Thanks for checking out my latest tutorial. Like promised, I will now be looking at the iris. The iris ended up taking up the entire guide because I didn’t take into consideration how very complex the iris can be.
Irises are where the eyes can get really fun and captivating. If you don’t believe me, just look at the iris of a friend. Irises have all sorts of colors within them with little lines of color. These lines exist because the iris actually has the ability to widen or close in order to get more light in dark areas. Eyes also have a shininess to them, making them even reflective under the right lighting conditions. Neat to look at, but tough to draw. That is, until you get used to it.
With cartoon eyes, you can completely skip the iris and just draw circles with dots in them. If you’re lazy, you can even just draw dots. These are great for simplistic cartoons and save enormous amounts of time. But artists who want to draw eyes that are prettier try to capture the enormous amounts of color found in the eyes. Blending a variety of shades and colors works fine for cartoon eyes, but to achieve the realistic look, much greater care must be taken.

For both realistic and cartoon eyes, the pupil is usually the easiest part. For stylistic reasons, some cartoon artists completely omit the pupil altogether. But most of the eyes I’ve seen have pupils in them. All that’s needed is a simple black circle in each eye. Make sure that this circle is symmetrically drawn.

Thus ends the easy part. Next, we’re going to add the shading found at the top part of the eye. This is done by covering the top part of the iris with black. Make sure to leave some space between the pupil and the black because you will want to make the roundness of the pupil obvious.

Next, we’re going to take part of the black and erase it. Choose the color you want to make your eye and find a good, solid representation of that color. We’re going to be drawing over the black with the color you’ve chosen for the eye. Be sure to leave small lines of black behind after covering most of the shading.

Next, we’re going to take those parts and smudge them upwards. Why in the world would we do that? Because in real life, shading doesn’t start and stop abruptly. By throwing in a little black in gradually, the shift from brown to darker brown to black will seem more realistic. (At least I hope so)

Now it’s time to add those neat folds I’ve been rambling about above. This can be done by drawing lines that extend from the pupil to the outer edges of the iris. For these lines, pick colors that are lighter than the base color for the iris.

Next, draw a squiggly line that moves through every single one of the lines you just drew, using the same shade that you used to draw the lines.

Start smudging the lines, moving your smudging tool from the pupil to the outer edge of the eye. Do this carefully and slowly so that you can change any mistakes you made. You want the lines to sorta merge with the pupil very faintly.

To add to the gradual shift from the top shading to the bottom shading, you can use a burn tool in Adobe Photoshop CS4in order to go over the top part of the iris. This program can also be used to create the highlight effect using the dodge tool as seen on the bottom part of the iris. You can then adjust the eye with the hue/saturation feature and use the blur tool in order to make some aspects of the iris appear more seamless.

The final part is the glare. Glares can be really sophisticated, but for now, let’s just add a simple white circle. Place one or two white circles of different sizes on the eye and blur them in order to make them seem like they’re actually a part of the eye. This glare really helps make the eye appear more round.

This iris is all well and good, but what if you do not have the time to detail the iris. Or what if realistic eyes just aren’t your style and you want to create beautiful cartoonish eyes. Creating pretty cartoon eyes starts with finding an attractive color. There’s no hard, fast rules for selecting the right color so you’re going to have to trust your gut instinct. I felt like using a dark blue.

Next, pick a darker color and create a trapezoid going over the top part of the eye. Then pick a lighter color and create another trapezoid near the bottom of the eye. Finish up by drawing a curving line near the bottom of the line with the lightest color. That’s four colors total. Then blur the edges where different colors meet. One way to do this is to use a selection tool and select a particular section of the eye to run the Gaussian blur filter on if you’re using Photoshop. Otherwise, you can use a blending stick or tissue to blend the edges together so that they come together seamlessly.

That’s it for this one. Good riddance, it’s getting late. There’s a couple of odds and ends when it comes to the eyes that I haven’t covered yet and they’ll all be thrown into one big super tutorial which will come out eventually. Until then, I’ll be covering a completely different topic: shading.

