The human face is by far my favorite subject to draw. But even after drawing hundreds of faces in the past two years, I still rip a considerable number of drawings off from my sketchbooks to ensure they never see the light of day.
And it doesn’t help that our amazing brains can just intuitively tell when a drawing of a face seems off, even though we may not realize where exactly the fault lies (thanks brain!).
So in this post, I try my best to break down what I think makes drawing faces so tricky, especially for beginner artists, and share some tips that have helped me draw portraits more easily.
Why is drawing the human face so tricky?
Drawing the human face is hard because it involves observing the complex shapes, anatomy, angles, tones, and textures of the face and marking this information efficiently on a drawing surface while following a specific art style.
And as if it wasn’t already hard enough, beginner artists have to deal with an additional set of problems that makes drawing a face even more challenging for them, including but not limited to:
- Unreliable hand-eye coordination and muscle memory which makes it hard to draw confident lines;
- Lack of knowledge of the structure of the face which makes their portrait drawings look flat;
- Inability to focus on the important details causing their drawings to look messy and busy;
- Problems with their drawing process, techniques, and learning habits.
So, how do we get better at drawing faces?
Until recently, I struggled with drawing faces myself. For the past couple of years, I have been focused on improving my portrait drawing skills by learning from other artists that I admire and, more importantly, applying what I learn into practice.
And after practicing drawing faces consistently for almost two years now, I am pretty happy with how much I have improved. And while there is still a very long road ahead for me in improving my skills, I find portrait drawing more enjoyable and less complicated now.
If I were to summarise what contributed to my progress, here are the six things that have helped me improve my portrait drawing skills the most.
1. Draw the structure of the face before adding details.
This might seem obvious to many of you but until recently, my process for drawing faces was to draw and shade the lips and then work my way to the nose and the rest of the face.
As you can imagine, this is a painful and inefficient way to go about a portrait drawing that requires countless corrections and disappointment (unless you‘re anything like the late Kim Jung Gi).
If you look at how most professional artists draw a face, they never start adding any details to a face until they have gotten the basic structure of the face right to the T.
I personally love shading, so when I feel tempted to skip this part I try to remind myself that spending time at the beginning of my drawing to get the structure of the face right ensures that the biggest mistakes have already been made, and this just speeds up the whole process for me.
The biggest game changer for me that has helped me in constructing the face structure more consistently has been learning the Loomis Method which I highly recommend you to learn as well.
2. Use a drawing reference that shows the forms of the face clearly.
While drawing from imagination is great for coming up with new ideas and sparking creativity, if you want to learn how to draw a face well, I think it is better to do so with the help of a good drawing reference.
Since most of us don’t have access to live models, choosing good reference photos for your drawing is an important skill that beginner artists must master.
One tip I learned from a course taught by the artist Chris Hong is that when you’re drawing from reference photos, you should avoid pictures of models captured under bright lights coming from different angles because such references look flat and hide the 3-dimensional features of the face.
This is important because trying to achieve realism from a reference that looks flat would always be an uphill battle for a beginner artist. A good drawing reference shows the depth of the human face through the contrast formed by a well-directed light and clear shadows.
This Pinterest library curated by Chris Hong is an excellent source of drawing references for artists if you are looking for one.
3. Understanding the basic proportions of the human head.
