Guide on how to draw the face - Basic Face Proportions

Guide on how to draw the face - Basic Face Proportions

I decided to start making guides and to help out fellow steemmates, who wish to try their hand at drawing :)
So of course, we need to start with the basics and that is on how to draw anatomically correct face.
This is the steriotypical proportioning of the face, and we are going to practice it first off by drawing the face in portrait.

So this is the template with all the steps, which I will be explaining underneath it. Feel free to draw along all the steps and to try it out for yourselves :)

1) Draw a circle, after which we are going to draw a line going down the middle. Then draw lines extending from both sides of the circle. Draw a horizontal line crossing the middle one, this marks where the chin will be.

2) Connect the lines on the side with the one marking the chin, with which we create the jaw.

3) After we have the basic face shape, you don't want to have so many guidelines, therefore we can erase them. After that we need to mentally divide the face into 2 sections, drawing a line a bit above the middle marking where the eyebrows are. Don't connect the eyebrows all the way to the side of the face! If you look at yourself in the mirror, you will see that your eyebrows don't extend all the way to the sides.
We need to divide into 2 sections the part of the face from the eyebrows to the chin. The middle of this part marks where the nose is. Connect the end of the eyebrows with the nose - this marks where the end of the nose is.

4) We can mark where the nostrils are, to give it a better look. So now we are going to divide the part of the face between the nose and the chin, into two - that is where the mouth is located.

5) Now we reach the eyes. To express where the eyes are, we draw boxes right under the eyebrows and up to the nose. The middle of the box, on the axis with the nose marks where the tear duct starts.

6) The tear duct is on the same level as the end of the nose. We draw the eye shape. If you wish to have perfectly identical eyes, you can copy the first eye that you draw, paste it, flip it horizontally and adjust it inside the other box - this will give you perfectly symmetrical eyes.

7) To give it a better look we can add a bit of a lower lip. Now we are going to draw the ears. They are located in the space between the eyebrows and the nose.

8) So now that we have pretty much the finished face shape, we can erase all the guidelines. At this point the face looks quite robotic, right? :) No worries, to fix this, we can add pupils to the eyes, also add some eye creasing and define the nose, to give it some volume.
Right now the face could belong to either a female or a male. I will show you the differences between both!

9) First I decided to go with the female one. In order to make the face look more feminine we can 1) add eyelashes; 2) make the shape of the face rounder, so it will look more softer; 3) make the nose smaller (but be warned if you do this you may have to adjust the whole lower part of the face!) ; 4) and give her a slender neck, starting a bit under the jaw.

10) And for the final step we can add a typical female hairstyle, which will further point the gender.

11) As for the male version to make it look more musculine you can: 1) make the jawline more sculptured and sharp; 2) give him a bit of cheekbones; 3)make his neck thich, starting from where the ears end, if he is a bit more buff; 4) also you can make his eyebrows a bit more thick.

12) And for the final step I gave him a typical male hairstyle that is suitable.

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Hope you guys found this guide helpful! I know it is a lot to read, but trust me if you follow this and practice it, you will become way better at drawing faces. Knowing the proportions is the foundation of having your pictures look right. If any of you guys try it out, please be sure to share with me I would love to see your guys results! :)