How to Draw Faces

Certainly, sketching exact faces is a scarce art! This is what I strongly believe, as I've seen people, having an expert hand at sketching landscapes, beautiful flowers, attractive designs and other pictures, but sketching faces...well brother, that is not everyone's cup of tea! Not many people are fortunate enough to have this skill God gifted in them. However, you can learn how to draw a face when you get proper guidance and tips to do the same.

Of course you would not turn Leonardo Da Vinci in a week, but with practice you could at least become a local expert!! Okay... lets keep expertise away, as at this stage of learning, it is miles away! At the outset, we will learn how to draw faces, step by step with the help of following tips. But, remember, only reading the tips would not serve the purpose! To achieve perfection and expertise, you need to practice a lot!

Tips on How to Draw Faces Step by Step

Realism, is the basic and probably the most important demand in drawing faces. Therefore, discussed below are some basic guidelines and therefore just a starting point acquainting you with, how to draw realistic faces. Following these tips would help you in learning the art quickly. You will need a sketching paper or a regular drawing sheet, B or HB pencil and a regular eraser. Read on...

Step 1
Preparing an outline or designing a border of your entire sketch is the first and probably the most important part, when it comes to sketching faces. Speaking in general terms, you need to draw an oval structure or an upside down egg, before you actually start with other facial features. Further, you can try out other shapes, once you gain expertise over sketching faces of different shapes and dimensions!

Step 2
Once you are done with preparing the outline, you can move onto the next step. Needless to say, facial features such as eyes, nose, mouth, lips, etc. form the most important part of face. Therefore, placing them in the right position and place is also equally vital! To do this, draw a horizontal line, half way down the face. This will indicate the position of eyes. See that the line is straight enough and the eyes won't get crooked, while drawing facial features.

Step 3
Further, as soon as you decide the position of eyes, you need to decide the position of the nose. To do this, draw a horizontal line between the bottom of the chin and the eye line.

Step 4
Next, after eyes and nose, comes positioning the mouth. In order to determine the mouth position, once again draw a horizontal line, in between the nose line and the bottom of the chin.

Step 5
Nature has designed the human face in such a way that it is vertically symmetrical! So our next step is to divide the face into two equal parts. Do this by drawing a vertical line, exactly down the center of the head, from top to bottom. And the last step is to draw the neck, by drawing two vertical lines on both the sides of the face.

This is a completely sketched face.

This was just a basic and a quick method teaching you how to draw faces. Drawing faces certainly, does not stop over here. There is much more to learn, which is beyond the scope of this article! This includes, shading the face according to the light, learning how to sketch facial features, after all, it is the accuracy of facial features that decides, how exact and accurate the face sketch is! Each one has different dimensions and shapes of facial features and this forms a part of advanced drawing or sketching. Definitely, Internet is not an ideal place for learning advanced sketching, you need to learn all of them, through a qualified artist. All the Best!!!