drawanyway.com

I thought I’d spend this week posting about one theme - drawing faces. There’s certainly enough to say on the subject to fill several weeks, so I’ll come back to it regularly. This week, however, I’ll start with a beginner’s guide.

Why are faces considered so hard to draw? After all, we see so many of them every day, and we can all close our eyes and see a face, either an imaginary one, or that of someone we know well. A face is really just an elongated globe with a few bits and bobs sticking out of it.

On the other hand, it’s possibly because we all know precisely what faces look like that we can also spot immediately if something is a bit wrong. There is also the important matter of likeness - if we are trying to represent a specific face, as opposed to simply the idea of a face, we have to make sure that everything, from the proportions to the shapes of the features, suggests or represents that person accurately.

That’s why the best idea is to start by drawing some generic faces. The most useful groundwork you can do for this is reading up on the basic proportions of faces - it really doesn’t take long, and, perhaps because it is so surprising, it’s not hard to learn, either. For example, a common error is to place the eyes too near the top of the head. The startling truth is that the eyes are pretty much half way down the face. If you then put the base of the nose half way between the eyes and the bottom of the chin, and the mouth half way between the nose and the chin, you are well on your way.

As for the rest, well, you have your own face as a reference! You can feel for yourself that the tops of your ears are on a level with your eyebrows*, for example. If you’d like to read more, this is an excellent and short guide.

Your task, in preparation for the week ahead (ha, a’head’), is to simply doodle a few heads with the proportions in mind. There is no need to try to get a likeness: just concentrate on the proportions.

This image is by my two-year-old daughter. I found it interesting that she has a vague idea where the facial features go, but already has habits she will have to unlearn later if she wants to learn to draw a bit better, such as the high placement of what (she assured me) were the eyes. I also know there are things she has yet to learn that she will equally have to unlearn, like drawing a nose as an upside-down figure 7.

*They’re not? What kind of a freak are you? Only joking - these are of course, generic rules.