So you came here to my blog. Maybe you’re new to art, maybe you’ve been at it a while. Maybe you don’t know where to start. In any case, this blog is for all of you. Even people who have been drawing for years like to look at tutorials in order to improve. I know I do, and while I’m by no means an expert, I have been drawing for as long as I can remember.

I’ll start out with a fairly basic tutorial of something that a lot of people like to draw, or want to know how to draw. A face. Now, with drawing people especially, everyone has their own distinct style. Here are just a few examples of some of the different styles artists have come up with: x x x

And now here’s some examples of my own art: 

As you can see, everyone develops their own style, but I will try to teach you the basics in developing a style and drawing a face. 

You start out by making a circle. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just roughly, a circle. This is the round part of the head or the skull if you will. 

Then we wanna make some crosshairs. Wherever you want the face to be pointed, think of that as the center of the crosshairs. So if the face is pointed to the side, the crosshairs will be off to the side, and if the face is pointed dead center, the crosshairs will be in the center. 

Next, we gotta have a chin, right? You’ll have to judge this. You could try looking at a mirror or a person nearby to judge proportions. Remember chins usually have a jawline on the sides of them, but how sharp you make this is up to you. 

Next, I usually go for the eyes. Draw another line below your horizontal one, a little more than halfway down the face, and that’s where you’ll put your eyes.

Here’s where a lot of stylistic choice comes in. You can draw your eyes big or small, and in a multitude of different styles. I start mine with a half-circle shape going from the bottom line and touching the top. However, some people draw eyes in one step by just making big circles or ovals, and that wouldn’t be wrong.

Next I draw a smaller half circle coming down to make the bottom of the eye.

Next we’ll make the irises and pupils. Sketch a circle inside both eyes and a dark circle in the center of each one. Then shade the top half of the iris to give some depth.

Just above that make the eyebrows. Remember, eyebrows are usually not just single thin lines, but if that’s your style or the kind of character you’re drawing, I won’t stop you. I make mine sort of thick. Then sometimes I like to shade them in.

Now, everyone dreads drawing the nose. But depending on your style you really don’t need to worry about it. You can see in my art and in many of the examples people just draw out a simple triangular shape and let it be. You can look at references for this too to determine how you want to make the nose. I just go with making a sort of triangle off the face, coming out right about where the crosshairs meet. Size, shape, is all up to you.

Now the mouth. Just draw a slightly curved line, and then I darken the corners of the mouth to give it more shape.

Remember when someone’s mouth is open, you can only see the top teeth, not the bottom. And you can choose to define individual teeth or not. I usually don’t; I think it looks cleaner, but some people do and it ends up looking really cute.

Ears are sort of like ovals, placed at the same height as the eyes. Again this is a stylistic thing, but I draw a little line inside to show the inside of the ear, with a bump in the middle.

This is my finished product; yours may look different though; everyone’s art will look somewhat different.

I added hair and a neck to make it look more completed, and you can do that too. The next post will be covering hair in-depth, but there’s so much to it, and so much variety among hair, that I’ll have to be covering it in a separate entry.

It’s important to think of drawing not as a series of steps, but as a whole picture. Think about what all the pieces look like together as you draw. Keep stepping back and looking at your work to see if you’re happy with it. Erase and adjust proportions if you need to. Never be afraid to google references to help you.

And most importantly, have fun! Don’t be discouraged if something doesn’t look right. It happens to everyone. Just keep drawing. According to cartoonist Chuck Jones, “Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.”