Helloooo GUT fam!
We could build quite the neighborhood with your doodles of perpendicular buildings from last week—zoning laws be damned. The wide variety of doodles we saw really drove home the point: a single prompt can lead to such wonderfully different drawings. As always, thanks for sharing them with us. Much joy sparked.
This week we’re tackling something many people find challenging: drawing faces! There’s a reason art schools dedicate multiple semesters to the figure and the face. Even then, many artists find faces the hardest thing to get “right.” Luckily, we don’t give a hoot about “right.”
That said, there's something satisfying about picking up a basic skill and then deciding whether to use it or gleefully ignore it. There are some simple, fun ways to start training your mind’s eye. Once you get a feel for head shape and rough proportion, you can make any face you want—for real!
You can also ignore all this and make a smiley face on a stick figure. NO RULES IN ART. But for folks wanting to learn the basics, we’ve tried to make it easy and fun and comprehensible.
Drawing faces!
Shape and position
Faces come in many shapes and sizes, but we’re going to start simple and introduce our model for the day:
First, let’s turn this egg into a basic face egg.
It’s a head! See that? (We know it seems like the eyes are too low, but trust us.) We can see which direction it is facing. The egg head above is facing forward. And when we turn it…
We can see how it looks when it turns, and begin to imagine how the face might look when we add on features, right? Here, this’ll make it a little easier:
Egg-sactly. Notice how you only see PARTS of the face, depending on where it’s facing. Sometimes you can’t see any parts of the face at all. Of course, this is a super flat face….So let’s see how it looks when we add a nose shape.
Getting there! Drawing a hyperrealistic face involves some complex steps, but understanding how the face works is the first step.
Proportion
Maybe you’ve seen these “general face guidelines” at some point. While they may be generally accurate, they are in NO way a rule or an “ideal.” These ideals were based on able-bodied, old white guys’ ideas of facial perfection (namely: young white guys) and have been used to oppress people. These rules, like all art rules, are a bunch of B.S. And at the same time, it’s useful to have a generalized foundation to push against. So Wendy drew us a new one:
Again, these are general guides, and not rules or ideals. But they are helpful to keep in mind, so when you are drawing a face from observation or imagination, you can ask yourself, “How does this person vary from the general guide?” That might help you decide how to place and adjust features.
Okay, it’s your turn! Let’s draw some faces.