Alex

For this how to draw guide, I will use the 1:5 ratio. This is not a good ratio for drawing chibi but rather for drawing an adolescent or short adult. The following character will be drawn.

After that, I’ll be covering how all the other different ratios can be used. Of course, she doesn’t exactly have a 1:5 ratio, but when I originally drew her with a perfect 1:5 ratio, she looked really weird.

How to Draw the First Circle

Draw five circles that are the same size and stack on top of each other. On the top circle, draw two horizontal lines that curve slightly upwards. These lines will represent the eyebrows. Draw two lines that slant upwards and towards each other, with their opposite ends touching the eyebrows.

For the eyes, draw lines that travel horizontally and curve upwards. Each of these lines travel downwards and wrap around at the points of the lines that are the farthest away from each other, forming almost half circles. The half circles form full polygons by forming points as the open ends of the half-circles close. Within these closed polygons, draw curving horizontal lines that curve upwards. These lines are near the top of the polygons. This will separate these eyes into two different sections. In the lower section of each eye, draw a vertical line and have that line curve to the right.

Noses are very tricky organs to learn how to draw. Some cartoon artists completely omit the nose or try to draw minimalistic elements of the nose, since the nose is difficult to draw attractively. I try to draw the areas that are the most shaded. Also, I read that with characters with some ethnic backgrounds, the nose needs to be more emphasized. For this face, most of the shading will be on the left side. So draw two vertical lines that curve to the right slightly. For the nose, draw a vertical line that curves to the left. When you reach the bottom of this line, have the line travel horizontally to the right while durving upwards. Reverse the direction of the curve where you want the middle of the nose to be and then reverse the curve again. Finish the other side of the nose with a line that travels horizontally and curves to the right.

Draw two curving horizontal lines that connect together. These lines will curve upwards. Then draw one horizontal line that curves downwards. These lines will connect at the ends, forming a polygon. In the middle of this polygon, draw a horizontal line that curves downwards slightly.

Ears can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them. Gosh, you don’t even have to draw them. In this case, I’m just going to draw a simple curve.

Since the head is tilted a bit to the right, the shape of the edge of the face will look different for each side. One side will be a gradually curving line where the line curves downwards and to the right. On the right side, draw a line that travels upwards while curving somewhat downward. At some point, this line will curve sharply outwards before returning to the path where it was originally traveling. This is the cheekbone, a feature that some people have more pronounced than others.

To draw the hair on the forehead, draw two waving lines that are close together, eventually meeting at one point.

To the right of the strand you just drew, draw several curving lines that travel to the right and curve downwards and to the left.

On the other side of the head, draw a similar strand of hair that consists of two lines that wave and connect together.

At some point on the strand of hair, draw a line that travels downwards with the line curving downwards and to the right.

Attached to the curving line, draw another strand that curves downwards around the ear. Again, this is two lines that connect together at a point.

Draw a line that travels upwards and waves. This waving can be slight or pronounced.

On the right side of the head, draw several more strands that are clumped on top of each other.

Finally draw the top of the head. Do not draw a perfect curve unless you are drawing a cartoonish character. Most people have imperfectly shaped heads and the top of the hair often consists of different clumps, which will cause the hair to not be perfectly symmetrical.

Draw lines that connect to the bottom of the head. Since the head is turned a particular way, the part of the neck that is farther away from the direction that the head is turned will appear more curving, while the other side of the neck will appear slightly closer to the center of the head.

In the next post, I will draw out the rest of the body as it covers the rest of the circles. In that post or the post afterwards, I will add color and shading. Then I’ll be drawing the 1:6, 1:7 and 1:8 ratios. If you would like any particular characters drawn using these ratios, email me at sketchinghouse@gmail.com. I’m going to try to talk Marisol into doing a how to draw chibi characters, since I have no experience drawing those types of characters at all.

See y’all next week,

Alex

Assorted Brush #1

This brush is made up of small circles that are strung together. When drawing in a line, this brush creates what looks like a slinky, cord or some type of microbe. If you scribble the lines together, it forms a black splotch with little renegade circles all around it. If you use the mouse to make single clicks, this brush will create tiny circles. This can serve as an alternative to using the ellipses tool. All you have to do is resize the brush using “[“ or “]” in order to get the right sized circle. However, the lines will be blurry. This might not work if you are searching for more fine lines.

