How to Draw FACES with ACCURATE PROPORTIONS & FEATURES (Front View) - Tutorial

How's it going , everyone ?

Today I have for you another drawing tutorial , and this one is kind of a big deal because we're going to be looking at the standard proportions of the head and also the placement of the facial features in relation to each other .

Now the technique I'm using for these proportions is from Andrew Loomis , and I really recommend his books for anyone who is learning how to draw .

Now I'm going to start off by giving you a bit of an understanding and walking you through the standard proportions of the head in general .

And then , I'm assure you a method that you can use and apply to your own drawings That should hopefully help you accurately measure the proportions and get everything where it's meant to be .

Because I know as well as you do that if you are drawing someone and you get something slightly off , then it might not look like the person you are drawing at all .

And it's it's quite challenging to get the proportions accurate , but hopefully this method should help .

OK , so I'm going to start by going over a general way of guarding proportions for the average head , and what I want to make clear is that this doesn't apply to every person , but it's a starting point , and so we can tweak this method so that it can apply to every person .

You'll understand it more clearly as we go along , just a heads up as well .

You might notice that the ruler looks like it's arching here , and that's just because of the lens distortion .

But right now all I'm doing is setting up a drawing in front view and then inside view .

I'm also using a ruler to make this more clear .

Now you can do this to any scale , and as that you want .

But for this first example to make it a little bit more easier , I'm using a measurement of inches .

I'm not sure if any of you have also watched the video where we looked at constructing the head from a front and side view .

But this is a pretty similar approach to what we did there because you can break up the face into sections or loomus refers to them as units .

Now , these boxes that I'm drawing out the first one is going to be three units wide and then 3.5 units high .

Like I said , for this example , I'm just using inches , but you can choose any size and make up your own units .

That's why this technique is really useful .

But we'll get more into that later , and I'll probably show you some better examples for the second box , which is going to be a sad view that is going to be 3.5 units wide and also 3.5 high .

It might sound confusing at the minute , but just bear with me for the next step .

I'm going to separate each each of these units in the box , so we have 3.5 going up , and then it's just free wide .

So at this point , remember we constructed the head and I showed you each of the lands indicated the position of the facial features .

This is exactly what we have here , except we have done it in this square .

So , like usual , the middle line here would be the brow line .

And so we found the island by simply finding the halfway point of that section .

And then we have that now .

This will give us the line where the eyes will go now .

The rest of these lines indicate things as well .

This top of the box is the top of the head .

The line down from that is the hair line .

Then we have the brow line , the eye line .

The next line down indicates the bottom of the nose and then for the mouth .

What we do is we separate this bottom section into fads , and that gives us the placement for the mouth .

And then , obviously the bottom line of the box is where the chin would go .

So now that we have that done , we have pretty much mapped out where all of the facial features need to go .

The next thing is to create some fair guard lands , so this is three sections wide right now , if we have the two end sections and draw in these lines , we end up with something similar to a grid , almost like the grids that we use when drawing portraits and other faces , for example .

In fact , this is quite similar to a grid because it assists us in placing facial features and stuff .

But it's it's a lot more effective because you can do this at any size , and the way you apply it is a lot different .

But now that we have that done , we are pretty much ready to start drawing in the face .

But just before we do that , we can take this one step further and half these sections once more , and that will give us not only the location of the eyes but also the width .

And it also gives us an idea and a rough estimate for the width of the nose .

So , as you can see here straight away , I'm able to then draw in some eyes and you have these guidelines to help you work out the sizes .

You can see where I've placed some small dots where the guidelines meet , and that's where the pupils will go .

Once we have the eyes drawn , we can locate the eyebrows because of that brow line we have .

You don't have to go about it in this order , either .

We have these lines drawn out to guide us now , and so we could essentially start at any point whilst I'm doing this , try to study where and how I'm actually drawing the features .

For instance , the point at which I'm arching the eyebrows down .

It's small editions like this that make it more realistic now since we already have that section earlier .

Remember when I said that it can give you a rough width of the nose ?

This is what I mean .

So normally the width of the nose lands up with the inner section where the eye begins .

We can simply draw in these nostrils and the nose to fit in between these guard lands .

We also have this land for the mouth where we can draw the lips above it and below it .

And now that we have a lot of the features we can use the lines to draw it in the shape of the head usually start at the chin , which is roughly about one section wide , as you can see here and also look at where it meets the guide glands .

So I'm bringing this up and it meets this land here and it curves upwards towards the edges slightly as it gets to this land .

I'm also going to draw in the ears which , on a perfect front view , are located between the brow land to the bottom of the nose .

It's really simple to draw these in using the lands we have made .

Once we have them done , we can finish the top of the head .

You'll notice that it's a bit wider than the lower part of the head .

We have to consider the thickness of the hair and naturally the width of the head reduces at the bottom because of the jaw and the chin .

But carry this head upwards around the top of the box and remember that we also have the hairline indicated here so we can use that to accurately draw in the hair .

So that's the front view .

And like I said earlier , it's only a general guide .

When we use it to draw other people and faces , we will have to tweak it .

Everybody has different complexions and features , but moving over to the side view and quickly going over this .

The guidelines work in a similar way .

The only thing different here is that our box is 3.5 by 3.5 sections .

That's because the width of the head from a side is around that size , and this is why the method that we sometimes use with the circle works well because you can draw the head at different three dimensional angles .

But all I'm really doing here is repeating the guidelines across from that front view .

OK , so from this sad view , we normally separate this left section into fads , and if he was drawing the other side of the head , it would be the right section .

But this is also indicating the placement of the facial features .

And I'm jumping straight into drawing these features here , starting with the nerves coming down from the halfway point between the brow land and the island .

