how to draw noses

If you have been practicing my portrait tutorials for drawing perfectly proportioned human heads, you are now ready to delve into the details with drawing features. We started with the eyes, and now we will move down to the nose.

It will be helpful to have a photograph to look at for this exercise, because everyone’s nose is so different and light can hit it in a billion different ways, making it difficult to give you a standard approach. Noses are handled very differently from drawing eyes, and we will mostly focus on how light is hitting them. Since there aren’t many hard lines on a nose, I’m going to show you how to develop a nose using values. Let’s start by drawing the entire basic shape of the nose. I’m going to do two different noses.

Pay attention to the nose you are observing, and draw out the different planes of the shape, you must think of this as a three dimensional object in space, not as flat lines on a piece of paper. The tip of the nose is usually a modified ball shape.

Notice how light is hitting the nose, simplify the values, and shade in the planes you drew.

Get a few more details in, by realizing the true shape of the nose from the basic planes earlier, and add a few more values.

Highlights are important! Observe the brightest area of the nose, and rough those in.

The last step is to keep adding variation in values, until you have developed the shape.

Noses require a lot of practice and patience. A lot of people assume that they know the shape of noses, and do not observe real noses enough. This can lead to flat, or piggish, unrealistic nose drawings. Avoid this by spending more time looking at your subject versus looking down at your paper drawing. For example, notice how delicately nostrils are formed, they are not holes punched into the nose, the nostrils usually curve inward toward the septum. All of these little details that you pick up during observation will in turn make your artwork come to life.

Related posts:

1. how to draw eyes
2. 3/4 view portrait tutorial
3. profile drawing tutorial
4. portrait drawing tutorial

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under art & design tutorials.