away from us or up into the right. I'm going to make sure that those long ones are at the end just because it looks nice. I'm going to build up this dark, that's just right around there because I want those eyes to pop. And then for the bottom, I'm going to kind of do them in a few different directions, kind of following the shape of that bottom lid there. So on this side, they're kind of coming out more that way, on this side, they're coming out a bit more that way. Then we're going to add a little bit of shading in the actual eyeball. I like to build up. You can do this with color as well. These lines, the closer I get to the edge, the darker those lines are going to become. That's just going to give us some shadows and some shading. Then this middle area, before I fill it in, I just want to add highlight like that. Depending on which subject you're looking at and what their lighting is, that will be a little bit different, but I'm going to fully fill this part in and so when you're drawing this part, you want to make sure that the black part is right in the middle of the color and because this is being cut off, I'm just imagining this going up higher to fill the rest of it. I can tell in mind, I think I made it a little bit small at the bottom there. I'm just going to fill that part in. I'm just going to add a little bit of eyebrows just to frame that eye. Usually, at the beginning of the eyebrow comes up pretty close to where that eye ends. Probably start around there. But usually have a few wispy hairs before it goes into the actual eyebrow itself. I'm just going to do a really light sketch so I know the direction that this is going in. And then I'm going to just disregard that line there. I'm going to do some small ones there, and then it will get thicker and darker as I go. So you can fill that in. But you want to do the lines kind of in the direction that those hairs are going. And there you go. 6. Mouth: Let's focus on the mouth. So if we're using the same portrait study, I'm first going to look at that middle line of the mouth. You know, here it kind of comes down and then curves up. Like that. Something super important about drawing lips and mouth a little bit more realistically for portraits is getting that sort of dark line at the edge on both sides. That's where kind of the skin starts to fold over, and that's where it's touching the cheek. So we'll build that up later, but for now, we know that this part right here is the middle. I'm just going to add kind of that divot, the lips, and her lips are not super big. I'm going to sketch out kind of that direction they're going. And then comes from there. You can put sort of a little line sort of where the bottom part is and then comes from there. They're sort of building up that look. And then I might get a little bit darker right in the middle there, and then quite dark kind of at the edge. You can add some lines for shading. You can add like this. Depending what you're using, this may look a little too intense. Like this black pen looks a little bit much, but if I'm building this up with colored pencil, that's going to look really nice. And I typically like to make the top lip a little bit darker than the bottom lip. So I can just add maybe some curved lines. And on the bottom lip here, you might want to add a highlight. So if I'm filling that in, I'm grabbing some colored pencil. I might do fill in the full color first and then build up the top lip a bit darker. Get a little bit shading right around the middle there. Keep that one spot, and that's going to make it look juicy. Let's do a second pair of lips. So if we look at our second reference, which is the beautiful Asian woman, her lips are quite thick compared to last one. So same thing now. I'm going to start off kind of sketching in that middle line. And then I'm going to put a mark how far down I want that lip to go and then do the little divot. Still quite far up on her. So that's going to go straight to the edge there. And it curves up, and then there's a bit of a downturn to shadow bit there. So on this person's lips, they're open a little bit. So you get this kind of dark bit in the middle. Apologize if you hear my bird. She's on my shoulder. So I'm just going to darken that part. Just to show that little bit of parting and I want to build up. It's got a bit of a divot in the bottom there too. Build up that spot. So let me build that up. I do CPIC this time so you can see how juicy you can make this. So if I start out, I'm going to leave a white spot at the bottom there. I'm not the juiciest copic marker. Build both of those up. Yeah. That looks a little bit nicer. So I'll just go over both of those. Just kind of get a little bit on the bottom there. Maybe pull in a little bit more color for part of it, just to get some shading in there. But there you can see having that white spot there makes it look super juicy. 7. Nose 1: Let's do some noses. First, I'm going to look at the front on nose here. I'm going to do a circle for that main part of the nose. I'm going to with the nostrils, I tend to get like a triangle shape like this. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower. Her nose, I'm going to do something similar to this. At the bottom here, go in like that. A bit of an angle that way. This comes in like that. There we go. Then this here is the highlight of the nose, the part that sticks at the most. But down here, going to add like that. Going around the nostrils. But I don't want this line to meet up with that nostril right there. I want it to go underneath. Then this is a bit of a strong line there because it's curving underneath, so we're seeing a line can fill these in. And then the bridge of the nose, you want to be careful not to draw too thick a line, especially if you're looking at this from the front. You can build up a soft shading around there. You don't want hard lines when you're looking at it from the front. I'm going to shade in just this bottom area here because that is all a little bit in shadow because this is the main part of the nose. I'm going to leave this highlighted. And that is the nose. Here's a slightly different version I just did a little bit earlier. You can see there, some shading, some bits. Actually film this twice. Didn't film the first time. 8. Nose 2: Then the next nose we're going to look at is one that's a little bit more profile. We're going to get this round bit for the main part and it's on a bit of an angle because his head is tilted. Then I'm going to add a circle here for that highlight. Then go in with that angle. When I draw the second nostril, I want to make sure to do it more squished looking, that's similar to our eyes, where if this is looking at the eye straight on, looking at it from the side, on either side is going to be squished, it'll be the same height, but it will be a more squished vergin. We're going to do the same thing here. And keep that