Assorted Brush #2

Assorted brush #2 is just like brush one except that this circle has two circles instead of one with one circle contained within the other circle like a bulls-eye. The result is a darker line and little individual circles that look like tiny bulls-eyes. Like the other brush, as you increase the size of this brush the lines get blurry.

Assorted Brush #3

This brush is made up of a bunch of X’s stringed together. This brush has all sorts of uses ranging from texturizing a picture to creating something that looks like a metal fence. Individually, this brush can really create interesting texture when the brush is scribbled in one location, though scribbling too much will only create a black blotch. Making singular clicks of the mouse will create little X’s that could be used for stars. If you enlarge the X, the X becomes more blurry and the X appears as if its made out of blotches that start off larger in the middle and get smaller towards the tips of the X’s.

Assorted Brush #4

This brush is a diagonal pound symbol. But when used for drawing lines, it creates a line that has a rough edge and a thick black line in the middle. This creates nice little edges on the lines that are great for texture. I like how the text looked when I wrote it. When the brush is drawn over itself, it creates very thickly black blotches with rough edges, which reminds me of some paint mediums. Placed individually, this brush creates a sharp that gets progressively more blurry the more you increase the size.

Assorted Brush #5

I like this brush a lot. The lines created by this brush have very scratchy edges that look manmade at the same time because they are so uniform. This might be a useful brush for drawing the silhouette of an animal such as a caterpillar. The edges of the brush are reminiscent of fur. If clicked individually with a mouse, this brush leaves nice little gridlines that can have different applications.

Assorted Brush #6

Do you want a lizard, a fuzz ball, or a spiral? This really awesome brush creates the illusion of scales with drawn in a straight line and creates what looks like a ball of fur when the brush is draw over itself. When clicked individually, this brush creates a little spiral. Let your imagination run wild with this brush.

Assorted Brush #7

Made from diamonds. Not sure if a diamond is an artist’s best friend. This brush can create lines that look like they have bad quality. This brush might be useful in some way, but I can’t really think of any uses right now.

Assorted Brush #8

Looking to create lace? This brush brush is for you. This brush allows you to draw lines that look like laces. A very fun brush to use, but I cannot think of any applications beyond creating lacy material. But that’s good enough to make it useful.

Assorted Brush #9

I guess this is a cool brush. At a smaller size, this brush creates lines with really interesting edges. Make the lines larger and they start to remind me of centipedes. The symbol used to create this brush is kinda strange. I don’t really find the blotch in the middle really interesting.

Assorted Brush #10

I like this brush overall, though I don’t like the blurriness of it when you create larger sized strokes. This brush gets thicker as you travel horizontally and thinner as you travel vertically. The brush creates a 3D look that reminds me of the ribbon brush. The splotch is kinda boring and the individual mouse clicks created little marks that could be flames in the right picture.

Assorted Brush #11

Even though the shape of this brush is way different, this brush is like the opposite of brush #10 in effect. Lines get thicker as you travel vertically and thinner as you travel horizontally. The brush is kinda shaped like a genie lamp. I like how the left side of the brush seems to fade.

Assorted Brush #12

This is a cool brush but I’m not sure what it would be useful for except for really neat font. The lines sorta make me think of the edge of a rock, but that might just be my eyes playing tricks on me.

Assorted Brush #13

I almost skipped this one. This brush might be useful for texture, but it mostly only creates what looks like railroad tracks. But it’s a little too much on the blurry side.

That’s it for the first half. There’s a bunch more brushes in the assorted brush section like the star brush and the black widow brush. I’ll hit those tomorrow.

Alex

Elderly men do not dominate manga and cartoons, but you can sometimes still find them playing a few important roles. These characters are given extra lines on the face to emphasize wrinkling and the sagging of a face. The elderly face usually has some features that are drawn out more than you would with a younger face. It seems like the older a character is, the more realistic the features are drawn, while the younger the face, the more details you omit. For instance, some young children do not even have mouths drawn. The elderly face can be really complex and the extra angles can end up requiring some really innovative shading. For this drawing tutorial, a more simplistic face is going to be drawn.

