Expressive Little Faces: Proportions, Painting, Personality

1. Intro to Expressive Little Faces: I wanted to design a class that was about faces. Faces are a big deal. They're relatable, because everybody's got one. They're fun to see, they add personalities and we all know they're not easy. Up your face game for that. Because having good faces, ups the perception and the marketability of your entire portfolio, and it's a lot of fun to do them well. If you've wanted to learn how to make expressive little faces, I think you'll enjoy this class. I want to teach you how to bring personality into your faces, how to bring expression, how to handle proportions and make sure that things look right, and how to add those little details that bring little face to life. This class is for people who like to draw. You don't have to work in watercolor, it is what I'll be working in, but you can use whatever medium you like. I think that this class is pretty much a fun class, a good basis for a lot of things that you can use in other areas. 2. Simplifying the Face: When we're making a face and not a portrait, it's hard to decide what is most important to bring this face to life. You want to use a minimum of lines and colors to bring the most personality. I'm going to take an example of myself, because I didn't need a model release. Here's a picture of myself. I desaturated it and I'm going to play with the levels, the contrast making it brighter, so that you can see that when my face washes out, what is left, those darkest darks are what I want to be focusing on when I'm drawing a face in its simplest form. I have my darkest darks in my eyes, corners of my smile, my chin line, obviously my dark hair. Those are the things that I want to focus on, the things that really jump out. Now let me show you a different face so you get a feel here. This is my husband. He did not give me a model release, but if he sues me, that's okay. I'm going to desaturate his face too and play with those levels to make those lightest lights a lot brighter and you can see what's left. He has fair skin and light hair and light eyes. But really, that's still what sticking out his beard, the creases by his nose, his eyes, and shadows in his hair. 3. Facial Proportions: Typically the question on everyone's mind is, where does all this stuff go? I'm going to show you a very simple way to look at faces and notice the proportion so that you can move forward in making your expressive little faces. Let's start with our face shape, I divide the face by thirds so there's a top third, a middle third and a bottom third. Now, each one of these sections holds important parts of the face. The top is just the forehead, the middle contains the bridge of the nose at least and the eyes and the bottom has the mouth and the chin. At each one of these lines, there's something else. The top third line is where the eyebrows go and that second third line holds the bottom of the nose. Everyone asks, where do the eyes go? The eyes go halfway down the face. I know that sounds counter intuitive but it's halfway down the face not halfway between your third. The only lines I'm going to keep in mind vertically are in the center so find the center and increase the width by about a feet. It's going to be a boundary of where the width of the nose is and the distance between the eyes and the eyebrows. Let's put these lines to use. Put in your eyes right at that line where it's halfway down the eyebrows, the nose, the mouth and it becomes a puzzle piece and you see how each one of these proportions does make sense and creates this very symmetrical face. Did I make that look too easy. In the next few videos, we're going to take each one of these parts and do a few takes on eyes, nose and mouths. 4. Face Shapes: Now let's talk about where all these facial features come together and how to put your face together just the basic pieces of the puzzle, the basic mechanics. So these are five face shapes we've got oval, we've got round, square, and rectangular and down here I'm doing a triangular face. It has a really long jaw line that points at the bottom. If you're wanting to do more idealized faces, oval tends to be the favorite. Next we've got round faces, which are very common for Asian faces but also common all ethnicities. These angular faces tend to be more European, strong jaw line and other things to consider is that when you're thinking of a masculine face, it tends to be long and have a strong jaw too. There are so many choices to be had when you're making faces so let's break it down and look at just the choices that you're making with just the face shape. We talked about some of those basic shapes and then there are other factors that change things along. The hairline, is it really arched? Is it flat? Is it round? All these things play a role in the shape of your face, how the ears and the chin look, is it a pointed chin? Is it a chin that's barely there? Also if the figure is male or female, something more delicate for a female and something more structured for a male. 5. Mouths: I was really blown away by all the great comments and suggestions you guys had. I'm going to use my real face because I still want to have and we'll start with mouths. When we're talking about mouths, we don't want to go very dark on the lines. Again, remember how I bumped the contrast on the picture of my face and the parts that stuck out are the corners of my mouth and you always need some hint of the shape of the mouth, obviously. I'm trying to show you guys a variety of shapes, different arcs, maybe, point here at the top, maybe, curved at the top, more