The Human Face

As an ending to my blog posts, I have decided to put all of my new skills together and draw an entire face. My goal when finding my book was to find techniques to which I could apply to my drawings, more specifically, realistic drawings. For this full face finale, I decided to draw another picture of Pony, a famous Korean makeup artist.

For a face, Holmes notes a few things that an artist must understand before drawing the face, and those are portioning features to one another (head shape, eyes, etc.), noticing the things that make us unique human beings (dimples, scars, etc.), also understanding what direction objects protrude in (nose, lips, etc.), and that you can use a grid to help with these measurements (72). Here are some of beginning steps the book gave me:

I used the grid, and it made everything much simpler, here are a few other steps I went through in the process of drawing Pony: 

Here you can see where I applied my learning of drawing noses, eyes and lips. Learning how to draw those before attempting an entire face was really helpful to me, because I didn't have to worry about if I could draw them or not. Holmes also writes a face checklist that lists the different parts of the face and what the artist should know about each one.

She also notes, "Hair is usually darker than the skin on most people" (73). This may seem completely obvious, but in general, I would just draw the outline of a person's hair and leave it at that. Pretty much like the second picture above. This affects how realistic the picture looks. In the end I came up with this:

The picture is not perfect, but it is the most realistic picture I have ever drawn. The book guided me through the steps and Holmes helped me to understand that it truly is not extremely difficult to draw cool things! My goal was achieved, and I've found some great techniques to apple to my drawings. I still have a lot of learn when it comes to drawing in general, but How to Draw Cool Stuff was a great investment. I guess judging a book by its cover this time around, actually turned out okay.

Have you ever attempted to draw a face? If so, what do you struggle with?

Book citation:
Holmes, Catherine. How to Draw Cool Stuff. Library Tales Publishing, Inc., 2013.