Draw a line that curves upwards. This will be a tiny line that represents the corner of the eye. Then draw a second line that travels outwards, curving slightly. Finish with a long, curving line that represents the bottom of the eye. These will be the eyelids.

Draw two curving lines in between the two eyelids. These will represent the irises. Notice how the entire eye isn’t completely shown. Instead, the top and bottom parts of the irises are covered by the eyelids.

Create a duplicate but reversed version of the eye you just drew.

Draw a line that slants downwards and to the left. This line will be beneath the eyes in the middle of the face. Yep, this is the nose. This line will then suddenly travel downwards and to the right, forming a right angle. The corner of this right angle will be rounded.

Draw a broad line that curves only slightly downwards to show a slight smile. This character is meant to be somewhat older, so I put slanting lines in the corners of his mouth that slant downwards.

Between the nose and the mouth, draw two lines that start somewhat near the nose that curve outwards and travel down towards the mouth.

Draw some curving lines beneath the eyes.

Draw two curving lines somewhat beneath the mouth that are small and very curved. Start drawing the jaw. The jaw will be less pointy than usual on this guy, since sagging skin will make his jaw seem wider.

Draw the rest of the head. Have the lines that make up the head slant outwards as they travel upwards. When you’re ready to draw the top of the head, draw a curving line that connects both slanting lines.

Draw the folk’s ears. Draw a curving line that starts at the edge of the head, curves and then travels downwards a long way becoming more straight with a slight curve. Have the line curve at the bottom until it touches the side of the head. As for the inside of the ear, you will probably need a human model
. No matter what, the ear is always drawn with curving lines near the edge of the ear within the ear. What’s tricky to draw is the opening of the ear canal near the ear lobe.

Draw the hair however you’d like, though it’s a bad idea to draw every individual strand.

Alex

Where was I? Working, school and being lazy. I’m sorry! I know, it’s been awhile. Marisol and I were trying to get an apartment but we ended up working so hard that everything started to suffer. From now on I’m going to stick with contributing to our tutorial art gallery.

Anyway, here’s another art drawing tutorial on nothing specific in particular. This tutorial focuses on drawing face art, rather than body art, giving explanations on how to draw out each part. I added advanced sections, even though they’re not really that much more advanced. They’re really just extra things you can look out for when you’re trying to go the extra mile with your art lessons.

Outline of the head

Make light strokes in a slightly curling motion when drawing the line art for the head. Stare at the edge of your reference photo and try to visualize the shape of the outline of the head. Advanced: pay extra attention to special details like whether or not the face is round or sunken. If you can capture each indentation of the face, capture it.

Mouth

Mouths can be an incredibly simple part of line drawing. With the mouth, draw a very simple curving line. The way I drew the mouth gave the character a slight smirk. Now, to draw the lips or not to draw them. Advanced: The mouth is drawn sorta like a small m. There is a dip in the middle, though the dip varies from person to person. Some dips are tiny, while others take up a little more space. Since the lips are not directly facing the camera but are faced slightly to the left, make the left side of the lips more rounded while making the right side more slanted in order to create that illusion.

Why draw the lips? A lot of don’t include the lips, which can create a very cute picture. Some artists even avoid drawing the mouth in order to emphasize the character’s youth. Plus, lips often look somewhat strange on drawn character, though they don’t have to be. Much of the beauty of lips comes from the right shading and highlights, which will be in another tutorial. For now, you can stick with drawing simplistic lips, which work well with ethnic characters.

Eyes

A lot of artists start with the eyes because the eyes often determine whether or not the rest of the picture will end up working. But where you start really does not matter. For these eyes, take the reference picture and try to capture the outline of the eyes. For cartooning, this does not have to be exact and be sure to draw somewhat larger than what is in the real life picture. Draw the bottom part of the eye with a bulge in the middle bulging downward. The outer edges of the eyes can be drawn slanting up or down. Usually they are slanting downwards.

