Archives: 2008 October

Archive for October, 2008

portrait drawing tutorial

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October 2nd, 2008 Posted 9:37 am

I want to share a comprehensive guide to drawing the human face with you, my dear readers. Before you even think about picking a subject to draw, you need to know the basic proportions of the human head and facial features. I’ll show you a method of drawing the human face from the front, the profile, and the three quarters view. These rules will become second nature to you, with practice, and drawing a portrait will be 47 times easier afterward.

Grab some pieces of paper (the larger the better, because it’s always easier to draw bigger rather than smaller), a light colored pencil (I like light blue), and one graphite pencil, get a board, easel, or other angled drawing surface. It’s never a good idea to sit at a table with your paper flat on the table in front of you. Your eyes will see a distorted perspective while drawing and when you pick up your paper to take a good look at it everything will be elongated.

Get started by drawing an upside down egg shape, very lightly with your blue pencil, centered to fill nearly your entire paper.

You need to break your egg shape apart to know where to place your facial features. Draw a light dashed line down the middle of your egg, and draw a solid line half way down across your egg. Think of the area from your line across down the egg, and break this area up in half again going across. One more line is needed 1/3 of the way down from your last line to the bottom of your egg.

Ignoring the dashed line down the middle, break your egg up into 5 equal parts vertically. It’s good to think of the width of the human face as 5 eye shapes going across.

In between the top two lines going across, you will draw basic ear shapes outside of your egg.

Now you are done laying the ground work for your facial features, so put away your blue pencil and grab your graphite pencil. You can be a little bit stronger now with your line work. The top line going across is going to go right through your eyes in the middle. Here is where the vertical lines breaking up your egg into 5 parts will be helpful. Using the horizontal line and the vertical sections 2 and 4, draw your eyes in.

The nose falls in between the eyes in vertical section 3 and stops at the line that holds the bottom of the ears. Use the dashed line to center your nose. Draw the nose using lighter lines for the bridge shape and only use darker lines at the bottom of the nose.

Next is the mouth. The last horizontal line you drew closest to the bottom of your egg shape is going to go between the lips of the mouth. Draw your mouth delicately and stop the edges of the mouth in the middle of the eye pupils.

Draw in the ears and add details like eyebrows and color in the pupils.

To draw the bottom of the jaw and chin you don’t have to follow the bottom of the egg shape exactly because everyone’s face shape is different. Also draw in some hair going above the top of the egg shape because hair sits above the skull. Be careful about where you draw the hairline, too high and it will look like it’s receding, and too low will look like hair is growing down the forehead.

You have now completed drawing a proportional human face viewed from the front.

Stay tuned for my other portrait drawing tutorials for the facial proportions from the profile and 3/4 views. After you have the proportions down, I will go into the details of drawing each of the features. Remember to keep practicing!

Filed under: art & design tutorials

profile drawing tutorial

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October 8th, 2008 Posted 6:38 am

If you have practiced my first portrait tutorial for drawing a perfectly proportioned human face viewed from the front, you are now ready for a bigger challenge; drawing a portrait from the side view, the profile. It will be helpful to have a photograph to look at for this exercise.

Grab some pieces of paper (the larger the better, because it’s always easier to draw bigger rather than smaller), a light colored pencil (I like light blue), a light red colored pencil, and one graphite pencil, get a board, easel, or other angled drawing surface. It’s never a good idea to sit at a table with your paper flat on the table in front of you. Your eyes will see a distorted perspective while drawing and when you pick up your paper to take a good look at it everything will be elongated.

Draw lightly a red rectangle closer to the top left of your paper. Draw a dashed line down the middle of your rectangle vertically.

Draw a light blue circle inside the top of your rectangle.

Draw a fat sunflower seed shape pointing closer towards the bottom left of your rectangle.

From the bottom of your circle up, break this area in half, and draw a line horizontally across.

From the line you just drew, down, break this area in half also, and draw another line across.

The ear falls to the right side of the dashed line, still inside the sun flower seed shape, in between the two horizontal lines you drew earlier. These mark the top and bottom of the ear. I’m drawing this with more detail, but you don’t have to as you practice drawing the profile.

The area to the left side of the vertical dashed line you will break up into five equal parts vertically, and draw another dashed line down, for the first fifth section on the left.

The eyebrow falls on the upper most horizontal line, with the eye slightly below it starting at the one fifth vertical line.

Break up the section below the ear into three equal horizontal sections.

The upper lip hits the left edge of your rectangle and the first 1/3 horizontal line. Remember to end the mouth at the dashed line that the eye hits. A person’s bottom lip usually starts a little to the right of the top lip. And the chin falls in the last 1/3 section you drew.

The bottom of the nose is in line with the bottom of the ear and protrudes slightly beyond your initial rectangle.

The rest of the scull follows most the big circle you drew ending close to the same horizontal where your circle ended, to start the neck.

I erased out my red and blue lines and added hair and a few lines to indicate a shirt.

Stay tuned for my other portrait drawing tutorials for the facial proportions from the 3/4 view. After you have the proportions down, I will go into the details of drawing each of the features. Remember to keep practicing!

Filed under: art & design tutorials

3/4 view portrait tutorial

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October 20th, 2008 Posted 6:30 am

If you have been practicing my first portrait tutorial for drawing a perfectly proportioned human face viewed from the front, and the second tutorial for drawing the portrait in profile, you are now ready for an even bigger challenge; drawing a portrait from the 3/4 view. It will be helpful to have a photograph to look at for this exercise.

Draw a light blue circle a little higher from the center of your paper.

At an angle, draw a U to make an overall acorn shape.

Similar rules apply to the 3/4 view as the profile view, like breaking up your rectangle in half horizontally.

But, it will be easier to think of this one as a 3D box instead of a rectangle, to plan our features out on.

We have to remember that the face is turned and draw a curved line in the center of our “rectangle”.

And now, instead of breaking the rectangle in half vertically, we have to draw a curved line to show the middle of the face.

Under the horizontal curved line, we need another curved line. This will hold the eyes.

An ear length down from our first horizontal curve, we draw another curved line to hold the bottom of the nose.

From that last line, we draw a smaller curved horizontal line a bit further down.

Now that the layout for our face is done, we draw in a U shape for the neck and the shoulders. Look at your photo to see where these fall exactly.

Starting with the nose, draw it so that the middle of the nose and septum fall on our vertical curved line, and the bottom of the nose hits the line that holds the bottom of the ear.

The eyes fall on the curved line above the nose line, and the corner of the eyes hit the nostrils, as you now know from the other tutorial.

The lips fall directly above and bellow the last horizontal curve line, and the corners of the mouth end in the middle of the pupils, like they did in the other tutorials.

The eyebrows fall on the line that holds the top of the ear, above the eyes.

Paying attention to your photo, draw the face, ear, and head shape outline.

We are done with our guidelines, and can now draw in the hair.

I added some quick shading to define the shape of the face, neck, and shoulders.

The 3/4 view portrait is one of the most interesting, but it does take a lot more practice and observation of you model. Stay tuned for the details of drawing each of the features, and remember to keep practicing!

Filed under: art & design tutorials

my baby Moj

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October 21st, 2008 Posted 6:00 am

Mojito has been feeling under the weather recently, recovering from a wound on his neck. Poor baby, my heart breaks knowing that he is feeling pain. Hopefully he heals up very quickly, but in the meantime you can send him some extra love. I’ll transfer your love into extra kisses.

I’ve been working on the hugging painting, and it’s nearly complete. I also have another teaser for you featuring Mr. Mojie. He told me that he felt much better after seeing my portrait of him completed.