And the tip of the nerve reaches the edge of the box and edges down the forehead .

Tip is slightly towards the top right section , and you can see where it crosses each of these lines , and so the mouth and chin fit tightly against that land behind the nose .

The eyebrow remains on the same brow line , and the eye is where both of these guidelines cross again .

It's clear to recognise patterns and similarities between constructing this in the front view , and then , from the sad view , the hairline is still the same .

And just like before , we continue this around .

The ear is placed further back , and it fits nicely into this set between the nose and the brow line .

And then we are free to add the hair and continue the jaw , which usually meets up around the bottom of the ear .

And finally , we have the general proportions for the head and face .

Now go ahead and screenshot this if you have to , I'll just sit there and stare at it for 24 hours until it's locked into your mind .

Because if you start to learn these patterns and placements , then it becomes a lot easier and you can draw this without so much construction .

So now let's look at how we can make use of this and apply it to when it comes to drawing a face , for instance .

Now , like I said earlier this method , you can use it to pretty much construct any face at any size .

And this is why it separates itself from methods like the grid and other measurement techniques .

Because you can pretty much look at any face and break it up into these sections and then recreate these sections onto the paper , and that helps guide you when it comes to placing the facial features .

Does that make sense ?

Right ?

So I went ahead and Googled front view of a face , and this image of Leonardo DiCaprio came up .

So I thought this would be a good enough example to use now if I was going to create a drawing of this using what we have just looked at , I would start by trying to break up the face into the similar sections .

You've probably noticed what is meant to be the half A section at the top isn't actually half a section .

It's pretty much the same size as one of the full sections , so that makes us have four in total .

Now the reason for this is Leonardo DiCaprio here isn't actually facing directly forward .

He is tilting his head down a little bit , and we see more of the top of his head .

We can also recognise this by looking at the ear and realising that the top of the ear isn't in line with the brow line , and the bottom of the ear isn't in line with the bottom of the nose , which it usually is .

So that's something to take into consideration .

Now that we have this broken up into sections , we need to find the eye land .

Now we do this by half in this section and then half in that again .

Then we can found the mouth by separating this lower section into feeds .

And then we have pretty much all of the facial features laid out for us .

But taking this further and going to the top line here , we can break this up into another three sections .

So firstly found the centre one and then the two either side .

Once we have that , we can have the two sided ones and then we can bring all of these lands down .

Now , this looks like we have just put Leonardo DiCaprio in a jail cell .

But if you can remember from what we did last time , we basically found the halfway point again , which gives us the width of the eyes .

And then we can bring them down to the nerves .

Finally , we can take both of these top corners down to this bottom section and then slice that off .

So now you have an example of how we can use and apply this technique to other faces and sometimes you have to tweak it a little bit .

The the proportions at the beginning was just in general and everyone's face is different , obviously .

And so we have to try and use this technique , but change it a little bit to actually fit what we add .

Right , For instance , the nose is slightly wider than the lands that we have created .

But we still have everything else pretty much working along with this guide .

And we can take that into consideration when it comes to drawing .

And but now we have a starting point and we can take that over to the paper .

OK , so now we are back to the sketchbook , and I'm going to use what we have just learned to accurately draw our image .

I'm also using some blue lead to create these guidelines so that they stand out over the pencil .

So , first of all , all we need to decide how big we want to draw the face .

And this depends on how big we make the centre line .

So I'm going to do this quite big so we can see it clearly .

At least I'm hoping you can see it .

OK , it might be a bit harder with it being in blue lead , but hopefully it should be OK anyways .

Once we have the centre line drawn out , the next step is to break it up into the sections .

Now it's exactly the same as what we just looked at .

I'm going to break the centre line up into four sections and if it was a direct front view , of course it would be about 3.5 .

But with the image we are using of Leonardo DiCaprio , it's around the four , remember ?

And so this is actually quite convenient because I just have to separate that centre line up into quarters and the next step is to find the eye line and then the line where the mouth would be .

I'm guessing that by this stage you have a pretty good idea of how to do that .

Now go up to the top of the centre line and mark on the three horizontal sections .

We have these sections again and bring these lines down and I just went ahead and boxed all of this off .

So after that we create the other halfway marks in this section for the width of the eyes .

And finally we bring the top corners down to the lower section here , and that is all we really need .

So that was pretty quick .

But all we have really done is use the method of breaking up the face to mark on the general placement of the features exactly like we did a minute ago with the reference image .

I want to mention that you can also use this technique for creating drawings of faces without a reference .

But whichever way you apply this , I'm pretty sure it will be useful .

Now we can finally pick up the pencil and start to outline this face .

If you have these lines created , you can easily look at the face you are drawing and just let these guidelines show you where to place the features .

I'll put the reference image I was using on the screen to give you a better idea , and this can be applied to any face but treat each one differently because sometimes the technique has to be adjusted to fit it suitably .

Also , remember some of the tips I mentioned earlier about being able to see how the head is tilting by looking at the placement of the ear .

It's small stuff like this that can be really helpful when drawing this video was dedicated to creating the proportions and the outline to start a drawing .

And like I said earlier , you can use this for when you draw faces at any size .

It's something a lot of people struggle with , so hopefully this can help .

Also again , I'd like to recommend the drawing books by Andrew Loomis , and in the next part of this video , I am going to be taking this drawing further and showing you how to render and texture it realistically .

So essentially , this has been the start of a realistic drawing guide .

But I hope you look forward to that , and I'm going to be using this method to sketch my faces as well .

I'll go ahead and let this video play out until the end , and if you did find it useful , I'd really appreciate it if you could leave a like , because it really helps me out .

And , as always , thank you for watching .

I'll see you in the next one