drawanyway.com

No-one wants lines on their face if they can help it… or so those anti-wrinkle cream ads would have you believe.

And yet, when we first learn to draw, as children, we pretty much use only lines for faces. Eyes, noses and mouths look like this:

And as we get older and more clever, we observe, and we think, ah, there’s a line from the nose to the mouth, I’ll put that in. Oh, there are lines at the corner of the eyes… Before you know it, your picture is showing a ninety-year-old hag.

That’s partly because lines are often used by cartoonists as shorthand for age. But it also comes back to something I said in a very early post on Drawanyway: there are no lines.

Well, ok, I’ll concede that the place where two lips meet can be represented by a line. But look at the outer edges of the lips. There’s no line there, just a slight change in tone and colour. This is your key to assured face-drawing.

Forget the lines. Look for the changes in tone. Look for light and shade. Look for shapes: the shape of the cheek, the shape of the nose. You have my permission to use lines for the inside of the mouth, and for the edge of the face. For everything else, use shading. And see if it makes a huge difference to your picture, changing you from drawing the way you learned as a child, to the way that artists draw.