How to Draw Face Proportions Accurately (No Grid)

One of the main reasons why portrait drawings by beginner artists such as myself can look off is incorrect proportions.

No matter how good your shading skills are, the honest fact is that if you don’t know the average size and placement of the different parts of the face relative to one another, drawing a good portrait will be a struggle. And as you may have already experienced, any effort to ‘fix’ a portrait based on the wrong proportions (like my drawing below 🙈) is quite frustrating.

This image shows a drawing of a face with face proportions that are not entirely accurate.

So in this guide, you will learn:

What I have binge-learned about drawing the basic proportions of the human face from different angles.
My process for outlining the main proportions of the face when starting a portrait drawing.
How the proportions of the face can differ based on gender.
Tips for drawing the basic proportions of the face that have proved helpful to me.

8 Face Proportions that are essential for portrait drawing

The image shows a persons face from front view with graphical illustrations to show the different proportions.

The image shows a persons face from side view with graphical illustrations to show the different proportions.

Here are the eight key proportions to remember when drawing a face. To get a better understanding, take your time to cross-check each of the following proportions from the reference pictures above.

From my observation, you can usually box the entire head in a rectangle with a height-to-width ratio of 4:3 when drawing the front view. Most heads drawn from the side view can be boxed in a perfect square.
If we divide the head horizontally into two parts, the eye line will be at the center of the head. For some reason, many beginners assume the eye level to be much higher on the face because they underestimate the size of the head, which often messes up the portrait.
The front of the face (from the hairline to the chin) can be divided into three equal segments:
1. the forehead (the hairline to the brow ridge),
2. The brow ridge to the nose, and
3. The nose to the chin.
The sides of the nose vertically align with the inner corners of the eyes (near the tear ducts).
The lower lip is distanced halfway between the chin and the nose.
The top of the ears is parallel to the brow ridge.
The distance between the two eyes is equal to the length of one eye.
The ear is attached right in the middle of the head when viewed from the side.

These proportions might seem confusing or difficult to remember, but if you incorporate this knowledge into your drawing routine, after some practice it becomes almost intuitive. Here’s a video I recently made that demonstrates how you can check these proportions in your drawings.

In the next section, I share the twelve-step process that I follow to block in these basic proportions in a portrait.

12 Steps to Draw the correct proportions of the face

The image shows my drawings of simple faces from the front and side views. The steps involved in drawing these are detailed later in the article.

Over the past few months, I have been studying different approaches to drawing the human head, including Loomis, Reilly, Glenn Vilppu, Steve Hudson, and Proko, in search of the “perfect method.”

And after a lot of experimentation, I have summarized my process in these 12 Steps that I follow to draw the proportions of the face from the front and side views. These steps may not seem very intuitive, but they work for me, and I hope you give it a try and find something that works for you too.

In case you want to follow along, these are the drawing references I will be using.

This is the reference of a person's face from front view that has been used to produce the portrait drawing.

This is the reference of a person's face from side angle that has been used to produce the portrait drawing.

Step 1: Draw a head sphere

Drawing a circle is a good way to start your portraits because you can build up your drawings from this simple shape for any face angle. These circles are the simplified three-dimensional shape of the human head.

The image shows a person's face from the front and side pose with an illustration of where the cranium ball is positioned inside the head.

The image shows the first step of drawing the face represented by a sphere. — I’ll be drawing the front pose (left) and the side pose (right) side by side

The circles don’t have to be perfect, but their height and width should be almost equal. If your circles don’t have an equal height and width, it’s better to make the corrections now because this will be the foundation of our drawing, and starting with an uneven circle can easily mess up the proportions.

I have drawn similar circles over the references to give you a sense of the dimensions of the circles in relation to the overall head volume.

Notice how the circle drawn on top of the front view (left reference) bulges from the sides? That’s because the sides of our heads are primarily flat. We will chop off this extra mass in the next step to show the side planes of the head.

Step 2: Indicate the sides of the head

The flat planes on the sides of our heads (that hold our ears) are about 2/3rd of the height of the head sphere.