Facial Features

I began with the eyes, sketching out the basic shape and used cross hatching to add tone, curving the lines to add dimension and shape with my use of tone. I liked playing around with the reflections in the eyes and adjusted my light source with my model to get some interesting reflections.

For me when I draw a face, I usually start with the nose, as its in the center of the face, if I can get the nose right, the rest of the facial features can then fall in the right spots. Again I curved my crosshatching to depict the shape of the nose. For the mouth I try not to outline the lips and use shading to show the start of the lip colouration. I think the bottom two attempts depict my models mouth the best as I built up the areas around the mouth to help better show how it fits into the face. You can also see where I started to look at the chin. Since I was using my model as reference, his chin is very round and there isn’t much detail to it.

As you can see from the bottom drawing, the chine is rounded and simple. I did look at his ears from 3 different angles, and the shape is quite complicated. I think my best attempt is the top left, it shows the details and the bone structure of the ear a lot better than my other attempts. I’ve been using a mechanical pencil for all the sketches as its thin and precise and works well to show tone and detail through cross hatching. After completing the many sketches of the many features that make up the face, I felt ready to tackle the head as a hole.

The Head

I kept to a smaller scale with this study and began with a mechanical pencil to draw in all the details. I began with the nose, as I said earlier, its the center of the face. If I get the nose right I find all the other features fall into place. I curved my lines with the shape of the face to help add some dimension to his face. I moved onto the eyes which aren’t as soft as I would have wanted them to be, I feel in this study I have made them look more outlined than tonal. This might be due to the small scale, quick sketch. I moved onto the mouth which I am rather happy with, I used tone to develop the colouration of his lips, and avoided outlining them. When it came to the hair, I switched up my media to a pencil lead stick to more effectively depict his dark hair, leaving some areas white for highlights. I think I captured the shape and size of the head fairly accurately, and feel all the facial proportions are correct. I wish I captured his eyes better but that allows me to improve with my next drawings. I found this exercise useful to really sit down and think about the shapes and tone of the face. I usually struggle with drawing mouths and found that my technique has drastically improved with working on this exercise. Taking time to center my focus on one feature at a time than the whole picture helped me to develop more skill at capturing the features of the face.