Portrait Drawing: a Beginner’s Guide to Drawing Faces

1. Portrait Drawing: a Beginner’s Guide to Drawing Faces: For years, I used the same methods to draw faces as I used to draw everything, and my characters just weren't very good. Fast-forward to 2022, I got sick and I spent my recovery time trying some new methods. Suddenly, faces made so much more sense and they were so much easier to draw. In this class, you'll learn step-by-step how to draw faces with repeatable technique for getting the proportions right and placing features, even when the head is turned in different angles. We'll bring their characters to life with a clear guide to adding shading and highlighting. We'll cover drawing the nose, eyes, mouth, and hair in detail, and you'll learn how to choose beautiful skin tones. By the way, hi. I'm Brooke Glaser. I'm a professional illustrator and a teacher. I've helped hundreds of thousands of students to learn illustration and level up their art careers. This class is everything I wish I'd been told about drawing people, broken down into fun clear lessons. I've included worksheets and resources, as well as tips to help you get better, faster. If you're brand new to drawing faces, have no fear. This class is meant for you. Whether you want to create realistic or stylized illustrations, the methods in this class are meant to be flexible and adapt to your own unique style. If you're ready to level up your portraits, let's get started. 2. Class Resources & How to Use This Class: Welcome, art friend. I'm so happy that you made it to class. I want to give you a quick breakdown of what we're going to cover and where you can get your resources. This class is broken into two major sections, there is a how to draw the face section and how to paint the face section. We're going to start by learning a method to quickly and consistently place all those features, the eyes, nose, mouth in the right spots on the face, and we're going to do that in a 3/4 perspective, because that's the best way to understand this method. After that, there is a video on how to draw the phase in front face view and in profile view. If you want to, you can skip those two lessons and go straight into how to draw the features. That's okay, you can come back to those ones later, but you'll definitely want that first lesson on how the method actually works. Then we will go into detail on how to draw those features, the nose, eyes, mouth pair, all that good stuff. After that, we'll pick out our color palettes, and finally, we'll go into how to color in our portraits, which is absolutely my favorite part. If you're feeling a little uncomfortable like your sketch didn't turn out bad great, don't stress about it. Once you start adding color to it, everything is going to really come together. While I will be demonstrating the lessons on the iPad in the app Procreate, these exercises can be done in traditional media as well. That said, for the drawing portion, you'll want an eraser. I would steer away from using markers or pens during our sketch phase. But once we get into the painting section, then you can use whatever media you're most comfortable with. Of course, you'll need to practice all of these things to get better. You really can't just watch the lessons and then just mentally understand how they work, you really got to draw them and try them out to really help it sink in. To help with that, I've created some worksheets and color palettes that you can use. To download the worksheets, go to brookeglaser.com/portraits. The link is in the Projects and Resources tab as well. Once you're there, you can type your email address and to unlock the freebies. This will add you to my email list, which means you'll get my occasional tips, freebies, and resources for artists. You can unsubscribe at anytime. Once you've done that, it'll take you to the page where you can download the class resources. You can download Procreate files or printable PDFs. These worksheets will help you follow along step-by-step with the lessons. Especially the worksheet for shading faces, I'm particularly excited for you to use this one. I've also included the skin tone palette that I use in my own personal illustrations. It's available as a Procreate custom palette and a JPEG, if you prefer to use other drawing apps. Finally, there's some premium worksheets and Procreate brushes. These are not required for the class. They're actually extra exercises and worksheets beyond the step-by-step lessons demonstrated in the class. You may find them helpful, but they're not required for this class. Let's get started. I'm excited to create characters with you. 3. Plotting Out Faces: The Method for Creating Successful Sketches: I can't be the only person who's ever drawn a beautiful set of eyes, nose, mouth, and then tried to draw the face around that only to find that suddenly everything looks off. Do you struggle with getting the placement of the features on the face correct or maybe the proportions? Anybody else end up with melting Mr. Potato Heads? In this lesson, we're going to learn a repeatable step-by-step process for getting those proportions right. Using this method has more than doubled how fast I can get a good sketch down. Don't forget to grab that worksheet and let's get started. First, we're going to draw a circle to help us represent the top part of the head and that is the part without the jaw. Then we want to draw a vertical line to split this down the center, and we're going to do it actually at a tilt. Why a tilt? Because this head is actually at a tilt. If this is the first time that you're drawing a head in this method, it might actually help you to try drawing on top of your reference photo to help solidify some of these concepts. If I draw a line through here, I can see that the head is actually a little bit on a tilt. So that's why I'm splitting this at a slight tilt. I'm also going to draw a vertical line splitting the circle in half this way, and that tilt is going to be determined by where the eyebrows are lined. The eyebrows are also slightly tilted. If her head was perfectly straight up and down, the lines would be perfectly straight up and down, but they're not. You don't have to get this perfectly right. We're not going for photo-realistic reference. So if you do not get these angles perfectly perfect, don't worry about it. What I'm going to do next is split this top section up here into thirds. I'm going to make a mark about 1/3 up and 1/3 up. It's okay, again, if you're not perfectly perfect, but the more you practice at this, the better you'll be able to get at just quickly splitting things into thirds. I'm also going to add one extra third down below the circle. Now, you're probably wondering what these are. I promised we're going to make sense of these lines a little bit later. The next concept here is that we're going to draw a small circle inside of our circle to help us represent the side of the head. Now, we're using a circle, but none of us have perfectly round ping-pong heads. We have round heads, but the sides are more flat. That's what we're going to do. We're going to chop off the sides of these balls in our drawing. Now, you're going to draw this circle bigger or smaller depending on how far the head is turned away from us. We are trying to think about where you're going to draw, how wide this is, you're going to look for this side of the eyeball all the way to the back of the head. For the height, you're going to make it as tall as this top third and as long as this bottom third. It's totally okay if this is not perfect. We're not going for photorealism here. I'm just going to shade in this ball. I'm just going to shade this in so that it's a little bit more obvious where the side of the head is. Now, I'm also going to need to chop off this side of the ball as well. Because this is again, there's two sides of this that needs to be chopped off. Now I'm going to make a cross in this circle. This is going to be really helpful because guess what? This back corner over here, that's where the ear always lands. Now, I want to connect these two sides of the face. I'm going to create some curved lines at the top of the circle going through that top line. I'm going to do it through the center line. I'm going to do it through the bottom line here. I'm also going to draw a little bit of a curved one here for this bottom one. Now, to make sure that I'm getting the perspective of this face right, it can help to draw these as curved lines rather than straight lines. For example, see how these curved lines make the ball look like it's actually round rather than these straight lines going across. Even with the dotted line in the background, the curved lines have a little bit more form. Why the heck are we drawing these lines? Well, this top line right here, this is going to be our hair line. That's actually where the hair starts growing from the head. It's not the actual top of the head, which is up here. This center line is going to be where our eyebrows land. Right here, that's the brow line. This line right here, that's going to be the bottom of the nose. This line down here, that's going to be where the jaw falls. Now, I roughly chopped off that side of the ball over here. But when we draw in this side of the face, this eye-to-cheek bone connection is really fun and important to draw. You notice that from the eyebrow, it goes inwards and then goes back outwards for the cheek. I'm going to draw my eye coming inwards and then outwards for that cheek, and then down all the way to the jawline. Now I need to decide how wide is the bottom part of my jaw right here. I'll probably have it come out to about here and then this is going to connect from the ear downwards. Now, usually, the jaw comes down a little bit and then angles outwards from the ear. This is different for everybody. Jaws are unique, some are more angular and some are more curved. Masculine jaws tend to be a little bit more square and angular, and feminine jaws tend to be a little bit smoother and rounder. Finally, from how wide the jaw is, I'm going to connect it up into the center of the circle up here. Again, I'm going to shade this in so that we can see that this is the side plane of the face. This is going to help us to find where the cheekbone is and just to see this as like a three-dimensional head shape. Finally, I'm going to add some lines for my neck so that my head isn't floating in space. The neck connects to the back over by this ear. I'll draw a curved line right here. Then I'm just going to draw roughly a curved line for her shoulder. Onto placing the features. I know that this is the eyebrow line and I know that this is the nose line, but how far over on this face am I going to actually draw where the eyes and the nose land? In order to do that, we need to find the center of the head because this is going to help us know exactly where to place the nose and how far over to place each of the eyes. Again, let's take a look at our reference over here, and I'm going to draw on top of it because this is a great way for you to understand what you're drawing. I don't want you to always trace on your reference, but at the beginning when this is really new and complicated, drawing on here can really help you understand where to place these lines, and with practice, you will not have to trace over it. I can see that this is the center of my nose, and we're going through the center of the mouth and up and around. I'm going to draw a curved line coming through the top of the head, and then it's going to come straight down through the chin. Now, you'll notice that this does not split the head evenly in half, and that's because this head is in perspective. We don't have an even amount of space for this side of the face and this side of the face. We see much more of this side of the face than we do of that. Now we want to draw the eye sockets. The eye socket is where the eyebrow lies, it's also where the eye itself lies, and some of the lower lid in there. This eye socket is quite a big space. I'm going to mark how far over my eye sockets go. My eye socket is going to go out to here, and it's going to come about to there. Next, I'm going to draw this little dip right here. This is where the nose connects to the eyebrows. Then I can create an arch for the top of those two eyes to connect them. Now I need to close this eye socket gap. Now remember this little line right here that we drew? This is how far down the eye socket is going to go. Now I'm going to draw some circles to represent the entirety of my eyeballs. Why circles? We'll dive deeper into this later, but it's going to help me think about how deep back someone's eyes are. It's also going to help me create really rounded looking eyes. But if you just really hate the idea of drawing circles for the eyes, you can also come in here and mark where you want the parts of the eyes to go and you can draw your eyes in like that. Now I promise that I will go over how to draw the eyes later, but one thing to keep in mind is that you want your eyes to be about one eye width apart. If I come in here and I take my finger like this, I can use the tip of my pencil and my finger to mark out how big that eyeball is. If I put it in the center, I can see those two circles, they're about one eye width apart. Now you might be saying, hey, why is this eyeball bigger than that eyeball? Well, that's because perspective. If this face was facing frontwards, both the eyes would be exactly the same size. But because this eye is closer to us and this eye is further apart, you can see that this eye and this eye are very different sizes. Now I'm going to create a new layer and lower the opacity of this initial sketch. Now, if you are drawing with pencil and paper, maybe you want to do a light erasing on here just so that it's a little bit easier as we start to draw a couple of these features in. On this new layer, I'm going to draw my eyelids and eyes in. I promise we're going to go over how to draw these in a later lesson, but I just can't stand having just the circles in there. I'm also going to draw my eyebrows in. Again, we'll go over this in more detail in another lesson. Now we're going to block the nose in. Now the nose has a bunch of fiddly little bits here and here and here. There's just so much to the nose. It can be really difficult and confusing to draw. But we can actually simplify this down into a simple box shape. I'm not going to have you draw your portraits with box noses because that would be weird. But breaking the nose down into really simple shapes in the sketch phase, it helps me visualize so much more easily when I get