The top part of the eyes curve sharply upward from the outer corners of the eyes and form a gentle round curve. I removed the inner corners of the eyes because they did not look attractive. I then enlarged the eyes because I was worried that the eyes would be too hard to see. Advanced: start cleaning up the eyes. Use an eraser or white coloring to color over the parts of the lines you want to erase. Always erase in a way that will increase the roundness of the eyes.

Choose a color that you would like to use for your eyes. Fill in circles that fill up the entire eye lid. Draw a nice black line around your irises that is somewhat faint. Then switch to white and draw in a glare that is on the same spot for both eyes. This will be a small white circle that represents the light reflecting off of the eye. Advanced: Add a faint white line at the bottom of the irises.

Eyebrows

Add the eyebrows. Much of the individuality and emotion of the character comes from how the eyebrows are drawn. The combination of eyebrows and mouth form a large percentage of the emotions depicted through drawing. Also, since eyebrows vary, you can be somewhat creative with them. For these eyebrows, put a lot of weight on the inner part of the eyebrows in order to make them look thick. As you slant upwards and curve to the outer part of the eyebrow, make the line progressively fainter and thinner.

Hair

Draw the bangs as curving triangles. You can start by drawing the outline of the hair or add the bangs first. Bangs can be drawn in all sorts of ways. The types of bangs I drew were the ones that curve inward and are triangular. With these bangs, the messiness or neatness of your character can be emphasized by whether or not you have the bangs all going in one direction or not.

Coloring

Coloring, one of the most awesome parts of creating an image. This is especially awesome when you are using a Photoshop program. Not only can you choose among a seemingly infinite array of colors, but you can also place different colors on different layers and then alter these colors using hue/saturation.

Regardless of what you use, make sure that you color very carefully by going along the edges without going over them. If you’re drawing traditionally, it is recommended that you go over your artwork lines using and then finish coloring with high-quality markers. Alternatively, you can draw everything using your tablet or mouse and then create new layers for each color. Then, be sure to set each layer to multiply in order to avoid coloring over the lines that you worked so hard to draw.

That’s all it takes to construct a typical face (at least in the anime world). It really all comes down to personal taste. Draw a little here and see if you like it. Erase something there when you realize that it looks really dumb. Slowly clean up every stray pixel or smudge until everything starts to look polished.

I’m not even sure who this character will be but she’s temporarily named Angora. I might not even use her since I don’t hold on to characters unless they feel right. Maybe she needs some redesigning.

My story takes place in a setting inspired by pre-history Philippines. I’d draw her wearing the clothes that people wore during that time frame, but they mostly wore nothing. That reminds me of a museum exhibit I saw of Native Americans. Some of the figurines of the Native Americans were completely nude. That was so weird since I was shielded from all nudity as a kid and then I’m exposed to a culture that sometimes runs around naked. I guess I learned from that how values can be way different from culture to culture.

You might think “hey, she doesn’t look Filipino.” Well, actually she’s Negrito. From the research I did, Negritos settled in the Phillippines before the Austronesians, an indigenous group from what is now called Taiwan.

That is the initial sketch I started off with. I like that sketch and might use it for a different drawing. How did she change so much? A whole bunch of reasons. The main reason was that I wanted to practice foreshortening, which is something I need to learn how to do with the body. Well, I didn’t really succeed at foreshortening her because that is tough!

What’s foreshortening? Foreshortening is how objects seem deformed at different angles. I guess I made her arms somewhat foreshortened, but their sizes are roughly the same and not large enough to show a real contrast.

So now what? I drew new torso lines in order to make her body appear turned to the side. I also foreshortened her shoulders, making one appear larger and one smaller to indicate that one shoulder is turned farther away from the point-of-view.

Next, I made her sides more shapely and raised her chest. Now she doesn’t look like she has the body of a 90000 year old woman. (I meant to say 900, not 90000).

