Tutorial - Face Sketches

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This is just a quick tutorial of how I draw my faces. For the longest time I would just start drawing a pic cold, beginning with the eyes first working my way down the rest of the character's body hoping that the image I have in my head will fit the paper. For the past serveral years, when I got into inking my drawings, and especially since getting a light table, I've taken to mapping an outline of the character before I started filling in the details, which I think improved my drawings greatly. This is just a closer look at how I do faces. Very similiar to how most art books out there would show.

1. I start off with an oval shape for the head, drawing a couple of lines across to help me determine where the eyes and nose are going to be and whether the face will be looking down or up. I draw a line for the center of the face that will indicate if the face is looking straight ahead or to the side.

2. As I've said before, the eyes are the first things I draw, then the nose. From there I know where the mouth is going to be.

3. Then I do the cheeks, starting at the temples or the curve around the eye. Once I have that and the cheek, the rest of the face falls into place.

4. Unless the character I'm drawing is bald, I don't worry about drawing the entire scalp, because it'll be covered with hair anyway, unless the character has very short hair. This hair style is parted slightly to one side, so I have to remember that with each pose I do with this head.