to more advanced levels of shading in the face. Let me just break this down for you really fast. We're going to create the nose as a box. The bottom of the nose is where the bottom of the nose is. Then it also is where this little dip right here, where the ball of the nose is, it's going to be right there. Then I'm going to connect these two like a box. Then I'm going to draw the front part of the nose coming up like this and align for the side of the nose. I've got the front plane of the nose and this side of the nose. Then there's this really special feature up here called the keystone that everybody has. It's where your eyebrows and your nose meet. It start a little bit wider and usually dips down a little bit, and then you've got the side of your nose over here as well. Let's do this on our sketch. I'm going to draw the bottom part of my nose. By the way, this should be happening in-between the eyes because the nose is in-between the eyes and usually it's about the same width as the in-between of the eyes space. Then I'm going to draw that little curvy bit that's right there and connect that part of the nose. Now I'm going to come and I'm going to draw that keystone section. It dips right here, goes inwards. There's my keystone, and I can connect that top plane, that's the top plane of the nose, and then I can draw this back here. Remember how I was saying that some people's eyes go deeper. This is something that you're going to see is unique to everybody, and you're going to see how this space goes downwards into the eye socket. A little bit different for everybody in how deep their eyes go. Now I need to place where the mouth is. If I take the bottom of the jaw and the bottom of the nose and I split that again into thirds, this top third, that's going to be where the center of my mouth is. This bottom third, that's going to be the top of my chin. I can come in here and place the mouth in. Again, I promise we're going to go over how to draw the eyes and the nose and the mouth in some future lessons. How do I know how far over to bring the mouth? The mouth usually comes to about the center of the eyes. Usually goes from there to there. I'm just going to draw a curved line to indicate the chin. Also just for fun, I'm going to follow this smile line right here just to give her a little bit of more personality. I can also shade in the bottom of the nose, the top lip, and actually right in here around the eye sockets, this is also an area that will be sinking backwards. The eye sockets are also a little bit in shadow, too. Finally, we want to come in here and include the hair. When we draw hair, we want to draw this as big form. We don't want to draw it as individual hairs. I really encourage you, hair is really cool. It can be really fun to come in here and trace the big sections where the hair connects. I can see a section right there. I can see this comes up in these little chunks and connects and down. This is a really fun line. If I follow this all the way around and then back up, that really creates a strong hair shape. We're just trying to block in big shapes. You want to think of hair as shapes. Of course, our hairline is right here. Because of her hair style, her hair really does sit on this hairline. One thing to keep in mind with hair, it's actually bigger than our skull. This original circle that we drew, our hair has more volume than that. When you draw your hair on, you want to make sure that it's going above the skull line unless it's super-duper flat, which most people's hair is not. I'm just going to retrace the lines of the face here. If I come in and I turn down this initial sketch or if you're drawing with pencil, you can erase a little bit more. You can have a really nice sketch of where all of your features are going to lay. Now of course, you can always come in and do a more refined sketch. One thing I might think about is that I would like that part of the forehead to go a little bit further in my sketch. When you are refining your sketch or when you're doing your initial sketch. One thing that I would not recommend doing is trying to find every single bump and curve in the face. It's better to try and simplify it down into smooth straight lines. Keep it as simplified as you can. Also, you want to make confident, smooth lines. What doesn't look good is if you have lots of really sketchy lines, these small dashes, while they're very helpful while you're beginning and you're starting out your sketch, they don't make a good looking final piece. You want to make sure that you're confident. It's okay if you make a mistake. You can erase it, you can redraw it. But try to draw as long and as smooth of lines as you can. If you like the idea of keeping your line art or you like a style that has a lot of line work, it may help you to make sure that you're creating a varying amount of thickness. So darker, or thicker, or heavier lines to emphasize important parts of your drawing. Maybe you think her eyes are the most important part, or her mouth. Those are the parts that you might want to have heavier lines in. Holy cow, that was a lot to take in. Let's do a quick recap, shall we? When we draw the face in three-quarters view, we draw a circle for the face. We split that circle as best we can into halves and divide the top and bottom half into thirds. We also add an extra third for the jaw. We add a circle to represent the side of the face, and then we define the other side of the face. Once we've connected the jaw, we bring it back up to this guy right where the ear sits. Then we find the center of the face. We mark out where our eye socket sit, and we even place our eyes. We also add some neck lines so our face isn't floating in the air. If you want to get fancy, you'll draw some eyes in before you watch the lesson on how to draw eyes because you're fancy. You also might draw in your eyebrows, and then we mark out our nose. We start with the bottom where we draw a trapezoid to represent the bottom half of the nose. Then we draw our keystone in between the eyes and connect the top plane of the nose and the side plane of the nose. Then we mark out thirds for our mouth and our chin. We draw the lips in, and then we mark out our hairline. The more that you use this method to draw faces, the more these guidelines, all of these extra lines that I've drawn in here, the more they're going to be something that you imagine, unless it's something that you have to draw every single time. In fact, when I draw faces, I actually only draw the circle and then I just draw that side circle in, and I can just imagine how far the chin will go down. I don't draw all of the guidelines. I did when I first started drawing because it really helped me understand exactly where to place everything. But now that I've done it so many times, I don't need every single one of those lines. Also, does your sketch look beautiful? Awesome. Does your sketch look like ***? That's okay too. That's part of being a beginner at something. Let me show you one of my early pieces. That's part of being a beginner at something. Look at this stinker. This is one of my early drawings. I went from drawing pieces like this to this in just a few weeks. That's because I allowed myself to make some "bad art". Now it's your turn. Using the worksheet or your own reference photo, draw a face in three-quarters angle. 4. Tips for Getting Better, FASTER: Tips for getting better faster. There's an excellent book called The Talent Code and it talks about the science behind how talent seemingly explodes overnight. I highly recommend giving it a read. One of my main takeaways was how to get better at things faster. To explain that point, the book shares an example of this experiment. I'd like to try that with you now. Take a look at these two sets of phrases and I want you to pause the video and take a minute and spend an equal amount of time on each list, column A and column B. Which of those word pairings can you remember? My guess is that it's easier for you to recall the phrases that had letters that were missing. That's because you had to concentrate a little bit to figure out what those words were meant to be. You had to struggle a little bit. Struggling a little bit helps our brains build pathways to help us build new skills. The trick is the struggle can't be too hard and it can't be too easy. When it's too easy, when there is just a list of words, those skills won't stick as well. But when it's too hard, you can't improve either. What can you do when it's too hard? The Talent Code recommends, and so do I, that you break things down into bite-sized chunks. For example, after you finished drawing a portrait, take a moment and assess where the one or two areas that you struggled the most with. Perhaps it was eye shapes or the placement of the features. Then in your next drawing, focus on paying lots of attention to that specific problem. Don't just blindly draw another portrait and hope that you do better the next time. Slow it down and spend some extra time on those trouble areas. I know that sounds obvious, but so often we just draw the next portrait and continually struggle with the same things because we didn't take the time to assess what did work and what didn't. Practically, here are five tips for you. One, give yourself training wheels. When a kid learns to ride a bike, they often start with training wheels. This helps them get the confidence to safely use the bike, how to master peddling and breaking, before they master how to balance themselves on two wheels. Jugglers start by using only one or two balls. What training wheels can we create for ourselves when we're drawing portraits? For one, these concepts are really difficult. If you're having a difficult time with that, try tracing them over your reference photo to practice these concepts of proportions. Or you could draw on grid paper. Draw the same size grid on your reference photo and the page that you'll be drawing on. If you're using Procreate, you can turn on the drawing guides. Having a grid will make it easier for you to see if your measurements are accurate. Two, one thing at a time. It's important that you practice at the edge of your ability. If you're really struggling with the techniques, simplify your drawing sessions down to focus on one skill at a time. For example, have a drawing session where you just draw noses at a specific angle or you just focus on getting the proportions right. I've created some workbooks that are fill-in-the-blank for faces. So you can focus not on drawing the entire head, but the specific parts of the head. To get those worksheets, check out the first lesson on how to download the class materials. Number 3, observe other artists and imitate them. The Talent Code talks about the importance of observing and imitating the masters. For example, amateur athletes study the videos of pro athletes. They study how those masters, how they actually do their tennis swings. In my class on how to find your style, I have a whole lesson on doing master studies. In the case of drawing portraits, here is how this would work. Identify an element that you're struggling with, say drawing eye shapes in three-fourths perspective. Find an illustrator that you admire that does it successfully and copy what they do. That can mean tracing what they're doing or just drawing it, but attempt it their way. You will learn so much from doing this. But these master studies are something that should be kept in your own personal private sketchbook. They're for your eyes only. These master studies are not something that you should share on social media or claim as your own. This method works really well if you know what parts you're struggling with. But what if you can't tell what's working or not working with your portrait? It just feels off. Number 4, flip it. If you can't figure it out, try flipping your illustration. If you have a physical copy, try looking at it in the mirror. Flipping your drawing is going to make the flaws way more obvious. Also, if you're like me, you're suddenly going to realize that all of your portraits are somehow slanting and sliding to one side. Another method to help you identify where your sketches aren't working is after you've drawn your face, overlay your sketch on your reference photo. Take a moment to assess where things went right, yay, and where you were off on your estimates. For me, I don't often draw the hair big enough or I'll make my face shape too small or I used to draw my nose way longer than it should be. Overlaying my sketch on my reference photo helped me identify where I was getting my proportions off. You do not want to get too perfectionistic with this. If we wanted photo realism, we'd take a photo. We wouldn't draw an illustration. The goal with this method is to identify the things that are way off. You may find that parts of your drawing are technically wrong, but you like the way they look. For example, I like to draw my eyes bigger than my reference photo. That's part of stylizing your illustration and coming up with your own unique look. You'll need to decide for yourself where that balance is. A bonus tip for digital users. Use the Liquify tool to correct your mistakes. For example, when you're using the Liquify tool, you can use the Expand option to make eyes bigger or you can use the Pinch option to make something smaller. You can even use the Push option to squeeze things to the side that you made a little bit too big. I want to reiterate that struggles and mistakes are good things. Remember, struggle helps you build those connections in your brain. I don't want you to feel bad if your portraits aren't instantly incredible. That's an unrealistic expectation and it's not very helpful. You can get better even at something that is hard. I believe in you. When I'm observing where I made a mistake, I'm not judging myself. I'm just saying, okay, now I know where I can make this better next time. It's an excitement to get better. 