How to draw a realistic face

If you are looking for the new hobby, try to immerse into the art of creating faces with a pencil. It is a very useful and interesting skill worthwhile to be mastered. Luckily, everyone who has a great desire can wake his or her inner artist up and learn how to do it quite easily. If you think that you have no talent for drawing pictures and portraits, you will be pleasantly surprised after completing a couple of lessons.

For startles, it is necessary to memorize some basic face drawing algorithms. They were coined by the artists and based on the big experience. Those algorithms embrace the general proportions of an average human face and practice them on the regular basis. Once you keep their in mind and can reproduce them without hesitations, you will be able to reproduce with a pencil any face, real or unreal.

So, let us see the elementary guide that explains how to draw a face when you are a complete beginner.

Detailed instruction of drawing a face

1. Start out with a circle. The circle’s diameter influence directly the width of the future face.

2. Use the straight vertical line to divide the circle into two identical halves. Let it go lower than the outline of the circle. The part of the line that goes outside the circle is supposed to be a little bit shorter than the circle’s diameter.

3. Create the connection between the circle’s uttermost dots in a horizontal direction and the end of the central line by using the curved lines that resemble the contour of a jaw. Make sure that both halves of the outline you have gotten are symmetrical. At this stage, you should get an oval, a shape that is similar to an egg.

4. Split the vertical axis right in the middle and draw a horizontal axis through that point.

5. Split the lower half of the vertical axis into thirds with two lines oriented horizontally. The line that goes closer to the middle of your drawing points out where the nose has to be ended and the second one designates the lowest points of the mouth.

   

Drawing the face’s elements

1. The eyes’ line that is presented by the horizontal axis, specifies where the eyes have to be placed. Basically, the distance between the left and right eyes is somewhat the same as the width of an eye. So, draw the eyes’ contours considering this practical rule and complete it with the irises. If you already mastered how to draw eyes, you can do it now. Otherwise, leave the details for later.

2. When the eyes are drawn (or at least their contours) you can get down to creating eyebrows. If you face the trouble with this step, draw the circles that depict the eyes and put the eyebrows on the top of those circles.

3. To switch your attention to the nose, you have to draw two vertical lines from the extreme inner points of the eyes. Thus, you will get the nose width so you can draw a proportional nose that consists of several curved lines.

4. The lines that go down from the middle of the eyes approximately determine the mouth’ width. With this information at hand along with the lowest mouth’s points, you can outline a mouth.

5. The ears are as tall as the eyebrows and as long as the nose. Remember, that some ears go further to the side than the other ones.  

6. The neck extends from the ears and curves in and out.

7. Converting the sketch into the realistic face

   

Once the sketch is ready, it is time to put more expressive lines where needed and erase the supporting lines to make the face look clearer. At this stage, you should smooth out and polish up all the sharp lines on your sketch. The main purpose is to get organic lines that are similar to the real face.

Most likely, in the beginning, you will not get the even and smooth face with the natural contours. You may need to reproduce many faces before your skills to draw a realistic face will become strong and accurate. To achieve this purpose, you need a lot of patience and even more practice.

This short guide provides you with some basic rules and tricks that will help you on your way. But, in order to succeed in drawing realistic faces, you have to learn a bunch of separate lessons regarding the eyes, nose, ears, and lips. Only after mastering those lessons as well you will be able to draw your first masterpiece by applying everything you learn from all those the lessons.

Finally, remember that the face features differ considerably so you may need to deviate from the general rules and recommendations. Look with attention at the face you are going to draw; draw imaginary lines on it, evaluate the proportions, and consider all specialties. This is the only way to draw a face that reflects the peculiarity of its owner.