How to draw a person’s face: lessons for beginners

Learning the basics of drawing in the future will help you become a good painter. People who are just learning the basics of drawing often have difficulties with how to draw a person’s face with a simple pencil. In this article, we will talk about those methods by which this complex process will become interesting and not so frightening. The lesson will be based on simple geometric shapes, on which we will "dress" the face. We will gradually understand how to draw a person. The girl’s face in full face will not be a very difficult task. So let's get started.

Of course, without anatomical knowledge it’s difficult to tell how to draw a person’s face, so we will use the so-called foundation, which will help us determine the exact location of the eyes, nose, ears and mouth. In the future, if you decide to continue drawing lessons, you will definitely need to master the anatomical drawing of the human body.

Face oval

So, today we are learning to draw a person’s face, and we will start our drawing with an oval of the head. If you miss all the anatomical details and look at the human head schematically, we will see an oval resembling a chicken egg. Divide it into symmetrical halves by a vertical line, and then - horizontal (pupil line). We will build on these lines.

Auxiliary lines

• The next step in the figure is the forehead line. Divide the upper part of the oval in half and, retreating slightly down to the pupil line (1–1.5 cm), draw a horizontal line with a pencil. Take a closer look at the drawing and you will see that the part of the oval where the forehead is supposed to be is slightly larger.
• Then measure with a pencil the distance from the top of the head to the forehead line and mark the same segment from the chin up (to the pupil line). This will be the line of the tip of the nose. Figuratively speaking, you divided the vertical line into three parts, the middle of which is slightly larger than the side ones.
• The mouth line is marked in blue in the figure. It is almost the middle of the segment from the point of the nose to the chin.
• Now back to the pupil line. Divide it into 5 equal parts.
• Now cut off the width of the head from the oval of the face. A little tip: the width of the head will be equal to the distance from the eyebrows to the chin. We do not have eyebrows yet, but approximately you will guess where they will be. You can fix it later.
  
  Nose, mouth, eyes

• Our eyes will be placed on the pupil line. This line is already divided into five equal parts. We are interested in 3 averages. In classic proportions, another eye should fit between two eyes. So, we omit the middle part, and the following segments on the right and left are our eyes. In the diagram they are marked with green lines. The middle of these segments will be our pupils.
• The nose, you guessed from the drawing, is marked out schematically with blue lines. The width of the nose should not go beyond the "middle eye". In other words, if you lower the vertical lines from the inner points of the eyes down to the line of the nose, these will be the necessary borders of the nose.
• From the middle of the pupils we lower the vertical lines down to the intersection with the line of the mouth. These will be the corners of our lips.
  

The ears

In the diagram, the place where the ears should be is marked in yellow. Extend the line of the nose to the intersection with the width of the head, at these points we will have earlobes. We will adjust the height a little later.

At this stage, we outline the contours of the eyes, eyebrows, tip of the nose, lips and ears. Here you will already see where your ears will end, approximately it will be a line of eyebrows. Draw a little oval of the head near the ears.

The final stage

Slowly we erase unnecessary and disturbing lines and add details. Draw harder, add shadows, make the drawing three-dimensional. The hairstyle is already to your taste.

When you draw a picture and remember how to draw a person’s face, check the proportions in parallel. The location of the eyes and mouth fits into an equilateral triangle. The vertices will be located on the corners of the eyes and on the lower edge of the lips. The height of the mouth will be equal to half the width of the female eye, as well as the distance from the tip of the nose to the lips. And the chin in the female face will be equal to the width of the eye.

Now you know how to draw a person’s face without knowledge of anatomy. This method is one of many that help you master the basics of drawing. Try and you will succeed.