5. WIN A YEAR OF SKILLSHARE: Want to win the year of Skillshare to celebrate the launch of this class, I'm giving away a year-long membership to Skillshare. To enter all you have to do is post a project in this class, you can post photos of your work in progress as part of your project, you could post your sketches, or you could post a finished project. You could also show your practice sketches of eyes, or noses, or whatever you like. All you have to do is post a project. If you'd like to double your chances, you can also leave a review of the class sharing the favorite thing you learned. So posting a project will count as one entry, and leaving a review with your favorite thing you learned will count as one entry. The deadline to enter is November 21, 2022, 8:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time. The winners is going to be chosen at random and I'll announce the winner in the discussion tab of this class. I'm excited to see your art, and best of luck. 6. Drawing the Face in Front View: The front-facing view is the easiest way to draw because there's no perspective shifts in the eyes, or the mouth, or the nose. So let's walk through it. First, we'll draw a circle for the skull, and then I'll split that in half. This reference is really easy because her face is straight up and down and not tilted at all. I'll also split the top half into thirds, the bottom half into thirds, and I'll make a line for the jaw. Help us out here, I'm going to extend the top hairline across this circle. This is our brow line. It's already extended across the circle, and this bottom one for our nose line across the circle, and I'll also extend the jaw out a little bit. Now, just like in the 3/4 view, we need to cut off the sides of the head. On our reference photo, right here is the side of the face. So this is the side plane of the face. Back to our reference, I'm going to draw a circle, that is the height of our brow and nose line, and that's going to help me figure out where the sides of the face are. Now I'm going to try and decide how wide I want to make her jaw. You might find it helpful to erase the wider part of this circle at this point. Now I'm going to just plop her ears in there because I know her ears are in the back corner of those half circles, and I'm going to decide how wide is her jaw. I'll say her jaw is about this wide. Now I'll connect the jaw to the ears. You can see really clearly in this photo, her jaw comes down and then angles over. I'm going to decide how far down. I want her jaw to come down from the ears, and then I'll angle it over to however wide I've decided her jaw will be. Let me erase this extra right here because that's how wide I decided her jaw was going to be. One mistake that I used to make was that I would make the curve of the jaw different on each side. Can you see here that I went a little bit further down from the ear before I angled over? One thing that you might want to watch is thinking like, this is about as far down as the jaw goes there, so I'm going to make sure it goes down that far there. Paying attention to these little measurements can really help you make sure that your face looks correct. Now she's got a really distinct jaw line, so I might spend a little bit of time finessing this. There's nothing wrong with taking a little bit of extra time to make sure that you get the shape that you want. Now, finally, I want to draw a line that goes from the wide part of the jaw up into the quadrant up here, up to right above the ear. I'm going to shade this in so that you can see it a little bit better, but that is also a side plane of the face. Next, we'll draw in the eye sockets. Remember, the eye socket is the whole eyeball, the area underneath the eyeball where there's lower lid, and the eyebrow itself. I'm going to mark out how far over the eye sockets will go, and I'm going to pay attention to this little dip right here. Draw that in and then create that M shape of where I'm going to lay out the eyebrows. Then I will come down to this middle line right here to complete our eye socket. Now I'll draw some circles to represent where the eyes are going to fit in here. This would be much easier than trying to draw this in the 3/4 perspective because the eyes are going to be the exact same size. If I draw a circle to represent the eye here and a circle to represent the eye here, they're going to be the exact same size and the space between them should also be the same. You can measure this by taking your finger and the pencil to eyeball, no pun intended, how far apart those eyes are. If you're using Procreate, you can actually grab these eyes and place them on top of each other to make sure that they're at the same size. You can duplicate them and drag this in the middle to make sure like, hey, are those eyes actually perfectly three widths apart? Back to my drawing, I'm going to get them as close in size and distance apart as possible. At this point, I'm going to create a new layer. Or if you're using pen and paper, make sure that you draw more heavily at this point. I'm going to reduce the opacity on my initial sketch layer here. Again, if you're using pencil and paper, you can just lightly erase. I'm going to quickly just draw in my eyes. Again, we'll go over how to draw the features in detail in another lesson. But it's going to drive me nuts if I don't have eyes at all. I'll draw in my eyebrows. Next, we're going to block in our nose. If I think about that keystone on this, that it dips down here and I think it really stops going inwards about here. Now we're going to put in the bottom plane of the nose. The bottom of the nose is just about that eye width apart and then this is going to be the top of that bottom section. I'm going to connect that top plane. Right here, there's where that top box connects there, and then the side of the nose connects right there. Let's try it on our reference drawing. I'm going to draw the keystone, which dips down probably until about there. Her keystone is really wide and I'm going to draw the bottom of the nose again. It's probably going to come out to there. Connect the top plane of her nose and then mark out the sides of her nose. Now I'm just going to add some shading in here to give it that 3D look. Also shade in some of the eye sockets. Now let's mark out the mouth and the chin. Again, so from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the chin, we're going to split it in thirds, one for the center of the lips and one for the top of the chin. I'll mark the center of the lips and the chin. The width of the mouth usually comes down to about the center of where the eyes are. Now we'll draw the hair. One thing that I notice right here is there's this really fun curve and curve right here that really creates a flow with her hair. With hair, you are welcome to exaggerate and push the shapes a little bit further because hair moves so much. Easily, this could blow in the wind, and if you think it would look really cool to have it like sweeping around a lot, you can do that in your photo. You can do that in your drawing because this is just the reference. We're not trying for photorealism. Also, I noticed there's a really fun dips along here that I'm going to try and mimic in my hair shapes. Since this is our hairline, I know that the hair is going to separate right here. I'm going to draw it a little bit bigger than the skull because our hair has volume. There we have our final sketch. From here, I could come in and refine my sketch. For example, I think that her eyes are a lot bigger in the reference photo and I'd like to emphasize that. So if I were to come and refine the sketch, I would make sure that I made the eyes a little bit bigger and the lip maybe even a little bit smaller. Our initial sketches are just that. They're just initial. I don't want you to feel like the first lines that you make are the perfect ones. Even I don't make my first lines perfect. I come back and I refine and I adjust. That is a normal process. Let's do a quick recap. When we're drawing the face in the front view, we draw a circle for the skull and we split it in half. We split the top into thirds, the bottom into thirds. We add one extra third for our jawline. We add some circles on the side to represent the sides of the face, and then we define the jawline. You can also draw your ears and at this point, too. We'll define the eye sockets and mark out our eyeballs, making sure that they are equal size and equal distance apart, and correcting if they aren't. If you don't get it right on the first try, that's okay. You can correct it. You can also add necklines. Then we'll lighten our sketch and start adding the features with darker lines. We'll add the bottom shape of our nose and the keystone in-between the eyes. Then we'll connect the top plane of the nose and then the side planes. Then we'll measure out and place our lips, and then you can start adding the outlines for your hair. If you want to get fancy, you can add a little bit of shading on the underside of the nose, on the upper lip, in the eye sockets, and even in the side of the face. It's your turn. Using the worksheet or your own reference photo, draw a face in front view. 7. Drawing the Face in Profile: Now we're going to approach our profile views a little bit differently because everyone's profile is really unique. I'm going to show you some fun tips and tricks with this view. But as always, I'm going to start by drawing a circle for the skull, and I'm going to split it in half vertically and horizontally. Now you may notice that this model's head is at a tilt, so I am going to slightly, slightly, slightly tilt my version. Of course, I'll split the top of my circle into thirds and the bottom of my circle into thirds, and I'll add a third for the jaw. Now I'm going to extend the line for my hairline and this is going to go at the same angle as my brow line. What I don't want to see you doing is changing the angle like this, or trying to change the angle like this, or making it straight. All of these features, all of these lines, they need to go parallel to each other. Now what about that half circle that we've been drawing for the face? Well, on the profile view, the side of the face is right here. That circle is going to go from our nose line to our hairline, dead in the center. Now I'm going to draw a temporary line right here to connect the front of the face down to the jawline. I know my ear is going to be back here, so then I can connect the jaw to the ear. Now let's take a look at our reference photo and see what it looks like if we do this same thing on our reference photo. What I want you to notice is that when I connected from the front of the face down to the jaw, look how much all of these features are sticking out. Now this is what's going to happen in every face. Our nose and our lips are going to stick out further because our nose sticks out, of course, but also our mouth sticks forward. Now how far forward the nose and mouth sticks out? This is going to be unique to every single person. All of our faces are different. Some people have longer noses and some people have more protruding lips, and some people have more flat lips. When we start approaching our faces, I really like to pay attention to the different angles that the different features have in relationship to each other. One thing that's going to help me make sure that I'm not putting my features too far over is to continue defining the side of their face. Remember, we want to create a line where the end of the jaw is, where that flat part is, and connect it up to this upper quadrant right up here. This is what that would look like on our reference photo. Next, we'll start working on placing the features. So I'm going to create a new layer or if you're drawing with pencil and paper, just erase really lightly or draw really heavy with your next lines. Now, usually, we start with placing the eyes, but in the profile view, I find it much more easy to start working on this connection right here, the nose and the lips first. Let's first focus on drawing the nose. As you can imagine, this is going to be different in the profile view. First, let's focus on the keystone area. The keystone starts at our eyebrow level, and it dips down and inward, and it goes back, especially from the side. Again, this is going to be different for everybody. Some people's eyes are going to go really deep far back in and some people's are going to be further over. Now let's grab the bottom of the nose. That's coming right about at this line right here. So here is the bottom of the nose. It tilts upward for her and then comes back. Now, we can't really see the front plane of the nose on the side view, we just see the side of the nose. So I'll connect the top to that keystone and the side to the back of the keystone. Let's try placing that on ours. We're just going to make our best guess for that keystone. It's going to dip inwards and back just like that, and then again, we got to make our best guess for how far out we think that the top of the nose will go, how far back the side here, and connect those two lines. Now we're going to place the mouth. Again, we want to do those split into thirds. So I know a third of the way is going to be the lips and a third of the way is going to be the top of the chin. This is where it gets really fun. I really want to pay attention to angles here. When I look at her upper lip, it really goes outwards and makes this really cool curve back towards the nose. I really want to emphasize that. Another cool curve is right here on the bottom lip towards the chin. So I know the bottom lip is going to come down and really dip back in towards the chin, and then the chin goes straight down. Then I can connect that to the ear. A really useful rule of thumb for how far out these features go is thinking of this as a staircase. The nose goes out, and then the lips, and then the chin. What you're seeing right here is that the nose is the furthest out, and then the lips, and then the chin. A mistake that I frequently used to make was I would get so focused on drawing that lower lip that it would oftentimes go further out, and then I would end up with a chin that would go really far out. As you can see, that doesn't look great. Think of it as a staircase, always going downwards and backwards. Now we can place our eye. I know that the bottom of my eye socket is right here, so I can draw a circle for my eye because I know my eyeball is going to be right up here next to that keystone area, and when we draw the eye in profile, it's more triangular shaped. Now the eyelashes are going past the eyeball itself. Now this looks a little bit funky because I haven't finished the lips. But one thing that is still true is that the lips and the eyes do still have a relationship. Generally, the lips go about as far back as the eyes. Now I can come in here and I can connect these shapes, and I can just draw a little curve, create our cheek. Now I want to place my neck before I do my hair because there's a really important relationship between her braids and her neck. When I think about where does the neck meet the back of the skull, it's going to meet right back here and this is curving, so I'm going to draw that curving, and the front is right about there and I can even draw the shoulder. Let