How To Draw A Face At A Three Quarter View

Hello, my name is Paul Reiken. I teach at the Insight School of Art in North London, and I'm going to show you some drawing exercises that you might like to try. I now want to show you how to draw a face in three-quarter view; so not from the front and not from the side.

First of all, I'm going to draw the head in the space that it's going to take up on the paper. Once I've done that, I'm just going to put a line half way just to suggest where the eyes are going to be. Remember, the eyes are always about halfway down the head.

Then, a little dash for the base of the nose, and a little dash for the center line of the mouth. The most important line I feel when you're drawing a head in three-quarter view is the line that comes from around the bottom of the eyebrow and down the side of the nose. That tells us where the whole eye socket is, so I'm going to put that in underneath the eyebrow, down the side of the nose, around the edge of the nose, like that.

Just drawing a line where I can see there's a line. I can also see there's a line just here, which is to suggest where the nostril is, and a not-so-dark line here, which is the back of the nose. This eye socket here doesn't have a line coming down the side of the nose, but it does have a line for underneath the eyebrow, which will tell us where the eye fits in.

Then, the side of the mouth is in line with the tip of the nose, so it's there, and this side of the mouth is past the side of the nose which is here, and I've put that center line of the mouth in, which goes up slightly, down slightly, up again into the corner. A little suggestion of a line underneath the fainter line, and a fainter line to suggest the top lips as well. Then, once I know where everything is, I can put a line for the top eyelid, a line for the iris, a gentle line because light's hitting the bottom eye there, once again dark line and shadow there, there's also a line coming down like that, and the iris there which is covered by the top and the bottom eyelid.

Sometimes, when we draw portraits, we can see a gap between the iris and the top eyelid or a gap from the iris and the bottom eyelid and very rarely, we see a space in the top and bottom. Finish off with putting in the eyebrows and then just focusing on the shape, the exact shape of the face, it comes down, it comes into the chin, around, and then it gets very pale as the line disappears. On this side, we've got the hair, comes around like that underneath the hair, comes around down the side of the face, the top of the ear in line with the top of the eye, the bottom of the ear is between the nose and the mouth.

There. Neck there, the other part of the T-shirt comes in there, the shoulder is from behind the chin. Don't draw what you think you might need to draw, which is a long neck.

If the neck comes from behind the chin, then that's where we need to put it. Then the back of the head just to complete the line drawing. So that's how I draw, or how I approach a drawing of a portrait in line of a three-quarter view face.