Portrait Demo - Drawing a Face with Correct Proportions

Hey art students, in this video I'm going to demonstrate how to draw a human face using correct proportions. And even if your first attempt wasn't something that you're proud of, hopefully your second try will come out a little bit more successful. Begin by taking one of the stencils and you're going to trace it for a starting point. Once you've got that oval made, we're going to draw some guidelines. Draw a horizontal line across the center and a vertical line down through the middle. On the center line, that's where the eyes are going to go. When you draw the eyes, you're going to start just by drawing some very simple oval shapes. Now you may have to kind of guess and check a bit. The face is five eyes wide and what that means is there should be enough space to fit an additional eye between the eyes and on either side of the eye. The nose should end halfway between the eyes and the chin. So place your next guideline in that center part between the middle and the bottom. When you make your guideline for the nose, don't make it all the way across your paper. The nose is not going to be that wide. You can end your line where the eyes are. Next for the lips, the lips are going to fall between the nose and the chin. So between these two lines, the guideline for the nose and the bottom of the oval, draw a line for the lips. That line again does not need to be any wider than the nose itself to start. All right, final guideline. I want to make sure that we understand that while the eyes are in the center of the head, that does not mean that from the eyes to the top of the oval that that is all just going to be blank forehead space. The hair is also going to be there too. So between the eyes and the top of the oval, you will need another guideline. This line is the hairline. I'm not going to draw that line all the way across because I'm going to assume that some hair might come down as well either for sideburns for the guys or you know maybe it's going to be maybe the hair is going to come down to the side or you'll cover some of the forehead as well. So we'll just leave it at that for now. For eyes, you want to basically start with drawing a circle, but you don't need to show the full bottom and top of the circle because when someone's looking at you, you don't really see the white of their eye on the top and the bottom of the iris, which is the colored part. Okay, so like big circles like this. Whatever I do on one side, I'm going to do on the other side. We're going to work on both sides at the same time, okay, back and forth. Then I'm going to draw the pupil. The pupil is the black part of the eye, but I'm not going to do it as a full black circle. I'm going to do like a c-shape. See that? Like the letter c, leaving a little gap where the lines would meet. This is going to give me an automatic reflection. It's like a forced reflection showing. All right, right now he looked a little bit scary. He or she looks a little bit scary. That's because the iris hasn't been colored in at all. So you would want to color in the eye to give it a little shading to show whether it's a darker eye or a lighter eye. Okay, again I'm going to do both sides at the same time. So I'm going to color in there. Okay, now I'm going to go in, define the eye a little bit more, a little bit darker along the top. I'm going to give it a tiny bit of eyelashes, just a little bit in the corner here. I'm going to bring the shape of the eye down, show the tear duct a little bit right here in the center, and bring it around. Again, see how I went back and forth there? Whatever I do on one side, do on the other side. Add a little bit of a eyelid. Okay, and that's enough for the eyes for now. Okay, I'm going to move down to the nose now. For the nose, the nose scares people because we don't know where to draw lines. And the nose doesn't have a lot of lines. There's a lot of shading. The lines that we could have though are going to be right here around your guideline, and that's for the nostrils. Let's just imagine though, I'm going to really lightly draw a circle here. This is the tip of the nose where it's coming forward. This then, next to that, is where the nostrils are going to be. So the tip of the nose, like a little half circle, then it's going to come out to where the nostrils are. So I'm going to kind of flip that line up and around. Okay, so like that. Okay, the nostrils are going to be shaded in a little bit. Next to the nostrils, I'm just going to have a small line to show where the skin would be right here to kind of define that space. And now I'm going to erase this guideline there so you can kind of see how this is coming together. The top of where I had that little circle going is where I'm going to shade a bit on the sides. See, this is where the nose is coming forward. So I don't have a bold line here, but I have some shading that would be in here. I've got to fix that so my nose isn't crooked. There we go. Okay, so there's a little bit of shading right there. All right, moving down to the lips. So this is, this could be kind of where the lips meet if I want. Maybe that's even going to be the bottom of the lip. We'll see. So I'm going to start with a little V shape on the line itself. I'm going to see, I probably want my mouth to come out to about here and here. I can make a line from the V to where I want the corner of the mouth to be. And I think I'm going to have the top lip end a little higher. Bottom lip, start with just a line across and bring that up to the corners. So horizontal line to start, bringing it up to the corners. And tilt that up a bit so it's smiling. Connect that a bit more in the separation between the top and the bottom lip. And for shading on the lip, I'm just going to go ahead and shade in the top lip. Bottom lip is going to get a little bit more light because it's more round. I'm going to shade a little bit on the corners, a little bit underneath. Okay, I'm going to keep going now. I'm going to pop up here, give a little bit of an eyebrow on both sides. I'm going to start simple. I can always build it up with more later. Okay, let's look at hair and ears now. So ears are going to go from around the top of the eyebrow, which I know seems pretty high, but that's where it should be, to about the bottom of the nose. So I'm just going to do a little small half oval for each. Okay, my hair might cover up some of this now, so now let's see what kind of hairstyle I want to do. If this is a guy's hair and we want some sideburns, it could come down here and then up. Maybe we give a little bit of volume here. Maybe some hair would come down here too. Okay, so only a little bit of hair is probably going to come up from the top of the oval. The rest is just part of that original oval. So we planned for hair when we drew the original shape, and if I just shade that in a bit, it's going to look a little bit more like it's darker hair. Okay, and then lastly, we need to get a neck in here. So the neck is going to start from about where the eyebrows end. So thinking of it like that might help you make the neck big enough, because a lot of times we make our necks too skinny. So eyebrows, end of eyebrows in, and shoulders. Don't make skinny shoulders. There we go. All right, well hopefully that helps you get started on a portrait. You can always alter the face shape too, so feel free to get in there and change up the jawline a bit as well. Bye!