me just connect my head, and then I'm going to draw the back of her ponytail, and I'm going to mark out how those braids fall, and then I'm going to mark out the hairline here. Again, the hairline starts right about there, at the hairline mark, and her braids don't go all the way to her ears. So that's where I'm going to draw these braid shapes. Now I'm going to come in and refine my sketch. For example, I really think that there is a much more curved section right here, so I'm going to come in and really refine that connection. I'm going to make these lines a little bit more subtle because they really stand out in the sketch. To recap the profile view, we start with a circle for the head, split in half according to the tilt of the head. Split the top into thirds, the bottom into thirds, and add a third for the bottom of the jaw. Now the side plane is in the center when the profile is perfectly dead profile. But if the face is tilted a little bit, and you can see a little bit of the other eye on this side of the nose, then sometimes this circle will be further back. Keep an eye out for the ear, and that will help you decide how far back to place this circle. If the ear is closer to the back of the head, you know that the face is tilted a little bit. Next, I'll draw an initial line to connect the front of the face and the jaw, and I'll connect the side plane there. I'll think about adding the lines for the neck, and then I'll start adding the features. In profile view, I usually start by placing the nose first. I want to think about the angle of the nose, how high up or down is it pointing away from the face and how far out. Then I'll also think about where does that keystone, where does the nose dip inwards before it comes back out, and how far back does that keystone go? How far back until the eyeball starts? Then I'll connect the planes of the nose, and then I'll think about where does the eye go. I know that the bottom of the eye socket is right there, so I'll draw a triangular shape for the eye because in profile, the eyeball is a lot more triangular. Of course, I'll draw an eyebrow as well. Then I'll split the bottom into thirds. Remember, everybody's mouth is different, so some people's lips will project out further or less far. But remember, you'll always want this to staircase downwards and backwards. You don't want the draw to be further out than the nose. We'll focus on the upper lip, and then the lower lip, and the connection to the jaw. Then I'll start placing my hair. That is how we sketch out the proportions of the face in profile view. Your turn. Using the worksheet or your own reference photo, draw face in profile. 8. How to Draw Eyes: Last, we left our eyes. They were these wacky eye circles and sockets and they look like superhero mask, don't they? With the eye, we've got the eyeball itself, we've got the eyelids above and below, we've got the eyebrows, and we've got this space that is between the eyelid and the eyebrow. The reason I had you draw these eyes as circles is that I want you to imagine them as round shapes. The eyeball itself is round. Well, and I hope you never see an eyeball without the eyelids on it, but the eyeball is round and the eyelids cover the eyeball helping to create that round shape. This is much easier to see in profile than it is in the front view. You can see that the eyeball is right here and that these eyelids come up and around to help create that round shape around the eyeball. It might help to imagine the eyeball as a rubber ball with a slit in it and the eyelids, again, help create that roundness. There's a worksheet to follow along with this. First let's draw the eye lids, the upper and lower eyelids. In some people it's just a really round shape. We'll go boop, very, very smooth, but in some people, it's a little bit more angular. Maybe the eye goes up and then over at an angle, or maybe it goes up, over and then down. There's a million different eye shapes and a million different ways to draw them. I often find that the lower lid is a little bit flatter than the upper one. When we get into these eyes that are in the three-quarter view, it might help to think about, again, this eyeball shape is really round. When I come and draw this eyelid around it, it's going to wrap around the eyeball, making a very round shape. In profile view, this shape is much more triangular. Now I'm going to draw this colored part of the eye. Depending on the expression of your person, you want to make sure that especially this upper part of that circle is covered up by the eyelid. You can also draw the black part of the eye. I'd like to leave a little bit of a highlight, add a little spark of life. Again, depending on the expression, more or less amounts of the colored portion of the eye will be showing. Too little and they'll look tired and too much and they'll look shocked, so you may need to play around with it a little bit. Again, in the side view, it's a totally different shape. Now we need to draw the upper lid. Remember, this upper lid is round. You can see on this eye how it's wrapping around that corner. Again, this is why I find it helpful to draw the circle because it helps me know where to wrap the lid around. Everyone is going to have different amounts of upper eyelid and that shape is also going to be different from person to person. Again, some people might have round one, some people may have angular ones. The shape of that upper lid is going to be all the more important when we start to add shading to this upper lid. Generally, I'll add some light shading on the sides of those upper lids and keep it very light in the center or where eye peaks closest to the light source. In the profile view, that's the front of the eye rather than the center of the eye. Some people will not have visible eyelids, so that's called a monolith and this is very common in Asian eyes. Sometimes the lid is so close to the eye that you just cannot see it when the eye is open, and in some people it's partially obscured. Maybe you'll see the beginning corner of the lid, but only in the beginning and not in the far edge. In those cases, a lot of times I will see that the upper portion of the eye, that space that's in-between the eyebrow and in-between the eyelid, that area has a lot of shape, and that's where I'll add shading. Sometimes it's more shape in the lower lid. Speaking of the lower lid, I used to skip this because I thought oh, drawing the lower lids, it's going to make somebody look older like they have bags under their eyes, but actually you can still draw it and have youthful eyes and it actually really helps to make the eyes look round. For example, you can see here that the lower lid is really showing the roundness of her eyes. It doesn't necessarily add bags, but the trick is you do get to watch how big it is, making it too large does add age to the character, but even young people have this. Drawn correctly in connection with the circle we originally drew and shaded correctly, it can really help makes the eye look round. For eyelashes, I tend to indicate eyelashes with a really thick upper lid and in the front view, maybe with a cat eye or maybe with some individual lashes on the end. You can also do that on the lower lids as well, but if you do want to draw more eyelashes, I'd be wary of drawing them in even increments like this because that tends to look a little bit spider like. Now the profile view is different. The eyelashes really tend to sweep to the front of the eye like this, rather than the side of the eye like that. Now when it comes to eyebrows, some people have really thick, almost straight eyebrows and some people have much more thin and arched eyebrows, so everybody has a different shape but the one thing that is usually pretty common is that it's thicker towards the center of the face and it gets thinner as it gets away from the face. You can just draw the eyebrows in as a solid shape, if that's the style that you like. You could just fill it in as a solid shape but if you want to, you can also draw in the individual hairs. Let me draw a rough shape for these eyebrows, so they go out and then when they get to the corner of the eye socket, they go downwards like this. If we were to draw this side, if I could see the other side of the face it would go down like that but because of perspective, it turns around the corner there and so I can't see it. If I was going to draw the individual hairs and the eyebrows, this is the thing to keep in mind. Towards the center of the face, the eyebrow hairs tend to go up and down. The further out they go, they start to become more angular until they really turn the edge and then they're almost sideways. You can really see that in her eyebrows. They go straight up and down, they'll start to curve around this way, and pretty soon they are almost going sideways. I'm going to turn off the backgrounds there and you can really start to see the shape of the eyes here. Now it's your turn. Using the worksheet or your own reference photos, draw several different eyes. Feel free to experiment with what details you like including and excluding. Play around with different shapes. 9. How to Draw the Nose: There are a lot of different ways to draw noses. You don't have to include every single detail on the nose especially if you'd like to draw a stylized faces. For example, you could just draw the bottom of the nose, or you could draw the outline of the nose, or you could even just draw nostrils. But for the purposes of this class, I'm going to show you everything that I draw on the nose so that you can decide for yourself what you want to include and what you don't. Full disclosure, noses are one of the biggest struggles I have withdrawn faces. I'm going to show you how I approach this, but I totally encourage you to check out what other people have to say and integrate what works for you and disregard the rest. We talked about placing the nose in previous lessons on drawing the face. But I just want to reiterate that the nose is one eye width wide. It's also worth mentioning how we divided the face up into sections, this nose line right here? Sometimes the nose actually dips beneath that line, especially the ball of the nose. It's okay if it doesn't fit exactly on that line. In fact, our noses and ears continue to grow as we age. It's not surprising to sometimes see faces of people who are older, their noses maybe a little bit longer than the ''average young face.'' Another way to conceptualize the nose is that there is a ball at the end and it's attached to a cylinder. The box method, it sure taught us a lot about the bridge of the nose, seeing the planes, the top and the side planes, the nose. But there's a lot more happening down here in that ball. We have the ball of the nose, but we also have the wings, the nostrils and the septum. The septum is that little bit that dips below. This is how I envisioned the box method drawn on these noses. This is going to help me base where to place all of the different parts of the nose. But I do want to point out this nose, it goes a lot further than that box. This nose, it dips below. This nose well, you can't see it with the lines drawn in here. This is not straight. She's got a little bit of a bump in her nose. The box method isn't perfect and we're going to build off of it. I'm going to start by defining the ball of the nose, at least the underside of the ball of the nose here. Then I'm going to see how this can connect to the nostril and the wing of the nose. Nostrils are often comma-shaped. Then I'm going to connect this up the bridge of the nose up here. This is going to help me define where the side of her face starts. I'm going to draw the other side of her nose right there because that also is sticking out right here. Now I'm going to draw the bottom of the ball of her nose because I like to have that shaded in. I would say the bottom also circulates around the nostrils over here. I'll also extend that out and shade it in as well. Now when I get to painting this face, I'm going to pay particular attention to where the highlights on the nose hit. But for now, I'm just going to lightly outline that area. I may define a little bit of where the edge of the nose turns. Let's try with this nose here. I'm going to define the ball of the nose where it connects to the wings. I'm also going to define the top of the nose where it separates from the eye sockets. Again, I'm really noticing a strong highlight right here. That's something that I would really focus on when I'm painting the nose. But for now, I'm just going to draw a faint line in there. I'm also going to lightly define this other side of that top plane of the nose. Then I will create some shading on the bottom of the ball of the nose here. You really can't see his nostrils. His nose is so tilted down, you really can't see it very well. There is definitely a little bit of shape on this wing of his nostril. It's hooks up and around on that side. When I take the box shape away, I really start to lose the shape of the nose. I'll probably also create a little bit of definition where the sides of the plane of the nose end. For this nose here. I'll start by defining the ball of the nose. On this profile, I'm going to come and start at the wing. Then define the nostril, which again is like a comma shape. One thing I want to point out, this wing comes in and curves around into the nostril. The same thing, the septum does the same thing, it curves around and in to the nostril. That might be something that you want to also emphasize that this curve into the nostril. I'll connect this up to the curve of the bridge of the nose and do some really light lines to define the top plane of the nose. Then I'm going to come in here and I really want to emphasize the shape of the ball of the nose and shade that in. Then also the wing of the nose comes up and around. I'm going to shade in, well it's a little bit deeper on this corner because this has also its own little ball shape. I may think about where that meets the eye socket over there. Just to give it a little bit extra shape. For this nose, I'll again start by defining the ball of the nose. I really like to focus on the underside of the ball and then where it comes in the wing, and the nostril, which this nostril is a totally different shape. It's almost like a comma on both ends. It's a little bit wider on this end and on this end. As I come to connect these, I want to capture that little bump right there. I want to think about about where does that happen, and I'll add that. I also want to add some indication for this side of the front of the nose. Then I'll add some shading