pronounced, thinner. These are all things that I'm thinking about while I'm drawing these lips and they're all these little choices that makes a face unique and just particular to that single person. If I'm looking at different expressions from my mouth, grinning, I'm only going to see the corners that are the darkest. The top, even though it stretches when I smile and you don't see as much of a crease here in the middle, I do like to add a hint of it. In the bottom, this bottom lip, even though obviously, my lips do reach to the corners of my mouth, when I smile, the shadows fall at the bottom and so that's where I focus my line. If I want to then align color on the inside, but I don't usually line the entire mouth. When it comes to teeth, they are better left suggested. A hint of teeth is all that you need. On that middle smile, I added the gum line and that's as far as I'll go when I'm working in black and white. Here are a few expressions for different lips, so you can see the shapes of those lips change and what a huge role the creases around the lips play. Lips actually in and of themselves don't express a tone. The upper lip can get more protrude, we can open it a bit. It could be a little slanted, but they're very subtle changes. It's those creases around the face that really show us what our lips are doing. As if you don't have enough to think about as you're creating your mouth shape and you are moving that brush or that pencil step-by-step, be thinking about whether those lips are full, if they're thin, if one half of lip, the upper or bottom lip is thicker or thinner than the other. When it comes to gender, that does play a bit of a role on lips, especially in how we treat how dark they are, how color they are. When it comes to male faces, either use the same exact skin tone or just a touch different. Ethnicity always plays a role in the choices you make for your faces, so consider that as you're thinking of the different personalities you're bringing into this face. 6. Eyes: Now eyes are so important. They show us so much expression. Some ideas on how to make eyes more expressive and come to life. That comes with the twinkle, the crease, and sometimes even a little glow at the bottom of the color part of the eye. Notice how the shape of my eye changes somewhat when I go side to side, depending on the angle that you're looking at your face, the curvature of the top of the eye will follow along. This eye is looking away and you can see how it gets wider on the right hand side where it's pointing. These eyes don't go together on a single face, they're both right side eyes. I'm drawing these lines in between. It's getting a little trippy. Something I wanted to talk about is that you can't usually see the entire eye unless someone is very surprised and even at that, if you look at this, you can barely see much white. Eyebrows play an important role in how an eye looks. With that comes more choices of how full structured or the shape of the eyebrow you want to use for your eye. When it comes to eyelids, usually if you're smiling, they go away for the most part, they scrunch up with this Asian eyelid. What happens is that the eyelid that's hanging over the socket of the eye tends to be longer, have longer skin, and so it goes over the crease that this eye makes within the socket. Basically the eye peaks out and the eyelid droops over. You can still have a lot of expression when you're painting an eye that has a single eyelid like that, instead of what we call a double eyelid. I'm really trying to spice up the different eyebrows and give you a feel for different eyes. It looks a little odd to have so many eyes on one page, but hopefully you're getting a sense for all the different choices that I'm making while I'm painting these eyes. With this one, I'm trying to show how the creases play such a big role in the scrunching of the eye and the granting of an eye. You see nothing else of the face and yet you know that eye is smiling. Feel free to take a screenshot of these as we consider eye shapes and whether they're big or small, wide open, single, double eyelid. That ethnicity again, plays a role in helping answer some of those questions. The expression of the face affects the eye greatly, so the nose, the mouth, not nearly as much as it affects the eye. Think of those creases on the top and the bottom and on the sides, you don't want to go overboard with wrinkles, but add just very subtle hints. Always go in light to dark so that you don't feel like you overstepped it a bit and consider which way is that eye going, and that'll be the widest part of the eye. 7. Noses: Last but not least, noses. Noses are tricky. Noses are hard because they are just a collection of shadows. You don't want to really outline noses too much. If you have got a three-quarter face and you can do this shadow, and usually a hint of the nostril and a hint of what I call the parentheses, just this side of the nose. You'll notice that I'm avoiding that bottom part. Usually there is a cast shadow there, but sometimes when you put that bottom in too thickly, it pronounces the nose too much. When you're painting, just use a slightly darker color than your skin tone for the nose. Again, we're breaking down each aspect of the nose and making a decision for each one of those parts. Is it wide or narrow? How big are those nostrils? Even if someone has large nostrils they may not seem very pronounced because it's a light color and not much shadow in there. Like I said, noses are a collection of shadows, so identify where those darkest shadows are and just focus on that. That might just be enough to give