At this point, I decided to redraw her clothes. Why? She looked like she was wearing a kimono or tunic, which doesn’t really fit with her character. But nudity doesn’t work for me, so I made up some clothes. I also redrew her arms. I liked how they looked, but they look way too long right now. I think this is where I was getting tired two nights ago because her proportions are extremely out of whack. I started drawing her legs because I wanted to shorten her dress. With dresses, its really important that you draw all of the legs out in order to make sure that you have the proportions right.

I did a little resizing and drew out the basic shape of the head.

Then I drew her face. I was aiming for a face that was both delicate and Negrito, but I ran into a problem. Most cartoon and manga faces are European/Asian inspired. Rarely do you see other races represented. I really had nothing to go off. I wanted to emphasize this character’s ethnicity, but I also wanted to keep her features relatively simple. So I experimented with the nose and lips until I got the results that I wanted.

I also added hair, my favorite part.

Then I added lineart and widened her features. I don’t know why I did this and I think I’m going to change it back later.

As you can see now, I colored her. I don’t know if I gave this advice out yet or not, but setting your coloring layers on multiply allows you to color without coloring over dark lines. This is good if you have a hard time coloring within the lines.

Then I used a handy-dandy color scheme generator at: www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Just plug in the value for one of the colors you’re using and it’ll generate colors that are compatible. These colors should pop out more when put together.

So I drew her and showed her to Marisol and she drew all over her. She took her mouse and drew all these lines all over my drawing like it was nobody’s business (joking. I asked her to).

This is sort of like an artist’s version of proofreading. It really helps to have someone else look at your artwork before you finish it because they can see mistakes that you missed. Being an artist doesn’t have to be lonely.

I took her advice and adjusted her. But I gave her brown eyes instead of blue.

Like usual, I have to finish most of my tutorials in multiple blog posts. This isn’t because tutorials take that long, but because I have to write these in gaps of time between school and work. I wish I could write more tutorials, but time is always so short. Still, Marisol and I promise that we’ll always keep updating. We won’t be those people who stop posting out of the blue.

I love you all,

Alex

Alright, so right now it’s pretty plain, and looks something like this 

Azcona needs clothes! This design is really simple, and quite lazy, I had no idea what kind of clothes I wanted him in, so I just threw something together.  Now this brings me to the next step.

With a soft round brush, or a hard brush with 70 percent opacity, paint the clothes with their base color. This is what I figure would be the color clothes he’d wear, I can change it later, which I just might end up doing. Anyway, fill in the shapes, clean it up a bit and it should look like this.

Alright, now start taking a darker color and fill it in, define more shapes to the clothes, add shadows where they should be, like where the creases and wrinkles are, folds and all that good stuff.

Alright, so I went to Image, adjust, hue/saturation and adjusted it so that it was a bit more black. Also, I took a small pixel eraser and started to erase parts of his cloak to make it look more tattered. Also, with about 3 pix hard brush, I drew loose strings that would come from those rips and tears, as if you know when you rip something, there are fibers that are ripped too.

Alright, here I drew  more shadows and fibers, along with doing the piece near his neck, which is like a tight turtle neck cover. Nothing much here, but I wanted to show a picture of how that works out. Just use a slightly darker color from the base color and make horizontal lines, and repeat the process getting a little darker at a time.

Ok! Now the fun part, I’m going to show a very quick and easy way to draw the cross. It’s so simple, you’ll be amazed to find out just how it’s done! So what you want to do is draw everything in a dark dark color, almost black, but in the hue you want. For me, I want the beads to be red, so I’m going to start with a dark dark red color.  Alright, now that I have that, I’m going to take a small brush, 3 pix is what I usually use, since it’s nice and small. So I take a vibrant red color and make the little red dots inside the darker ones, which gives it some volume, but we’re not done yet! Now I take an almost white color and add tiny tiny white shiney dots on the side where the light is, which makes it seem to pop out a lot. I go back to the skin layer and make shadows where the necklace is, and take a soft brush, with the vibrant red color and lightly dab it on to look like the reflection is hitting on skin.

That’s all for the clothes! It’s turning out nice, now just the background is left! I’d upload that one right now… but I’m too busy listening to this guy sing and falling in love with his voice! He’s amazing and I think everyone should check him out on Youtube! <3 But that’s for another time….

