Face drawing - how to do draw a face

The basic proportions of the head are demonstrated in the "draw people in a landscape"-lens. Face drawing mostly is about the frontal view of the human face. There are two general characteristics of the average human face which are remarkable:

1. The eyes of most human faces are on a line which splits the face more or less exactly in two parts of same size : From eyes to the top of the head and downwards to the tip of the chin. These equal distances are marked with line a in the drawing below on the right side.

2. There are three parts in a face of almost equal proportion marked with line b in the drawing below on the right.
a. the forehead,which stretches from the hairline to the eye brows
b. from the eyebrows to the tip of the nose
c. from the tip of the nose to the tip of the chin


I have used a blue ball pen to trim the drawing on the left to more correct proportions. The forehead was stretched a bit to much and the distance between tip of the nose and the tip of the chin is a bit short. However individual faces can deviate quite a lot from these general rules,which are nevertheless helpful as they can make you aware of the individual look of a face.

In this face study from a photograph I have used brown for the drawing. Light ocre for the bright side and blue for the shadows.

Click on images for larger versions!
On the left there is a quick sketch in oil colors on large sheet of kraftliner paper. In this example the volume of the head and face is created by drawing with a brush in different tonalities. I used only three values. The middle tone was given by the paper. The dark values are represented in black and the brightest value with white oil color. This is a fast 10-15 minute study, as reference I used a photograph that shows the sleeping Andy Warhol.
The example in the middle uses line drawing. With lines one can describe the volumes and create different tonalities at the same time with more or less dense lines or hatching in various directions. In the third face on the right I used bundles of lines, some of them following the volumes of the face and some in independent direction.

Click on Images for a larger version.of this face studies in oil color on paper.

For some time I loved to do quick drawings with acrylic colors from black and white photographs. Here are some examples .. each drawing took about 10 minutes.
Black and white photographs are great because it is easy to study the darks and the lights on a face.

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Click on image for a larger version-

David Hockney has studied the human face through his entire career in various mediums and styles. His very realistic portraits with a camera lucida are very famous, but he has also done great free hand drawings from life.

There is a great gallery of his drawings on the official David Hockney website

I took this link from a great Squidoo lens on Hockney: David Hockney resources for artlovers. There is a lot of great material for example also videos/interviews with Hockney on that lens. I find Hockney so very interesting as he masters very precise drawings and a free or lose style.

The human face is a never tiring inspiration. Here are some t shirts with a short series of some strange surrealistic human animal heads from rat over chicken to carp.

Rat head - surreal t shirt
by editionha
Create a custom
t-shirt at zazzle

Chicken head
surrealistic T shirt
by editionha
View other Surreal T-Shirts

Carp head
surrealistic T shirt
by editionha
Browse other Carp T-Shirts

This study is a bit more expressive. Again there were mainly only three colors used, umber,blue,ocre and a bit of purple

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In the face on the left I tried to depict the major "planes" in a face with lines, on the right side there is an ink drawing in combination with pencil

Sometimes I use also a blue ink roller pen in my sketchbooks.

Retro Sucker cartoon head graphic by editionha
See other Retro Bags