enough of an impression or a hint of the nose. 8. Putting Your Face Together: Now that we've looked at each one of those parts of the face, I'm going to help you put those together. Here is some sketches that I started to just get my proportions down, I wanted to show you how those proportions play a role in the actual drawing of the face. Here I'm going over it with this dark ink so that my lines are hopefully obliterated. I'm adding personality to each face. I'm being very suggestive with the nose, like I said, the minimum that I used for the nose is what I call the parentheses and the two periods in between. That would be the nostrils and the sides of the nose and add a little personality, I added some freckles. With this face, I'm going to go for an African-American face. A woman who's really proud of her Afro and that'll be super fun for me. Their features tend to be larger, totally speaking and generalizations here but it helps really when you are painting and trying to make something recognizable, you will work in a lot of generalizations. You saw that I used big eyes, big curly hair and big earrings to make her face very pronounced. Now I'm going to go for more of an Asian look. The wide eyes, the single eyelid, the straight hair, thin lips. Again, these are all choices that I'm making as I'm painting and trying to give each face a different personality. This face shape is really long and I wanted to use as thin as few lines as possible. You can see the contrast between the face that I intended to be African-American and this more Asian face, even though I have no colors involved, the thickness of my line, those facial features, they all show through hopefully to communicate a touch of that ethnicity. I tend to enjoy to do girls, so I'm going to make this a guy. Girls are more fun. There's more details and stuff you can add. Sorry guys. But with this guy, I wanted again to use even fewer lines because we don't want him to look like he's wearing makeup. With this woman, I'm going with a triangular face shape, very pointed features, cheekbones that are protruding just a bit. The corners of the mouth are very angular as well. 9. How I Do Faces: To give you a little overview on how I approach faces. Now that we've talked a lot about theory and proportion, we're going to go into style and styling. What I'm going to talk about here is not a list of do's and don'ts. This is just how I work. I don't usually use pencil because watercolor once it goes on top pencil underneath can not be erased. I usually go straight to painting. I also like working with brushes as my drying medium because I have gotten so used to line quality. I have a hard time working with markers. Markers have just one line width throughout and with a brush, I get a variety of thick and thin and I love being able to use the brush to render what I'm doing. I like to use watercolor and to have several pieces out at a time. It keeps me from mucking up pieces that need to be let dry and it keeps me creative. I'm also a mom and when I sit down to paint I don't have a ton of time, and so I am a multi-tasker and I want to just juice my creativity for whatever amount of time that I have for painting. I like to use unexpected colors. That's a little overview of how I work. If you're curious about these paints and you want to use exactly what I do, I sell a very light travel packet that just has a few colors and lets you sample the feel of my paints. There's also the sketchbook that I like to use; a watercolor sketchbook, there is a water brush and my travel pack so that you can take it on the go like I do. I stash it in my purse wherever I go. 10. Facial Skin Tones: Skin tones can be difficult, and my best piece of advice is to not worry about it too much. It's when we focus on those colors too much that we get a little too crazy, start rubbing into our paper, making it too wet, and blobby and then we're super frustrated. I'm showing you the colors that I like to use. Permanent yellow deep, opera pink, yellow ocher. These are the base of your skin tone colors, yellow or pink. Mix them together, you get a little orange. Raw umber for brown, and I add white ink every so often if I want a matte look that's difficult to get with just watercolors. A favorite of mine at the moment is this Ecoline, liquid watercolor and it's a light rose. Here are the brushes that I recommend. I love to use fiber brushes for faces because of that curved edge, and then I add a little variety of my round brushes, the round tips for details. Lastly, I have my liner brush for very fine details or my detailer for tiny details. You can learn more about brushes from another class that I taught right here on Skillshare called Brushes. I'm going to mix some skin tones here in front of you, squirting out my paints and I'll have them there for you so you can always see what it is that I'm grabbing. I only use a very little amount. These paints are pure color and that's what I love about them. I did add light red in the two colors, it's the very last color you see there for more of dark-reddish undertones in people. I'm going to do this saturated watercolor since it's a different piece than the rest of the paints. Just straight from the bottle, just right off the bat, get that out of the way so that you see what color that creates and why I like it so much. I'm going to first put out a little swoosh of each color so that you see how they look when they're watered down a bit and actually painted on the paper. You can see that these are all pretty good skin tones as it is. I went ahead and made them look more like faces so that you can visualize them. Now I'm going to be combining things in the second row. I'm combining that upper pink and that yellow and with what's left, I'm going ahead and adding a third row of a very watered down look of the mixture. What you have is the pure color. Then in the second row a combination of colors, and the next row is a watered-down version of those. When I'm painting the first layer of skin tones, I basically want to be that bottom row. Then I add in what might be on the second row. Now I'm adding in white so you can see how the white interacts with each one of these colors and how it's not exactly the same as a watered-down version of that color. Not surprisingly but wonderfully, the most beautiful flesh tone color comes from combining a little bit of all of them into the white. 