in, underneath and around the wing. Also I'm going to add some shading on this side plane of the nose so that I can really separate that from the front. If I turn off my boxes, you can see that a little bit more distinctly. Now once the box has gone, I can say, that's really intense, the bump on her nose is really subtle. I can maybe come and add that a little bit more gently in there. This last one, I'll start with the curve of the ball of the nose. This one is very smooth and up and around up to the bridge of the nose. Then I'll define the wing of the nose and add the nostril. Then I'm going to define the front edge, top plane of the nose which comes down and curves at the base right here. I'm going to note that the top half of the wing is being hit by the light. I'm not going to shade that portion and I'm just going to shade part around it. I'm also going to shade the side of the nose so that we can really see this side. This one's really in shadow. I might even add some of the black around this so we can see it really clearly. I'm going to turn the boxes off under there so you can see that a little bit better. That is how I approached drawing noses. Now it's your turn. Using the worksheet or your own reference photos, draw several different noses. Try a variety of noses, but remember you don't have to follow the reference photo exactly if you think it would look more interesting a different way. 10. How to Draw the Mouth: The mouth can be broken down into several sections. We've got the cupid's bow right here. We've got the lips themselves. We've got these little nodes right here that help us indicate a smile. We've also got this overall shape that indicates that the mouth goes forward and there's a little bit of shading underneath of the lips there too. Let's start with the lips themselves. The upper lip has three parts. There's this bean-shaped or heart-shaped center. Then it's got two rounded triangles on the sides. The bottom is made up of these pillowy rounded triangles as well. Lip shapes vary between person-to-person. The reason I chose this example is because this guy's lips, this center heart part, it is extremely pronounced but in this example, you can hardly see that there's a dip at all. I'm going to be honest, I don't usually draw these forms, I just visualize them. Now let's go over how I actually draw these. Usually, I have done the sketch and layout proportions that we did in some of the previous lessons. I have an idea of where the center of my lips are going to lie and I also have a good idea of how far my lips are going to go from side to side. In this case, I'm just going to mark these out and I'll start with thinking, let's take a look at this bean shape right here. As I draw this, I'm thinking about how wide and how deep does this dip right here go? Also, is it sharp or is it curved? Because that shape, it really varies from person-to-person. Then we'll connect it to the size of the mouth. Then I'll think also about the same thing with his lower lip. How far down does this go? Is it very curved? Some people will have much more straight, angular lips and some people have much more smooth lips. Then when the lips are connected here, I'll come in and I will connect those two. Sometimes you'll see a little bit of a dip going this way with that bean shape. Sometimes, people, their lips will actually curve upwards in that bean shape. It'll actually go more like that. You can either make it up or draw however you think it should look. These lips don't have a particularly pronounced dip right here like some lips do. Now once I've gotten that line down the center, they're connected. I'll also mark out those little nodes. This guy has got really pronounced nodes as well, right here and right there. If I wanted them to smile, I'll get those lines going upwards because that creates that hint of a smile. That's trying the lips in the front view. Then I could go in and add an indication of the cupid's bow right there. In some folks, the cupid's bow is extremely pronounced and you can really strongly see it, and in other folks, you really can't see it at all. If you find yourself drawing the same face over and over and over, there's a lot of variation in the lip features and shapes that you can add or include or not include to come up with a variety of different faces. Let's try an example when we've got the face in three-quarters view. Right here, you can really see that heart shape in the center, it's really jetting out and that corner is pushing back. That's something to visualize when we get to shading but also this pillowy curvy triangle, because the mouth is round, it's curving to the other side. This side looks pretty much like the same as the front view but again, when we come to do the lower lip, it really is curving around. Same on this side. Let's try drawing it. We also don't have the lips touching here, so this will be a really great intro and how to do teeth. In theory, would be the center of my lips is right about there and we'll just say it's about this wide. I'm going to start not in the center right here, but over here with that dip in the lips. I'll curve it around and curve it around to here. Now, I'm going to start by filling in the top lip instead of going to the bottom here. I can imagine that the bean heart-shaped is right there and then I'll connect to the side. Again. I'm going to really curve this around. Now, I'm going to come in and I'm going to draw the bottom of the lips, and so they're going to be right about here. They round up and they really round outwards. Some people will have a really big dip in the center right here. That's something you could add if you wanted to change the shape up a little bit. Let's talk about adding the teeth. First of all, the teeth end right about there. I'm going to draw in black right there. Then I'm going to just suggest the outline shape of the teeth. What I would not suggest is drawing every line in between the teeth because usually that'll draw far too much attention and it's just really difficult to do to nail it right. In general, I would just leave a shape, like an outline of the whole shape of the teeth. If you really want to add the lines of separation, I would maybe suggest adding just a small line on the bottom to indicate that rather than a solid line through the center. Now, if somebody's teeth are very distinctive, if they've got a gap then you might want to include that but in general, this is a nicer, easier way to draw teeth. Let's just do an example of our original girl that we drew in three-quarters view. Her bean shape is actually pretty angular. I might really emphasize that. Then I'll think about this bean-shaped being shorter, this one's longer, this one's shorter. Then since these lips are connected, I'll draw the line in the center, and I will draw the suggestion of those little beans in the corner. Let's try our profile portrait now. Thinking about those three sections on the top of the lip really helps me see that. The bean shape would be like this. If I can see the other side of the lip, this would probably dip right there. Then you've got the triangle over here but this little dip-down area, including that is going to give your lips a lot more personality. Let's do our front-facing girl too. I'll draw those lines for the center and how far out this is going to go. She also has some teeth showing, so we'll work on that once more. Her curve right here is really flat. It's definitely there, but it's really flat, and then these lips go super steep downwards. If this is where the center of her lips would normally lay, there is not a ton of space between these lips, so I don't want to add this up too high and then create this giant gap for where the teeth are going to be. I want to be mindful that I'm not creating a really big gap there. Then I'll draw in those bottom lips, which again, they come out here. They're pretty steep going inwards. Again, I'm going to fill in the corners of the mouth so that there's just a suggestion of her teeth because her teeth are going backwards in space here, so her molars or wisdom teeth would be further back. They don't go further out into her cheeks. Then maybe just a suggestion, barely suggesting teeth in there. When we get to the point where we paint the face, it's important to note that the area above and below the lips, it's not flat. Those areas are raised up. This whole area right here is often referred to as the muzzle or the tooth cylinder. This is a lot easier to see in profile. You can see here the area above the lip and below the lip also move outward to create a rounded shape that moves forward and away from the face. When we get to painting these areas, we're going to create shading and highlighting to help indicate that shape of roundness there. We'll also often see a shadow underneath of the lip. This shadow often is deeper and bigger when the lip is large and protruding. It's also going to help indicate where the chin starts to move forward and the muzzle area stops going backwards. I can actually see this in her. I can see, this area is moving forward and the same actually in here as well, like those areas are moving forward but I won't usually draw this in. Sometimes I'll draw lines to indicate those areas, especially where I'm going to add the shading under the lip but this is just for my reference. So that I remember, this area is going to be in shadow, these areas are going to be a little bit more highlighted. This is not something that I would include in my sketch. If I wasn't trying to do like a final line art piece, I wouldn't include these lines because they just add age when there isn't necessarily. You know what time it is, it's your time. Using the worksheet or your own reference photos, draw several different mouths. 11. How to Draw Hair: We're going to draw hair next. It's one of my favorite things to draw. There's so much more freedom and experimentation and how you can draw hair. There's a lot less rules about it than the way there are about all the features of the face, like the eyes and the nose. They have a lot of rules about. You really got to place it right here to get it right. So I have the three-step process for drawing hair. The first is that we're going to block in the overall shape of the hair and the big sections that make it up. Second, we're going to create the shading, the shape of those sections. Then third, we're going to draw in the details, the highlights, the individual hair strands. Before we get into step-by-step examples of that, I want to point out a couple of key points about drawing hair. The first is to create the outline, the overall shape of the hair. The first thing that we need to know about that is drawing the hairline. If you've got the hair pulled back really tight, it's very easy for you to see the hairline. You can actually see where it goes right here. That's not always the case, but what I want to point out is that the hairline is not a perfect straight line curved around like that. Now, if somebody cuts the hair that way or shades it down that way, it can look that way. But when the hair is tight to the skull, usually, you'll see some shape right here around the eye, and sometimes people will have sideburns, not this extreme, usually in women, but even sometimes, you'll see women who have hair coming down to a peak right in front of the ear and then it comes back and around. If I were to draw that on here, I'd have it come curving down and around and then up around the ear. I know where on the skull to start the hairline because we have that initial sketch, and this line right here is that initial sketch. It's not crucial that you hit exactly this point, but let me show you what happens if you don't. If you start drawing the hairline too far back, it's going to look like the person is balding. If you start at too far forward, that's also not going to look very correct. So you don't have to make it perfect, just make sure that you're not too far on either of those extremes. The other thing that we want to consider when we're laying out the main outline of the main shape of the hair is how far up from the skull it comes. Now, in her hair it's really flush to the skull. But let's take a look at another example. In this example, if we were to draw where her skull was, it would be right about here. Her hair is coming up and above that, and that's because our hair often has shape and volume. I also want to point out her hairline here is partially obscured. If I zoom in really close, her hairline is actually coming along here, but there's wisps of hair that come down and around and cover-up that actual hairline right there. Let's start with a section on drawing straight hair. We already drew out the shapes and outlines for the big sections of hair for this in the first lesson where we drew the 3/4 view. What I'm going to do now is just quickly fill in these shapes with a little bit of base color. If you're drawing with pencil, just use a medium pressure to fill this in. We want a mid-tone here. Now that I've got my base color in here, I'm going to start adding the shadow areas in big block chunky sections where I find them. So right back here. I noticed that her hair tucks back around and there's a front part and a back part, and this back part right here, it's not going to get a lot of light. So I have this really fun trick that I like to use. Basically, I'm going to come in here and fill in this area with a darker color. If you're drawing with a pencil, start pressing hard right here, and it creates this beautiful contrast that really creates a shape to that hair. Now, I also noticed that there's a shadow shape like that on this side of her face as well. This is a little bit different. Whereas this is a back section of hair and this is a front section of hair, this is almost a cast shadow, that she is casting that shadow onto several different chunks of hair. You can also come in here and just manually draw that in because see this is, it's not covering that entire chunk of hair right there. Although I would argue it's probably covering that chunk right there. I'm also going to start adding some highlights, some lighter tones to help create the shape on some of these other areas of hair. So if you're using a pencil, you can start using the eraser to gently erase some of this. The first section of hair I'm going to do this on is these sections up in here. What I notice is that there is a shape like this that is lighter, where the light is hitting that section of hair. I'm going to come in here and create these large shapes, create highlights to create this idea that the hair is curving up