Basics #14 - How to start a portrait drawing from live

Hey , everyone .

I'm Chris Wharton .

I'm back again with another how to draw video today .

I'm gonna be teaching you how to draw a face .

Now , uh during the last video , which was how to start your drawing .

Uh the video ran a little bit long .

So I'm hoping to keep this video more short and sweet .

Um If you haven't actually seen the how to start your drawing video yet , I'll actually leave the um the link to it in the show notes .

So , um you can go to it , you know , right now if you want to or you can go to it after this video .

Um I'm also gonna put up here around here a uh a cheat sheet for um the things I like to keep in mind when I'm uh when I'm actually drawing a face , I don't necessarily look at this , you know , at any given time while I'm drawing a face .

It's just something I've uh the , the rules that I've um seen and I've sort of honed and um ingrained in my mind after years and years of practice .

Um So I uh I don't necessarily expect everyone to , to use the same exact rules .

But these are things that I use for drawing the faces that I draw .

In this case , I'm drawing , you know , a girl's face .

Um Anyway , um here's to the video , I hope uh we'll , you know , teach you some things along the way and you'll , you'll pick up some cool tricks .

I'm gonna draw two example faces side by side using those rules that I just showed you .

Now , I'm starting off with the skull and I want you to think of the skull as sort of like a squished ball .

Um And it's very much a 3d object .

You can see , I'm actually dividing these balls in half using the horizontal and vertical axis .

And now I'm gonna draw the , the what indicates the side of the head .

Both of these are um , a three quarter shot with the character looking off the side a little bit , you can see the side of the jaw , the bottom of the jaw , the cheek .

Um And then the side of where the eye goes into the cheek .

Um And right here is the bottom of the skull and that also indicates around the same place where the nose would be , um , the very tip of the nose .

You should be able to see that the head is broken into three sections here , it's into thirds .

Um The two top two are in the skull and the bottom is in the jaw .

So right around here is where the nose would be , we're gonna follow the midline of the forehead down to the tip of the nose and the nose is actually like a little pyramid kind of sticking out , um right around the bottom of the skull .

Um Same over here , midline of the forehead down to sort of a little pyramid .

Um right where the the bottom of the skull is now , the shape I'm talking about is quite literally a little pyramid kind of turned off on its side like it's growing straight out of the face .

The bottom half of that pyramid is actually the nostrils .

You're gonna see the tip of the nose leading up into the the top of the ball of the nose .

You can see the same thing in both of our examples on the left side and on the right side .

Now , I like to add sort of a feathering hatching kind of effect on the top of the nose to indicate that it's rounding off and moving into the bridge of the nose .

We're about done indicating where the nose is going to be .

So let's move on to the eyes right on this line right here is where the eyebrows go somewhere above that or on that line is the eyebrows .

When you're actually drawing the eyes , you have to remember that there are spheres inside of the skull and you only see what's outside of the the eyelids themselves .

So you're drawing the eyelids to indicate the contour around them .

I actually like to add a little bit of the upper eyelid to show the contour of the eye .

Then I like to hone the shape of the cheeks a bit .

Ok .

Real quick .

I just want to stop for a second and I want to point out something , um , everybody's mouth is a little bit differently , but if you take your finger and point it right here , you can see kind of going right here .

You follow the sides of your nose , you see to the corner of your mouth .

Um And it's the , it's the same with everybody basically .

I mean , if you look at my face when I'm kind of resting my , no , the nose and nostrils are a little bit wider than the triangle that I'm talking about .

But it's roughly there .

Um , another trick I wanna point out to you is that when you're looking at somebody's face , um , most of the time you can take the top of their nose right here where the , uh , you know , where my glasses basically stop my nose and the bottom of the nose .

And you take those two spaces and you slide your fingers across and get to the size of the ear .

Now , um , this is uh a nifty little trick for trying to figure out where the ear rests on the side of the head .

Um , because it's also the same height .

Um So the , the third uh breakdown that I was talking about is this is the skull , right ?

And the um the ear is the bottom half of the skull and the forehead is the top half of the skull that I was drawing .

And the bottom uh right below the ear line .

You know , that's where the , the skull ends and the neck basically begins .

And um right here where you hit the bottom of the nose .

This is the bottom , third , last thing I wanna point out to you right now is that your eyes actually have the space of one eye in between your eyes .

I know that sounds weird .