Good morning, everyone, if you consider this a good morning. It is currently a balmy 18 degrees out with six inches of fresh powder covering my lawn. The Chicagoland area was inundated with snow last night, and even though it’s pretty, I don’t like it. I’m not a fan of snow; only on Christmas. Christmas snow is magical.

It’s currently really early for me, too. I could not sleep a wink last night for some reason, yet, I was very tired. Personally, it sucks. I’m very tired and I have that somewhat dizzy feeling I usually get when I’m very tired. It sucks more because, today, Alex and I are suppose to go back to Artist’s Square to do some antique shopping. I better get a lot of coffee in me, or else I’m not going to survive the day.

*Yawns*

I have an idea. How about instead of me rambling on about how tired I am, how about we do another tutorial? We’ve done hair–digital, long, short, and medium length–eyes, lips, but we haven’t structured a full face. I have three methods for structuring a face: anime style, unfeatured, and features first. Today, I’m going to use a style that I’m totally unaccustom to: unfeatured. This is going to be scary.

*Rubs eyes and yawns again*

Now, dearest Mari, what is an unfeatured face, you–our wonderful, yet mysterious viewers–may ask. The answer is simple, my friends. An unfeatured face is a face structure you draw BEFORE adding the eyes, nose, and mouth. I usually draw all my facial features before, THEN add the face around it, then a friend of mine–who is totally annoying me at the moment, but that’s a rant for another time–pointed out that, sometimes, my faces look goofy because I do things that way. Well, poo on him. To each their own, I suppose. But anyway, that is besides the point. So, I figured I’d try doing the face structure FIRST, then add the features. Now every character I draw kinda looks like Jennifer Aniston. Hopefully, this will not be the case for you!

Additionally, for this tutorial, I apologize for my shading looking very dark and askew. My family, for some reason, has an aversion to using lights in my house. I think it has to do with NIPSCO raising the electric bill 50% or something. Eep!

Now for the tutorial!

FACE STRUCTURE

1) First, you’re going to draw a figure that looks like an egg standing on the tip. The tip will act like a chin guideline, the fat part, the top of the head. You know, I never really noticed this, but all our heads are kinda shaped like eggs. Wow!

Next, we’re going to separate our egg into sections. No, we’re not separating our yolk from our whites; we’re not cooking today. What I mean is that we’re going to literally section off our head so the face itself will be easier to create later on. Starting from the chin, measure about an inch to half an inch up; Draw a straight horizontal line at this point. From the line down is where the mouth and chin will be. Next, measure half an inch up from this line; create another horizontal line. This sections off where the lips will go. From that line, measure, once more, a half an inch up. Draw another horizontal line; this is where the lower half of the nose guidelines will go. Now, measure 3/4 of an inch up and add a horizontal line; this is where the middle nose guideline will go. Then, from the 3/4 line, measure half an inch up and draw a horizontal line; these are where the eyes will go.

WHEW! Holy moley, that’s a lot of measuring. Did I tell you I was not accustom to this? I’m mathematically challenged. Oh, I forgot to mention, adjust my measurements to actually fit the dimensions of your image.

Moving on to step two…

2) At the top of your head, create a basic hair outline. This will determine where you want the bangs to be. This outline doesn’t have to be too detailed.

After creating the hair outline, you’re going to shape the face. You can square off the bottom edges of the egg shape to add jaw definition, if you want. To make this simple, I stuck to the egg shape. Once you drew the lines defining how you want your face structure to look, start shading. The outside edges of the face should be dark, because those are the vanishing points. Shade darkly, then, take the blendy stick (or tortillion, depending on how professional you want to be) and blend these dark lines into your midtones toward the inside of the face. Don’t forget to shade the neck, too! Create shadows to add depth. I don’t think I created the depth illusion well for this image. Like I mentioned before, my depth perception is really bad.

You also want to create jaw features. From the tip of the egg (chin), shade UP toward the inch line we created in step one. You can make this shading as wide or as narrow as you want; it depends on how defined or how hollow your jaw or cheeks are.

My laptop battery is about to die; I better hurry along.

3) Now we’re going to add ears (ear tutorial coming some to a Sketching House near you!). Where the 3/4 inch lines are, add your ears. Start from the upper line and create a C-shape; create a backwards C-shape for the right side. Create smaller C-shapes, or small R-shapes as I have done in the image to create the illusion of the inner ear. Shade the ears, remembering to start with the darker shades first.

Extend the hair outline and add definition.

4) Draw the guidelines for the eyes and nose. The eyes go in the upper 1 inch section; the nose guidelines go in between the eyes and down to the center half inch section. Remember, the nose has a circle and “wings” at the bottom.

5) Create the nose and eyes as we did in the nose and eye tutorials. Shade and blend. Add circles around the eyes to add definition and give the image eyebrows.

6) About a half inch below the nose, add your lips. Remember, the beginning of the lips consist of one horizontal line and circles. Please recall the lip tutorial, if needed.

Shade the lips and add a light source to the entire face.

You have created a face! Congrats! Oh, and please remove the guidelines; I didn’t.

Next time, I will show you how to draw the face structure using anime style and featured style.

This is Marisol signing out so she can go to work!

Love always!

Tags: Adobe Photoshop, anime, Art, Artists, Crown Point Indiana, Digital Art, drawing, Eyes, face, guidelines, Lips, midtones, Nose, Pencil Art, Pencil Drawing, Photoshop, photoshop elements, Photoshop Tutorial, shading, traditional Art, Tutorial, wings