and around. I also notice that this hair right here has a section of highlight right there. I'm not drawing individual hair strands. I'm drawing sections of highlight. You can also make this up a little bit, if you want to. You don't have to stick 100 percent to the reference photo. Cannot super see a lot of curve right in this area right here. I don't see a lot of highlights right there, but I think it would look good in my drawing. I'm also drawing these in the direction that the hair would actually be flowing, the hair would be going. The individual hairs would actually be moving in this direction, and they'd be going in this direction if I was drawing individual hairs over here. So now that I've created the overall shape, now I'm going to start coming in with more details and actually drawing individual hairs. I might come in here and emphasize that this chunk of hair is sitting above these too by adding a little bit of shadows around those sections to define the different sections of hair, and these I'm drawing with individual strands. I'm always thinking about, am I adding too much detail or too little detail. I don't want to draw so much detail in my hair that it looks incredibly realistic compared to the rest of my face. So the amount of detail that you add is going to be up to you. But now that I've added a little bit of definition between those shapes, I'm actually going to come in and draw some individual hair strands overall. I tend to draw these in sections of two's or three's rather than just an individual strand of hair by itself. One thing I like doing is adding a few hairs that come off of the main shape to create a little bit of flyways. I don't want to do a ton of these or the hair is going to look totally frizzy and ragged, but a couple of them add life to the hair. You can also come in here. You don't have to do this with just darker lines. You can also do this with really light lines, so really heavily erased areas. Especially anywhere where the light would really strongly be hitting the hair and creating the highlight off of it, this is a great place to put in some extra really sharp highlights. We got this girl with braids. So let's talk about a couple of ways that you can draw braids. So first, I'm going to draw two shapes. They don't have to be straight, they can be curved around as well. The first way I'm going to draw lines that intersect, so it's a Y shape almost going up and flowing with the shape of this braid. Then instead of this being straight on the edges, the hair would actually curve in a line like this. So in this case, I'm drawing digitally, so I'm going to turn off that layer underneath, but if you have a pencil, you can just draw a faint center line, and with the same idea there, you draw and you come up, so you're drawing it halfway into those lines, and then you just follow the curve of the line. That's one way. Another way is to draw a central line, like we did there, and this time just draw teardrop shapes that come to the center. Instead of overlapping, they're coming to the same center. If you don't want to have to come in here and erase all of those lines because you're not working digitally, just draw your center line and then draw up against that. But how do you draw the start of the braids like right over here? So if I come to look over at my reference photo, you'll notice that at the start of the braid, the hair is being pulled back into the braid. Another thing I'm noticing is that the braid shape is smaller at the tip and it gets a little bit larger as it goes out. So that's what I'm going to think about as I draw my braids in. When you've got a mass of braids like this, you don't have to be totally exact and perfect. You can put little 1/2 braids in here, or a little suggestions of braids in between the braids. So a big mass of these, you can fake some of this stuff. If you had bigger braids, you'd want to be more careful and more exact with your shapes. I want to show you another method here. Now, what if she had locks or twists instead of braids? Another method we could use is to draw in those big sections of hair first, color them in with a mid-tone, and then we'll come in and add those sections of shadow, so where the hair turns to the back over here. I've got my big shapes in here. Now I'm going to create roughly curved shadow shapes under the rows up here. These are not straight lines, they're curling up to create that curled, or twisted, or textured shape. I'd also add these to the strands coming from her ponytail. I'm making a base for these first, and then coming in with the curves. Then I could come in and start adding the highlight side. Of course, I want to add a suggestion of some of those curls in the backside so it doesn't look like it's left out. Your turn. Using the worksheets or your own reference photos, draw a few different hairstyles. 12. Skin Tones and Color: Before we dive into the coloring portion, we need to choose our skin colors. So here's a couple of helpful tips for choosing great colors for your characters. Our faces are not exclusively one color. Imagine it's winter time and you've been sweating for a few hours, when you come back inside and check your face in the mirror, your cheeks and nose tip will be a lot more noticeably red than, say, your forehead. Even when we're not freezing cold, our cheeks and nose tend to be slightly more reddish in hue than the rest of our face. To include that in your illustrations can really bring some life to your characters, not to mention, it's really fun to draw. Also, our ears are also usually more red. Fun fact, that's because our skin has translucency. If you hold your hand up to a really strong light, you can often see a red glow around your fingertips. The same thing happens around our ears. The technical term for this is subsurface scattering. It happens because light rays penetrate our ears and then get bounced back out so we can see the light reflection of the red from the inside of our ears. Now, you don't have to understand the science though. You can just know that your ears are a little bit more reddish in hue than the rest of our face. Also, when drawing men, it's common for stubble to show through the skin around the beard zone. When that happens, the skin can appear a little bit more bluish or grayish than our natural skin color. Some people might talk about this in zones. So we've got the normal skin base color. We've got reddish areas across this zone of the face with the cheeks and the nose and the ears. Then sometimes, we've got a bluish or grayish haze on the lower part of the face. These three different types of colors are things that you might want to include in your portraits. In the real world, every one has different undertones to their skin. Some people's skin will be a little bit more reddish pink, and some people will have more of an olive undertone, and some people will have more of a golden brown undertone. Now, you can create a unique color palette for every character that you draw. If you do custom portraits, this might be the approach to take. However, as an illustrator, I work in the same color palette for pretty much all of my work, whether I'm drawing people or scenes or food. All of these characters were created with the same color palette. Essentially, I end up just starting on different ends of my color palette value scale. Now this is just my approach. If you do custom portraits of real people, you may want to create a unique color palette for each of your clients. It can be really fun to play with a whole range of colors. But since this is my class, I can only show you how I do things. Let's walk through how I create my color palettes for skin tones. I have three skin tone pallets that I use. The first one is up here and this is my base color, that's the main color of the face that I use. Then these second two down here, these two are my red tones. These are the ones that we discussed having in the cheeks, the ears, the nose, those reddish tones. I draw all my characters with a base brownish color, so I choose a hue when I'm working digitally and I just decide I like this version of brown. Basically from here, I'm going to increase the saturation and the darkness and lightness to fill out my color palette, I want something very light on this end and something very dark on this end. Every step in between needs to be noticeably lighter and darker from the steps on either side of it. But here is the most important thing to consider. I am not just going lighter and darker with my colors. Because these colors in here, if I just go lighter and darker, these colors start to turn really grayish instead of having that really vibrant life-like color that I really like, so I am always thinking about the saturation. If you're working digitally, that means that I generally start to create a palette like this, that's got a curved C-shape and is on the edges here. But really what's happening is I am choosing lighter colors that are slightly more desaturated. The darker I go with my colors, the more saturated those colors are going to be. In Procreate, going from side-to-side here, everything on this side is more saturated, everything on this side is less saturated. Going up and down is your lightness and darkness. I know that can be a lot to wrap your brain around; I do have a color theory class if that's helpful. What if you are working with physical media? If you are using with physical media, that means that you want to be really cautious about the amount of black paint that you add to make your skin tones darker. You may want to try playing with a little bit of opposite colors, adding some of your opposite colors to deepen your colors and make them darker. Then just be really cautious with the amount of white. What we want to avoid is getting really grayish skin tones. That really is going to depend on the media that you're working with. To get lighter colors, remember that you can use lighter pressure if you're using a colored pencil; you can use more water if you're using watercolors; and you can use more pigment, more of the actual pigment to get darker colors. Now that you know the theory, go ahead and create your skin tone palette. My palettes have 10 steps. You don't need 10 steps. I would say that you really do need at least six different steps. But you can decide how big or small you want to make yours. In the next step, we will be using at least six colors, so do make sure that your skin tone pallets are at least six colors. Once you've created your skin tone palette, then you'll want to create a pink tone palette. Just like we discussed how the cheeks and nose and ears are more red, when I create my skin tone pallets, my pink ones, I'm making sure that they are very similar in value so that they can just go on top of each other and blend really nicely. For example, the reds in this are about the same darkness as the browns over here. If I were to take this, I've got a mid tone pink, and then that's the one I used right there, I'm going to go one step down, look how similar those are. It's really easy for me to match my peach colors, my blush colors with the skin tone that is underneath of it. It's okay if yours are not perfectly matched. It's nice to have a little bit of contrast, but this is just how I like to work. For me, when I'm working digitally, that means I can basically say in the same color palette here, so here's my brown, I'm tapping my brown, and I'm just moving this to be a more reddish color. Then I can save this new color and they should, in theory, match really closely. It doesn't always translate perfectly that way, but that's how I created these ones. To grab my palette, check out the first lesson on how to download the class materials. 13. Shading and Highlighting the Head: Now that we have our sketches, how do we go from this to this? First, I'll add my base colors, then I'll add shadows, then I'll add highlights, and finally, final details. But how on earth do you know where to put your shadows and highlights? You can just look at your reference photo and draw what you see. But in general, nice brightly lit photos like this, they don't give us very visually interesting shadows and highlights. It's really hard to look at this photo and know where am I going to add my shadows, where am I going to add my highlights. Now, you can just choose better reference photos that have really nice strong lighting and will make it easier to create these compelling photos. Like it's very easy to see where to add the shadows and where to add highlights in this photo. But what if you want to draw from imagination? Or what if you want to spice up your brightly lit reference photo? That's what we're going to learn in this lesson. In previous lessons, we learned a technique for drawing the face, and in this lesson, we're going to learn a technique to add shading to our faces using the Asaro head as a model. Introducing the Asaro head, a really weird looking model. But really, this thing is great. It breaks down the face into planes, and this is how we're going to know where to paint highlights or shadows on our face. Let me break this concept down a little bit more. Let's say when you're drawing a box and you've got a light source that is coming from, let's say, this direction. Well, when the light source is coming from this direction, I know that this side of the box is going to be in light, and this side of the box is going to be in light, and I know that this side of the box is going to be in shadow. I also know that this box is also going to cast a shadow. I can tell from the planes of the box that some of these will be in light, some of them will be in shadow, and some of them will cast shadows. Well, the face can also be broken down into really simple planes. The Asaro head is basically a cheat sheet showing you where those planes usually exist on a face. Now, there's a ton of Asaro head references out there that people have made and you can Google to find your own, like this one. This is one of my favorite ones that actually is broken down a little bit differently than the traditional Asaro head, but it has a light source that you can change to create different colors for your model and move the head around. You can customize the lighting and position to match your reference photo. I've created a list of my favorite Asaro head lighting tools which you can find with the class resources. Remember to check out the lesson on downloading the resources for the class if you're having trouble locating them. Again, how does this weird-looking face help me with my beautiful characters? Well, I compare and contrast the Asaro head with my sketches. For example, I can see that this eye socket, it goes down and inwards. While this eye socket may not match mine exactly, I do know that the eye socket is going to go down and inward, so that area is going to be in shadow. A couple of notes about the Asaro head. It has two sides. One side is more simple and rounded. We can use this side to focus on more simple shapes and also to imagine a more young face. The other side has a lot more detail and we can use this to imagine an older face when our bones start to show more strongly. Also, there's a lot more detail on this face that can be really useful even for young faces. Now, you don't have to include every single plane on the Asaro head. Especially if you're drawing more stylized face, you don't have to use all of these angles. But this is an excellent tool as a beginner and it's a fun way to explore what you'd like to include and what you don't while exploring your own style. After you've practiced with the Asaro head, you'll have this stuff memorized and you just won't need to use the Asaro head all of the time. Let's do a walkthrough step-by-step of the important planes that I like to pay attention to and how I use them to shade and highlight my faces. 