How To Draw Face From The Front

Hi, my name is Paul Reiken. I teach in the Insight School of Art in North London, and I am going to show you some drawing exercises that you might like to try. So I'm going to show you how to draw a portrait of a face using line only.

The first thing that I would always do is first, just construct the idea or the shape of where the face is going to be on the page and then, think about the way that the face is positioned. So this face is looking forwards, so everything is going to be very symmetrical with the line straight down center and the eye line will always be around about halfway down the head. Notice that I'm doing these construction lines quite thinly; we don't want them to really show at the end.

Once I got the construction lines in, I can start plotting out where I think the nose will be which is a bit further than the third way down, between the eyes and the bottom of the head. And the mouth, which is slightly closer to the bottom of the nose than the bottom of the chin. Once I got those lines in, I can look at where the eyebrow is, and the eyebrow comes underneath the eyebrow from here down the side of the nose to here.

And then I have got a shape that comes round and a darker line for where the nostrils are, and then round the sides there. Only use a dark line, where you see there's a really dark line, otherwise just use very faint lines to construct things. So underneath the eyebrow, and I've got the top of the eyelids, I've got the circle of the eye, the iris of the eye and the little light hitting the bottom of the eye.

I am going to do that a little bit fainter. And the same with this one here, darker line at the top, iris of the eye, and a thinner line underneath. Center line of the mouth is a dark line, and it goes like this, underneath the bottom lip is a very faint line and above the lip as well is a faint line too, like so.

Then put the line of the hair in, like so it comes round here, down past where the eyes are, and then the top of the ear in line of the eye coming right down below where the line of the nose is and that's where the side of the face comes in, shape of the face here gets wider, other ear in line with the eye, like so. Hair line comes down here, and then the top of the head round like so. Finally, the neck, don't do it too thin.

You can see it comes further out than the eyes, it's wider than the eyes. So in here, out to the shoulder, here and out to the shoulder And that's basically how to plot out a face using line only.