11. Painting Little Faces, Part 1: Now, we get to the fun part. Finally, painting faces. I've gotten my page ready with a lot of different face shapes and different skin tones to start with, and that's exactly what we're going to do. I'm going to start filling in those faces with skin tones and very subtle shadows. Since she's angled at a three-quarter side, I'm making the darkest side be the part that's away from us. I'm adding just a hint of color where the darkest shadows would be. This is not my darkest color, but it gives me a framework. Those eye shadows, those cheekbones, the bridge of the nose. Those little hints are enough for our eye to understand where those face parts will go. Now, I'm going to place all those facial features that we were talking about before. Sometimes I like to start with the eyebrows because even though they are often overlooked eyebrows do add so much personality and character. This girl's a blonde, but she has dark, strong eyebrows. I'm already sensing a personality that's developing here. I'm using blue to line her eyes because I am putting makeup on as I paint her, and they're little angled I'm choosing an omen shape. There's not much of a dip on the bottom of her eyes, which means I know that she's smiling or grinning. Again, I said, she's smiling, so I know exactly what I'm going for there. I'm going to go straight for the smile and these dark beady eyes. Now, I'm going in with more darker colors. I'm adding in the eyelashes and the darkest parts of the nose. That bottom part where the shadows hit the darkest. Towards the end here those tiny touches make the biggest difference. As I said, I work on a lot of things at the same time. So as things dry, I'm working on something else. I'm going to start in with this face. These are the two faces that you'll watch me work on the most and I'm going in with lighter washes. This is getting very wet, so I'm probably going to have to just put in these light washes, work on another one, come back to it when it's dry. But I'm using a lot of neutral colors. This is a man's face. I'm not going for the hot pinks and oranges that I would for a girl's face. But for a man's face, which actually looks a lot like my dad's. I'm doing a lot of brown's. This hair is coming in on his hairline. You're getting a sense of where that goes, the sideburns or something I'm thinking about. Since I've got a hefty mustache, I'm not going to see the upper lip very much. I'm really mostly going to see the bottom lip, especially since he's giving me a hint of a smile. At the end, I go in and put in darker lines where I put lighter lines more conservatively to define my face, even though I had done that before. Now, I know exactly where I want to place it. I'm also going to add a hint of shadows into the face, which is a bold move here at the end. Because I feel like it's feeling a little flat. So I need to be very careful, very light with my brush. Not use much water, but I'm going to go in and put in just a few more shadows to give his face a little more definition. Be careful not to touch areas that are wet, especially working in watercolor, as things will start to bleed together. You'll see that I added cleft in this chin. That's a little too dark, but then I dry my brush off and erase it. That's something that's covered in my, oops class. Now this lady started as a brunette. I wasn't quite satisfied with how that was going. Then I added some orange to make her a redhead to really add some variety to this page of lots of different faces. I also wanted something that's bold and that's what I'm going for. I'm going to go with an even deeper red. I'm giving her a beehive, and I thought that actually with the pink tones of her face, which are typical for a redhead, I could go ahead and go with that hair color. Her eyes are really expressive. She's giving us a big smile. I'm going to start with that. I'm drawing her eyes with a light brown line and even though they won't be light brown later, again, I'm putting in lighter colors at first to define the shapes, and I'm basically having more and more fun as I go. Now, I'm going to go darker with my colors and bolder with my colors. I'm adding in her an eyeliner, so to speak, and her mascara, and then adding in eyes and definition on the hair. Remember, those creases in the mouth, the shadows at the end of the teeth. Now, I'm going in with the eyes just while things are dry and I feel things won't bleed. I'm constantly working around the page so that things dry. I also feel sparks of ideas for the other features of our faces. 