14. Tutorial: Adding Shadows: Let's do a step-by-step walk through of how to use the Asaro head in our sketches. I provided a worksheet for you to follow along with me. The instructions for downloading those are in the lesson on downloading the resources for this class. I recommend following along with the worksheet first to help you better understand how and where to apply your shading. Then once you're familiar with all these concepts, you can try applying them to your own sketches. The first thing that I want to do is choose the background color for my character. This is especially important if the hair doesn't frame the face, or the neck, or the skin of your character. Because if the background color and your skin tone are very similar, it's going to be really hard to separate them. So it's really important that you have enough contrast. I've also gone ahead and filled in the hair, and the shirt, and as well as the eyebrows, the whites of the eyes, the colors of the eyes, and the eyelashes, the black areas of the eyes. I've done that because otherwise it's going to be distracting, so I want to make sure that we're getting as clear as possible on how to use this Asaro head. Once I've got my background color, I need to choose the base color for my skin and that is basically the overall color that the face is. I'm going to choose a value on my scale that's close to the overall skin tone of my reference. If your reference photo has a bunch of shadows, it may be difficult to tell what the base color is. So you might find that looking at the neck area and seeing where the mid color is, something that's not in the shadow and not in the highlight, that might be the easiest for you. On my value scale, this is going to be my base color. I'm going to fill in my entire face with the base color. For my shadow color, I'm simply going to choose a color that is several steps away from my base color. This is important because you're going to want some wiggle room leader in our process. It's important that you have wiggle room on your base color as well. You don't want it to be the lightest color on your value scale, you will need some lighter values to work with later. So that is going to be my shadow color. Now I'm going to choose a light direction. Since we're not using the reference photo entirely for our painting process here, I'm going to choose my light direction. Now we're going to identify the planes of the face and then decide if that area is in light or in shadow, and it's just going to be one or the other. Is it going to be the base color or is it going to be the form shadow color? We're going to start at the top on the forehead. On the Asaro head, we've got these four planes. There's the front of the forehead and then two planes which sloped towards the back, so making that round forehead shape, and then there is this side of the face right here which is this plane over here. If you remember that circle that we drew in our sketch, that is the side of the face there. So these four planes look like this on my sketch. Now with my light source coming up from the top right-hand corner, these far three planes are going to be in light, and the only one that's going to be in shadow is the far one on the left. Now let's look at the eye sockets. The eye sockets on the Asaro head are going downwards and inwards, so they're going to be in shadow. This is where the eye sockets are on the Asaro head, and this is where I would find them on my character. Now, these sockets are going backwards, inwards, and downward, so they are going to be in shadow. Let's take a look at the eyelids themselves. On the Asaro head, you can really see the planes where these eyelids, where the center is coming forward and the sides are going backwards. This is what it would look like if it was drawn with an outline. This is where I would imagine those planes to be on my model. With a light coming from this direction, I know that this part of the eyelid will be in shadow, but not these two sections. The underside of the eyelids will be in shadow, and on the far side, all of them will be in shadow. The area directly beneath the eye is next, and this raises upwards. This is also part of the cheekbone. Here is where I would see those on my model. Now the right side is going to be in light, but the far side is not going to be in light. So I'll fill it in. Now we're going to get to this side of the face, so we are going all the way down across the cheek and across the side of the face right over here. That's going to be this area on my model, and we paid really close attention to this area when we were drawing our sketches. You might remember I shaded in this side of the face. You might also notice that there is barely a sliver of that on the left-hand side. With this light source, this side of the face is actually in light, but the far left side is not. So I'm going to shade that in. Remember, it's base color or it's shadow color. Now I have got this area that is closer to the nose, it's like a cheek area. This will become more important when we start filling in the pink rosy areas of the cheek, so this will be important. Now in my model, the right-hand side is going to be open, but the left hand will be filled in. Now let's look at the mouth area on our faces. The muzzle, this is often referred to, really is a rounded shape. So there is this cupid's bow in the center, and then on the sides, these slope back and downwards, and something similar is happening underneath of the lips. So the area right underneath the lip usually curves inwards a little bit, and then these sides are curving out. On my model, it's going to be these areas. You'll notice that that under area is above the mark where we drew for the chin there. Again, with lighting, these will be the planes that will be in shadow. You'll notice that this area under the lip, I can even see that that's in shadow on the reference photo. So I do know that this dips downward. Now we're going to look at the lips. In the Asaro model, the upper lip goes inwards and the lower lip jets outwards, and this is not true for everybody. This is where this arrowhead is just an example. It is not like the end all be all. So different face types will have different lip projections. Some people's upper lip will stick out more. But in general, people tend to paint the upper lip a darker color and the lower lip a lighter color. Now, on our model, I'm not going to paint the lips the same color as the skin. But the upper lip is going to be a little bit darker than the lower lip. For me, what I do is the same way that I create a value scale for my skin tones. I also create a value scale for my lips or my blush, anything that's pink on the face. I'm taking the same steps, the same from light to dark steps for those colors. So that's how I would color in my lips. Another area I want to point out is those little nodes that I had you draw in on the mouth. That is not shown on the Asaro head, but that's where it would be on the reference model. Because we are drawing in our shadows, I want to get those, too. This little crevice right here, it's going to be in shadow, almost like a dimple. Now let's look at the chin. The area under the shadow of the lip is rounded. It goes forward and upward. Now, the Asaro head is really jagged, if I turn the outline off right here. It's really harsh, but nobody's chin is like a box. The Asaro head is just breaking this down into sharp corners, so it's very easy to see one plane from the next. Sometimes we want to embrace that. The lip often has a really hard edge, and we do want it to be a nice sharp straight line. But in cases with the chin, you probably are going to want to be a lot more softer and gradual with those shadows. You don't necessarily need them to be like sharp and angular. As you can see, the way that the shapes form on my character are quite different from the way they shape on the Asaro head. You can see on my chin, I don't have a perfectly angular line. It's a gentle curve, but also the line work itself, the painting itself is gentle. It's not like a harsh straight from shadow color to base color. It goes gradually. Time to talk about that nose. This is where that box method that we learned to draw the nose in is super going to be helpful. Because what we can see here is that there is a front plane to the nose, an underside of the nose, the side of the nose, and there's this little section called the keystone up here. I've highlighted this in red, but you've already got this. With this light scenario, I know that the side of the nose is going to be in light, the top of the nose is going to be in light, the keystone is going to be in light, and the underside of the nose is going to be in shadow. I can also fill in the darker areas of the ear now. We have added all of our form shadows, that's everything that the face is made of. But what about that cast shadow? This guy right here. We need to add our cast shadows. The first cast shadow that I want to add is the nose. The nose is going to cast a shadow onto that side of the face. But you can't really tell because there's already shadow on this side of the face. In areas where there's already some darkness, I'm going to add a darker color for my cast shadows. So in my case, I'm going to go one step darker to draw my cast shadows. Also, underneath of my eyes, the eyebrow is going to cast a cast shadow. It's going to even cast it all the way down onto the face. You can see that actually in the reference photo right here. There is some shadow right in there. This brow also is going to cast a shadow. Also underneath of the lip, that is also going to cast a shadow. So the lip is casting a shadow onto the chin underneath of it. The neck is also going to cast a shadow, but this is not already in the shadow. So I'm actually going to use my regular shadow color, my form shadow color to fill in the neck. Now my lips also are going to have a little bit of shape. There's going to be a little bit of shadow on them, but they, of course, will be a darker red, not a darker brown colors because they are the lips. Another area that cast shadows is the eye itself. The eyelid and the eyebrow, that will also cast a shadow over the eyeball itself. I like to add a little bit of each of those colors. For example, a quick technical note, if you're using Procreate, you can actually use Multiply layers to do this in one swoop. So I use just like a darker purple color right here, and then I tapped on the little letter right here, and I switched it from Normal to Multiply. So then it's just darkening all of the colors underneath of it and I didn't have to switch from going to a darker white color, a darker green color, a darker black color there. I just did it in one move. In fact, I often like to play with Multiply layers just using the color that's underneath of it. I like to add a little bit of extra darkness to the nose itself, maybe to the cupid's bow. This Multiply layer, it just enriches the color a little bit more. Of course, if you're using a paint, or a pen, or anything like that, you can just make your colors a little bit more saturated. Finally, we've got these smile lines, and they also have a little bit of shadow on them and they are casting some shadows. I drew a smile line right here and I want to add some shadow to it. I'm adding that smile line right there. On this side, of course, it's going to be a darker color because it's a cast shadow on top of a shadow. I'm also filling in the node shape right there. Now I do want to be really careful about smile lines like this. I don't want the color to be so, so, so much darker than the base color that it's like a black line because making it darker makes it look like it's very deep. That's a principle of large areas of shadow. The deeper the crevice, the darker the shadow. So adding deep darkness to these lines is going to add age to my character because it's going to make the wrinkles and smile lines look deeper. However, that actually brings us to our next level of shading, and that is ambient occlusion because there are some areas on everybody's face where the light just doesn't reach. So it is really dark. That is oftentimes in the eyelids, for example. This crease right here, it's super, super dark because the light isn't able to penetrate in there and brighten it up. My ambient occlusion colors are going to be some of the darkest colors that I use. Here are the ones that I'm going to be using. I'll go ahead and draw in those lines for the eyelids. You don't have to draw the lower lid one, but I like doing that because I think it draws a little bit more crispness to the under eye. That's just a stylistic choice that I make. Another area will be the edge of the nose. This actually can expand a little bit because light's coming this way. It really isn't getting into that dark corner up in that edge right there. It doesn't have to just be an outline like the eyelids. I'll also add a little bit more definition between the neck and the shadow there. Because as the shadow gets closer to the neck, it does get darker. It gets a little bit deeper and a little bit more defined. I'm definitely going to see this in the nostril. I'll also actually maybe even see a little bit of ambient occlusion around the corner, that wing of the nostril. I've chosen two different colors for my occlusion, so I can go a little bit lighter that's not quite as dark as the nostril itself. But you can see that, right? There is some real darkness in these areas right here. It's, of course, very dark right there. But even around the wing of the nose, the light really can't get quite in there, and that's also true of the line in-between the lips. Let's turn off our sketch for a second to see how far we've come with this. We're really getting to a point where we don't even need the sketch anymore to show all of the parts of the face, how it's really starting to come together. But I think we can make this a little bit better still. 