Face Sketching

Step 1: Drawing Guidelines

  This is a free face sketching tutorial to support your sketch! So before you do anything drawing a framework on which your subject's facial features lie in position is always a good idea :

• vertical: draw a line the passes through the center of each eye and the nose.

• horizontal: draw a line at the top of the head, bottom of the chin, one that goes through the center of the eyes and one at the bottom of the nose and through the mouth.

Then draw the guidelines on your sketch according to the scale of the original with a pencil.

Step 2: Facial features.

Using a soft pencil like a B or a 6H or even an HB, draw and sketch the main features following the framework. In face sketching optimizing a portrait, the eyes are generally halfway down the face and the nose is a quarter way up from the chin. But you will always have to measure for yourself because the angle at which the face is facing will change the following rules.

After drawing the basic features using a soft pencil, start shaping the features using a darker shade of the pencil.

Step 3: Adding more detail.

Face sketching for beginners is not a very easy task but following the 

the tutorial you will definitely get a structural idea of how to draw your 

first sketch. Generally when ever I start the shading part of I sketch, I 

begin by  shading the eyes first followed by the lips and then the nose 

and then the hair at last, but this completely depends on person to person.

Keep adding and filling in more details by highlighting the lighter areas 

and darken out the ones which are supposed to be.

Step 4: Smudging.

Keep adding shade to define the eyes, brows and around the nose.

Stick to the shadows you see, not the ones that you expect and have faith that it will all gel together in the end.

The brain is an amazing thing - we often 'fill in' the missing pieces to make sense of an image without even realize that we are doing it!

Try adding some basic line-work around the neck and collar to keep the whole picture in perspective.

Step 5: Erase all the Guidelines.

Now when the portrait is in good shape and all the things are in perspective, we no longer need to have the guidelines that were drawn earlier to support our sketch.

Erase the carefully and try to not mess up with the basic shading that has been done. I suggest using the stealer pencil shape erasers for such detailed tasks to avoid creating a mess.

Step 6: Final Touches.

Despite being in good shape the portrait still looks unfinished.  Some artists sometimes like to leave the peripheries such as clothing etc half done, it creates a sense of the picture being a piece of art rather than simply a copy. It also sometimes helps make the focus of your piece stand out, which is pretty cool.

Asides from smudging and erasing to fix up the light and dark shapes,  also take the pencil work to add some of the finer details such as hair.

Try using the following list as a check to make sure everything is correct.

- elongate the face (usually this step is performed when the subject has a sharp jawline and the jawlines are not completely detailed because the face structure is not completely a copy of the original one.)

- fix the eyes

- brighten up the lighter areas with an eraser to create finer details.

I hope this article about face sketching for beginners was helpful. Feel free to comment!

do check out my other blog here!

Happy sketching :)