12. Painting Little Faces, Part 2: Now let's go into the final stage of that face. I'm adding very small highlight touches, going in with my fine liner, this is a number one size brush, and I'm doing outlines, tiny eyelashes, tiny hair strokes, those accessories that bring this little personality to life. As an added touch, I like to use acrylic white ink, add it to my paints or just on its own to be able to work on top of the watercolor and add small touches. Here I'm adding a really subtle shadow around the ends of that smile to curve it around just a little bit. It's great for doing highlights in the hair, in the face, and as you see in these glasses. If I could offer you one piece of advice in creating faces that have personality, it would be that it's really a step by step collection of small choices, and very small details that make a face have a personality. 13. Final Tips for Your Faces: You came for answers, answers you will get. Here are some of the frequent questions that you might have. Let's talk about kids. When we're doing kids, we want to do what they are known for. Their faces have wonder or joy. So open up those eyes, meet them by looking up, that's a way that we often look at kids, or they're smiling and their eyes are very squinting. Watch your proportions as their eyes do tend to be bigger, their noses and their cheekbones aren't as well-developed. Those parts need to be there lighter, not even there, lighter eyebrows, what we want to focus is actually on the QS factor, their hair, their big eyes and things like that. With babies, we're going to take a lot of those similar suggestions and bump them up even more. They are even less-developed, so their features do seem to be very round. Always work with really light colors and and build up from there, use the least amount of lines, least amount of shadows. Really you're wanting to do big eyes, cute lips, minimal lines in the nose, and watch those proportions. Babies foreheads tend to be pretty large, and their cheeks tend to be larger to focus on that cute factor, milk, all those little details are what they're worth to make that baby adorable. When doing faces that have different expressions, the best piece of advice I can give you is to either use a mirror or take pictures of yourself. Look in the mirror and do a little, and then try to draw them, notice how your eyebrows change when you just go like this, and your nose changes, and your mouth changes, your whole face is involved in each facial expression that you do, heighten that emotion to the tenth degree. If you feel like your drawing looks a little silly, then the next time, tone it down a little bit. But you'll be able to see those markers of what really translated into that emotion or mood. Let's start by talking about my favorite accessories, glasses. You paint the face, and then at the end you paint the glasses. The most you can tell when you're looking at a face, try to visually take away those glasses, and at the end editing. It's so ironic because glasses are the last thing you paint and yet it's the first thing that we often see on someone's face. Accessories are something that you add at the end, unless it's incorporated into their face. Let's say if a hat is covering their face or a floral encroaches on their forehead, or on the side of their face and you allow some space for that. On the most part, I put accessories and later. In this instance when you're rendering hair, there's two ways to go about hair You either go strand by strand and go as realistic as possible or you stylize it. When you're stylizing it, paint in the direction which the hair is. I like to differentiate the colors because no one's hair is one single color, and adding details at the end always makes a huge difference. Facial hair is fun because you get to feel like you're basically defacing your own painting. So you do the face and then you add in that facial hair. Unless it's a very full beard, I won't typically allow much space for it, I'll just paint on top of it. With this guy's case, I thought that he needed a very manicured beard. He seems like the guy who would take good care of the edges of his beard. For those of you who are feeling very confident and want to depict someone who is in real life or it's a celebrity or a loved one, my piece of advice is to a, do several. I have several here, these are just little faces that I did of our family for a letter. I was not content with most of them. But I walked away, I came back and I found I was able to choose which ones exactly I liked. So go easy on yourself. A lot of times you are not crazy about this particular face and other people will remind you, assure you that it actually does look like that person. What is most important is to focus on top three things that are distinctive about this person. For me let's say it would be my glasses, the curly hair, and maybe my nose. As long as those are in place, the rest can look like me and it will be okay. But find those distinctive traits in other people, think of caricatures of gelado and think of Marilyn Monroe, with a platinum hair, as long as those things are in place, people were able to recognize that that was so and so. 14. Show Us & Closing: I hope you had fun with this class. I hope you took out your paper and you started sketching, doodling some eyes, some faces, some face shapes and exploring the different varieties that are there. Hopefully it answered some questions about skin tones, about different shapes, different ethnicities, different accessories, ways to approach your face or I hope I just made you confident to just try it out for yourself. Show me what you've worked on, it'll be so fun to have a feed of little faces. Whether you do one or you fill a page with a dozen, show us so we can see your little people and will probably ascribe our own interpretation of their personality to them. Until the next class, thanks.