15. Tutorial: Adding Midtones: Let's take a look at our SRO head over here again. So in the forehead there's these three planes. The top plane is really bright. It's the lightest one and the far left one, that one is the one that's in shadow. It's darker. The one over here is somewhere in between there. That's what we want to do here. We want to add some mid tones. Because before we just said, either it's going to be in shadow or it's going to be the base color. But there is a little bit of leeway between there, for example, the forehead is not this blocky like one side to the other. There is some shape in that. There's some small progression. So I want to maybe smooth this out so it doesn't look like that. The head dislike turns around the corner like that. when I am choosing my mid tone colors, they are not going to be the same color as my shadow there going to be lighter, but they're also not going to be as light as my base tone. That is why we left some wiggle room in here. That's why we decided we needed some space between our base color and our shadow color. I'm going to use these tones for my mid tones. Because I want to soften up the forehead right here, I'm going to use the color that is closest to my shadow color right in this section. Now I've got a lot more of a gentle curve across that forehead. Also remember that we were talking about our nose as a box. Well, with the light coming on this side, the side of my nose is going to be the brightest, but the top of my nose, well, that's going to be in a little bit more shadow. Under the nose, I think is going to be a little bit more of a gentle turn because that side of the face is in shadow, but this side is blocked by the way that the cube is broken, pulls up there. I would also say that this side of the cheek, it doesn't necessarily mean that the farthest either that side of the cheek is in deep shadow. But I could probably even lighten this up a little bit right in here. Maybe I'll add a little bit to the smile line because it's not just like a hard line there, can let it gradually get darker and also the side of the face, I'm going to put into a light shadow here as well, maybe even down to the chin.. Remember the chin was different sides like this. This is the bright part of the chin and this is the other sides of the chin. In fact, that plane that was underneath the eye, this is the high point. So I'm going to add a little bit of shadow underneath there as well. On this side of the forehead, I'm also going to color that in. Again, now the forehead is rounding out. It's not just a one side is in shadow, on one side isn't; now, it's like a really nice even cast. Now, in Procreate, I use a brush that has a little bit of opacity and pressure changes. If I want to shade more lightly in an area, I just press more lightly. If you don't use brushes that have pen sensitivity, like pressure sensitivity, you can always go in there and choose colors and manually make them lighter. If you're using a pen or a pencil, you can just use less pressure, so you can draw more lightly. 16. Tutorial: Adding Highlights: Check it out. This is how it looks without the sketch now. Now we're still lacking a little bit of definition like where does the nose start and stop? Well, now we got to get into my favorite part which are the highlights. Highlights happen at the spot that is closest to the light source. Wherever the face is projecting out the furthest, that's what is going to get the most light. Also, areas that are very shiny or reflective will also get highlights. I actually already added a highlight in the black of the eyes here, because that is such a dark spot and such a shiny spot, our eyes are really wet. That is probably one of the brightest highlights that you'll see on the face. Also, we need to choose colors for our highlights. This is why we never want our base color to be all the way at the end of the value scale because then we won't have room to add the highlights. I always like to have like two different colors of highlights in here. One for just gentle highlights and then one for really extreme highlights. If you look at reference photos, you'll be able to see where some of those really high points are. I can really see that right above the eyebrow and in the forehead. The top edge of the eyebrow actually very often is a little bit in highlight. I'm going to add that. Then also the top of the cheek here, that also is very often in highlight. There's very often above this corner of the lip or on the top edge of the lip. It's a really bright spot right there, so I'll add a little bit of highlight right there. The top foremost part of the chin will be probably in a little bit of highlight. Also underneath of the eye, this whole eye socket is not totally in shadow, so you may, when you're doing your highlighting or lightening process, you might decide that, hey, I actually want to add a little bit of this back in here because it's a little bit lighter in that area. Now the nose is where some of the most noticeable highlights are going to happen. I think that the light in this case is going to hit the flat part of the face more than this side of the nose, so I'm actually going to add a little bit of definition between there. Now I can really see the difference, the side between where the side of my nose is and where the face, the cheek starts. This definition is really important to me. Also, you'll often see a really bright highlight on the edge of the nose, and at the ball of the nose. I'm going to draw one that goes down the side of the nose, and then a couple at the base of the nose. In fact, I might even go a little bit lighter on those ones. Because I think that that really makes a nice pop. Sometimes it's too much and I want to go inside of there, and maybe I'll make a little bit of a highlight inside of the darker highlight color, maybe even smaller than that. Also, the lips are shiny and they will get a highlight, so I'll often see this on the bottom of the lips. Sometimes I'll draw a little line or a little specular highlight. That's just like a dot right there, and that really brings some roundness and some life to the lips. I want to point one more thing out about the eyelids. This is not technically a highlight, but the top portion of this eyelid. Remember we divided it into three. This will also be a little bit lighter than the sides. I like to come in and lighten up that middle section right there. I do this on both eyes. That, I find that contrast really helps the eyes look rounded, the eyelids look rounded, and also, it just brings a lot more visual interest when we look at the eyes. There's one more type of light that I would like to talk about and that is called bounce light. We do have a direct light source, but in real life, light will hit things, and it'll bounce off out of it, and it'll reflect. It's a really fun and easy way to add a little bit of extra life into your portraits if you add a little bit of bounce light. One of my favorite ways to do that is to add a rim light and that is just to add a highlight along the edge of where your dark shadows are on the edge of the face to mimic the idea of light bouncing back on the face. I could add just a little bit of light along the edge of the face right here. Now that's a really subtle example of a rim light, but here's an example that's a little bit more extreme. You might also notice bounce light in different areas of the face. For example, we were talking about how this part of the eye socket is actually not in shadow and how it reflects light, well, sometimes maybe bounce light is going to bounce off of this really bright highlight of the cheek and bounce up into that area, so maybe we'll lighten some of this area up. Anywhere that's very exposed or you might think might get a little bit of extra light, might be a nice place to add a little bit of bounce light and there we are. 17. Tutorial: Finishing Touches: Now, the whole face isn't just one brown color. We also have some pink in our lips, but we also often have pink on our cheeks. Sometimes people like to add a little bit of pink on the nose or the ears. Now, when I am drawing these, I like to make them very stylized. I just draw straight up circles and I use a multiply layer so that I can see that there is this area of the cheek is going to be a lot more light pink and this area of the cheek is going to be a darker pink. Now you don't have to draw a circle like this, you could extend the pink all the way across the cheek or into the nose so that it's a little bit more naturalistic, like in this case. I would just come in here and erase some of these areas where the pink probably wouldn't actually be, and make it just feel a little bit more natural. But the important thing to remember is that we still want to follow the planes of the head when adding this pink. Those planes that would have highlights or mid tones would have lighter color versus the areas that would be a little bit more in shadow would have a little bit of a darker color. Again, it's very common to see the ears are a little bit pinker because in the ears, the blood vessels are closer to that skin. It's a lot more translucent. Of course, you could also add a little bit of pink to the nose. That's a stylistic choice. Most people don't have super red noses unless they're maybe a little tipsy. We can apply some of these color changes to the hair itself. If you go back to the lesson on drawing hair, you'll know that some of the areas of hair are going to be dark and some of them are going to be lighter, and you can just use actual colors to fill that in and we get to this. Now, I jump around my paintings with all of these processes. I'm showing you these in an order because it's easier to understand and come back and reference if you're struggling with a tricky area on your painting. For me, I don't actually just draw my form shadows, cast shadows, highlights in that specific order. What I do is I start drawing the eyes and I get super interested in drawing the eyes. For you, I would recommend drawing these in this order so that you can wrap your brain around all the different lighting types, but then when you're actually drawing portraits, go all over the place. If you get stuck in one area and you get frustrated in one area, move on to another area. I tend to draw the eyes and the lips and the nose as like an entire unit all at once. I don't tend to just do the whole face in one chunk,. You'll make more progress when you feel like you're having fun. Focus on the parts that you like drawing, and when you get to a block point, move somewhere else. Let's do a quick recap. 18. Recap: We start with a sketch and then we move into adding our base layers, so we add a background color. You'll probably want to add a color for the hair just like a flat color, a base color for your skin, the whites of the eyes, the colors of your eyes, the black irises of your eyes. Probably you want to add your eyebrows as well. These are all of our base colors. From there, we will add our form shadows. Our form shadows are these areas where the light curves around. It's also the color of our lips as well. From there, we add our cast shadows. The nose casts a shadow. There's a shadow cast underneath of the neck where the jaw and the neck meet, the eye sockets casts some shadows. Then we add our ambient occlusion light, which is the edges of our eyelids, the line between the mouth and the lips. We also add our mid tones so we make sure that we're not just going just shadows, we're also adding some mid tones. From there, we add highlights. That would be the little dots on the nose and the brighter areas where the light is really reflecting off of the skin. We also want to remember to add the highlights in the lips and in the eyelids themselves. As an extra touch, you can add a little bit of bounce light. The more extreme this is, the more intense the light around the face is going to look. You may want to add some pink for your cheeks. Finally, any finalizing details; coloring in the hair, adding details to the dress, maybe jewelry, any finishing touches to your portrait. We covered a lot of new information. I hope you followed along with the worksheet that I provided. As you move forward, you may want to practice with the worksheet and filling in the shadows and highlights with a new light source. Once you've practiced with the worksheets, you can try identifying the planes of the face on your own sketches. In fact, using the Asaro head may make it easier for you to understand how to draw your sketches. I know it helped me make better sketches. 19. Recommended Books: The methods that I shared in this class are a mashup of the Andrew Loomis method, Michael Hampton, and just what makes sense to me. I built it around the questions that I had as a beginner and expanded on what I learned from these two methods. But you can definitely check out more from both of these authors if you're interested. This is the Andrew Loomis book, Drawing the Head and Hands. I'm not going to lie. This book is from the '50s. It's dense and boring and difficult to extract information from. So if you find that it's expensive to buy, it might be worth checking out at your local library if it's available. This book by Michael Hampton is great. It's called Figure Drawing, Design and Invention. It's not super beginner friendly, but it's excellent. There is great information in here and drawing faces is really only a small portion of the book. It's a lot about drawing bodies as well. If you found this class helpful, I want to ask you a favor. Please leave a positive review, a comment or project. Your interaction with the class really helps it in the Skillshare ranking so that other people can find it. Even a simple thank you for the class in the comments really makes a big difference and it makes me feel good. I love meeting you on Instagram. So if you're sharing your portraits, I'd love to see your art. You can tag me @paperplaygrounds and you can use the hashtag, DrawWithBrooke. Thank you for spending your time with me and I hope you've had fun drawing faces.