tilt to the head. I'm going to add that little line there just to go over top of that highlighted area and then have that come down and around. With men, you typically want to use a bit more straight lines, less curves, especially for jaws and features. I'm just adding that as a bit more of a square and then a bit of an angle there, which that goes into the eye. And you can build up that shading on the bridge of the nose right there. You know that that goes down. Then you can add a little bit of shading just underneath the nose there. Shade those in. I can make this whole bottom part be a little bit shaded. Yeah. I'll show you this other version as well, just for case that helps with any more information. And there you have it. Hopefully that helps a little bit with noses. When you do a profile no, you can make this line here, really solid because you are seeing that really solid line, and then you can build up some shadow here. But for here it's you're not quite seeing the profile here. You don't want that to be too dark of line, and especially on the ones facing front. It. 9. Female head part 1: That we've done all the different features of head, we're going to put it together. I'm going to do a circle here for that head. Pull off from there and add the mask. She's got a very narrow chin. I want to make sure to get that to start that up high enough and make sure this comes out wide enough. And then we want to add those features are the guidelines for the eyes and nose and mouth. I'm going to make a little mark here because I know that's where nose is going to go, and your mouth is going to go there, and then I'm going to add circles where the eyes are going. I'm just going to hold up my reference, make sure that looks accurate. Then I can start to add in some more shapes, just to make sure that those proportions are right. I'm going to start carving out those eyes. You can do one eye together if you like, sometimes I like to go back and forth just to make sure that those are looking nice together. This comes in a bit here and down. Faces are not symmetrical. You're not going to get a perfectly symmetrical face. But if it's really of the you'll see that. I'm going to add in those for the nostbs there. Get some shading in there. Then I'm going to go back to these eyes. She doesn't really have very much of an eyelid, but I'm just going to add a touch there, and then I know her eyebrows are around there. I tend to skip around a little bit just to make sure that I'm looking at the whole thing instead of just one area at a time. And I'm going to go in and add the curve that mouth. Now I'm realizing I probably made the chain a bit too narrow, so I'm going to fix that once I get to my outside of the head. That's pretty round like that. Here. Now let's see. This is a bit more rounded. I originally drew it, and this is going to go a bit higher as 10. Female Head part 2: Can always adjust things as you're going. That's why we don't get too detailed too fast because if you start doing all the details first and then you realize, oh, shoot, I totally drew this wrong, then you're not going to want to go back and change anything because you already put so much effort into it. Her pupils are very dark. So I'm just going to fill that in. Maybe leave a little highlight area. I got two there. But I can always add that after. Do a little erasing. I'm going to give her some eyelashes, add in those ears. When you're adding the ears, it's good to look on the model and just see where does the top go compared to the eyebrows, and where does the bottom go? Then you can put in the proportions of that a little better because you know you're referencing it against something else. Then with the hair, I want to make sure to find where that part is, especially if I can see the part, and then it goes like up and over. All those hairs that are going to come up from there, and then they're going to go down into the face. Then she's got some wispy hairs coming up here. And I can add in that neck. Again, you can look and see where does that meet on the face? We did it a little too thick. Come down here into the shoulders. Then just got a lot of cool here. Add in those shapes. And there you, there is our person. 11. Male head 1: Thought we would do one more just to show the difference between men and women. So so I'm going to start with that skull. It's going to be a little bit more oval because he's turned to the side. And then we have here. So again, with men, I want to make those lines more square than with women because that's just sort of how they're made. So I'm going to put the nose is pretty high up. Mouth there. And then eye pretty high up as well. This eye is going to be a little bit more squish than this one. Make sure this nose. Is good Pretty flat at the bottom. Now, I think I drew this a little bit too far to the side, and I don't want to do that. So I'm just gonna erase that. I did it with colored pencil, so let's put it a little bit closer. So then see kind of where it cuts in here. I got pretty strong jaw bone down here. Yeah, that's good. It's got pretty full lips with guys. I don't want to draw that lip too dark. The middle is fine, but the top and the bottom, sometimes I like to just do hints, because the more defined you make that, the more sort of womanly it's going to look so. 12. male head 2: This is giving me a little problems. So his hair is a little crazy. It's going to add some curls there. You don't really see much of the part, but you can kind of see where the hairs coming out of. So I'm gonna do sort of an overall shape for his head. Get lots of fluof in there. I like to do for curls, kind of, like, a few go one way, a few go in another. Lof. A little bit straighter and shorter in here. I like to do a little shadow kind of where the bottom of the lip meets the chin, even though he doesn't really have one. But I like to add that. And that goes down into. And then we can add pupils highlight. But you can always add coloring in for that, too. So, not perfect, but there is my man character. Thanks so much for watching. And, uh, yeah, join me in the next video, and we'll close out. 13. Closing thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class guys. I had a lot of fun. I hope you did too. Hopefully by now, you'll understand at least how to put features on a face and how to draw that head. But just remember that the best way to improve is to keep practicing. Use those concepts and bring it into your everyday practice. Remember to take a look at the assignments written in the description. Take photos of what you did and post it so we can see. I'm sure everybody would love to see as well as me. If you want to see more of my drawings, I have my Instagram posted below. I've got lots of other classes to look at. There's one on drawing nature and leaves, making your own comment character and more, so check them out, and I hope to see you in the next one.