-Tala

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!

Noses– most people have them and like lips and eyes, they are very useful. People can steal noses (hehehe, got your nose!), or get smacked in the nose every winter at least once. I get smacked in the nose at least once per winter because my boyfriend slips on the ice and I have to catch him, only to have him accidentally hit me in the nose and mouth. Ouch.

Some people have anxiety when it comes to drawing noses, but have no fear, noses are easy! In fact, noses are so easy that they can be drawn in four steps. This is going to be a short tutorial, folks.

1) First, you’re going to get a ruler and figure out how long your drawing’s nose is going to be. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to use three inches for my length because it’s an easy length to divide up evenly. I am math challenged. So, I’m going to draw a three inch long vertical line that has an inch long horizontal line at the bottom. Next, I’m going to draw a second three inch long line going up from the open end of the one inch horizontal line. Next, I’m going to divide this open-ended box into three equal sections; in my case, it’s all one inch sections.

2)  In the bottom third, draw a circle in the center. Depending on how wide you want the nose to be, you can make this circle any size you want. On the sides of the circle, add “wings.” These wings consist of half circles. Like the circle, you can make these as big or as small as you please. All noses are different. Now draw two lines that stem from the upper sides of the circle going up through the upper two thirds of the box.

3) Determine where you want your shading to be and create guidelines. Press dark for your dark tones, lighter for your medium and light tones. Also determine your light source. Additionally, create your nostrils. The nostrils start on the circle and extend into the “wings.” You can makes these as larger or as small as you wish, since in a drawing, the nostrils show how pointed a nose is.

4) Shade your nose, starting with the dark tones first. Take your blendy stick and soften the ark tones and “bleed” these dark tones into where you marked the midtones. Then lightly create the tones, leaving the light source white. Smooth the entire drawing with a Kleenex.

And you have created a nose for your drawing! Your drawing can smell! See how simple that was? I didn’t learn this technique until recently. Before, I just used parenthesis lines to create my noses, and that looked weird. Thanks to the Big Book of Drawing, I learned how to create noses and other facial features. It’s a wonderful book. Not only does it show how to draw realistic faces, but how to draw realistic animals and sketching techniques. Cool, huh? I got the book for Christmas about 6 years ago. I highly recommend it!

So there you have it, folks! Enjoy and have fun!

Love always,

Marisol

Preferred Tools: Circle stencils, colored pencils, pencils, Photoshop (optional)
1)    First, draw intersecting lines, forming a cross-like figure. These lines are going to help you keep everything centered, which is very important when drawing eyes. Now, I’m only showing how to draw one realistic eye, but this step can be duplicated for the opposite eye, as well. Unless, of course, you want to draw the One-Eyed-One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater, than one eye is fine.
2)    Where your lines intersect, draw a circle that is a half inch in diameter (adjust for the size of your image). In the center of this circle, add a smaller circle that will serve as the pupil.  If you have circle stencils, please use them for this step.
3)    Add smaller misshapen circles in various sections of the eyes. Don’t get overzealous with this step, because these small orbs are your light source areas.
4)    Color the pupil black; lightly shade the iris. With both colored objects, leave the light source circles white.
5)    Add small lines all the way around the iris. The lines on the outside and inside edges of the iris should be darker ; the center lines should be lighter.
6)    Now we’re going to draw the upper lid of the eye. Draw a line that arcs up slightly and goes above the iris.  Then, draw a second line for the button lid and connect all the lines at the corners. At the inner corner, create a  small triangle for the cauthus, the tear-producter at the corner of the eye.
7)    Slightly above the lower lid line, add another line. This is the inside of the lower lid.
8)    Above the upper lid, draw another line; this is the fold of the upper lid.
9)    Add eye lashes.
10)    Shade the eyes.
11)    Create an eyebrow using various short lines going every which direction.
You have created a realistic eye! Isn’t that cool? Now use these steps to create the second eye. You can also use these steps for creating animal eyes, as well. This eye tutorial has multiple uses. Hooray!
Now that this is complete, tune in next time for more tutorials.

“Eye’ll” be seeing you,
Marisol