Alright you lot, how’s it going? Basically
what I’m doing today is something that I do whenever I sort of need to get out of a
rut, and I’m just drawing a load of faces on a page. So this isn’t gonna be a step
by step tutorial because, and you’ll see what I mean as the video goes on, but I don’t
have set way of drawing faces. I’m just gonna talk through like my thoughts behind
different decisions I make in the drawing process and a few different techniques I use
as I go I guess. I always start out with pencil. Um for some
of these drawings as you saw a second a go I’ll be using reference images from Pinterest
for inspiration, and I’ll leave a link for you to my Pinterest boards below. But basically,
with my pencil, reference image or not, I break down the head, neck shoulders, whatever
I’m drawing, into two or three very basic shapes. I’m showing you this real time so
you can see how quick and loose I am with it. And quite often once I’ve got those
shapes down I’ll go back and just slightly exaggerate a few areas so you just saw me
bringing the back of the head further out. And then it’s the same with mapping out
facial features, I just kind of suggest them roughly where I think they should go, no real
detail at first, I map out the hairline and in this case I’m drawing the lips as one
sort of geometric flat shape to start with. And apologies if you can’t really see the
pencil lines that clearly, I’m having a couple of camera issues but I might talk about
that later. It might help you to watch full screen and make sure you’re in HD.
So there’s the comparison between the sketch and the photo, I’m not really going for
a likeness here but I just wanted to show just how basic my initial sketches are.
So getting on with inking, I’m showing this at real-time again because I do get a lot
of comments saying that I seem so confident with inking, but I think a lot of that sort
of illusion comes from things being sped up. In reality im very slow and quite careful
with it. I really dot my way around the face willy-nilly, but my favourite thing to draw
are ears because I do have quite a set way of doing them and its basically just this
wiggly line with a bit of added pressure in the middle. And then I go back to inking in
wherever I want to the face, again adding pressure to the pen on curves like the bridge
of the nose mainly because that’s just the natural movement of the pen anyway.
Eyebrows tend to be a wiggly line or sometimes just a solid block. And quite often I end
up getting caught up in tiny details so here I was drawing a few really light lines to
suggest a nostril and some shadow under the nose.
Okay with the lips, I usually start out in the middle, at the bottom of the top lip,
because that’s where there’s the most shadow so that’s where you’re most likely
to get a solid line. The rest I try to fill in quite lightly depending on the look I’m
going for. I don’t always like to draw lips completely outlined but in this drawing to
make them stand out a bit I did shade them in, again not a solid block of black but a
kind of suggestion of shadows creeping up the natural creases of the lip.
Alright getting onto the chin! And this is where having quite a vague pencil drawing
can sometimes be a bit of a draw-back. You see the jaw line I started at the chin wasn’t
going to naturally make it to around the ear where a jawline should go. So mistakes happen,
I just carried on with it, drawing in the jaw where I wanted it to be, thinking ill
come back to that and sort it out when I’ve come up with a solution for it. Uh so after
shading the neck I thought I could use the same dark block shading on the jaw as well,
which I don’t usually do, I do prefer to keep that harsh shading on the neck but in
this case obviously it was necessary and I think it worked out okay. But just to get
my confidence back a bit I did decide to waste some time dotting in a few little pointless
shading and contour lines here and there, cos you can’t go wrong with those. Then
with the hair, I get asked about how I draw hair a lot as well, and like faces, it really
varies, so I’ve tried to show a few different ways throughout these drawings. The first
is just this simple wobbly outline along the hairline and shape of the head, I almost always
think of the hair as a coming together of a just few sections rather than individual
hairs. And almost always with hair, I go around the outline with a few fly-always just to
make it more interesting. Okay doing the eye now and I’ve switched
pen because my other one ran out. Unfortunately this one has a slightly thicker line so I
was kind of struggling in this area of detail. But with eyes, I generally don’t draw a
full outline of an eye, like with lips, I suggest the shape with shadows in the creases
of the eyelid. In this case the eye turned out a bit bigger than I would have wanted
but this is the sort of quick preliminary sketch I would happily re-do with a lot more
effort and planning behind it. I think this one took about 15 minutes altogether,
the rest which you’ll see in a bit I spent about 5-10 minutes on each. I like to keep
sketches like this quite short because I feel like that time restriction and the speed that
I’m drawing really loosens up the character and gives me that sometimes wonky, less polished
look that I like in my drawings. Plus it’s a great way to get the concept down. So another
day when I’m stuck for something to draw, I can pick one of these to re-do, refine and
fix the problems with to create something with a much better finish.
Starting with a new sketch here, I’m not sure if you can see but I wanted to show a
different way that I draw the mouth which is just with a wobbly line for the middle
and a bit of shadow under the bottom lip, rather than sketching it out as a full shape
as I did last time. And I drew the forehead too low on this one so before I erased it
I re-drew it where I wanted it to be and then rubbed out the areas that I didn’t want
any more. My old art teacher at school used to say there was no point in erasing your
mistakes before you’ve corrected them because if you don’t have those mistakes still there
as a point of reference, what’s to stop you from making the same mistake again. And
I don’t wanna get too deep but I think that kind of applies in life too. Like don’t
try to block out your mistakes, use them as a point of reference to get you to better
things. But anyywayyy.... Oh my god, what am I talking
about?! So now that I’ve inked it, I think you can see better what I meant about the
mouth. The top lip is basically all black and the bottom lip is only represented through
that shadow. I kept the nose quite simple and cartoony and you can see here again that
I’m just drawing the outer corners of the eyes. Two thick lines for eyebrows and a solid
block of hair. Like Lego hair. Remember when you had Lego and their hair would come off
in one piece, that’s how I draw hair. I broke the hair up with a few little bits on
the fringe and made the overall outline quite jagged. And then when I coloured it in I loosely
left a few areas white to suggest highlights. Ok, this is a bit of an interesting one because
in the reference image I worked from she was leaning against her hand with gave her face
a bit of a smushed look. This one I would definitely do again as like a standalone piece
because I love the concept of it and I’m quite happy with how it turned out but I would
definitely exaggerate how stretched her facial features get in those smushed areas. So that’s
that flat smushed cheek. With the lips on this one I did draw a solid sort of sausage
of a top lip, I don’t know how else to say that that’ll make it sound nicer but you
know what I mean and then again just a shadow under the bottom lip. For the rest of this
one I was really concentrating on having as few lines as possible, so just suggesting
thigs really. I put lines in where there was the most amount of shadow and left the rest
quite bare. But yeah, here on the eye, I’d have loved to have got that a little bit more
slanted and scrunched up. Quick ear and neck and then the hair I approached a bit differently.
Instead of drawing out the whole outline of it, I used really thick brush strokes to represent
clumps and sections of hair, making sure they all sort of made sense in the directions they
were going in. and adding a few little individual hairs here and there to give it a bit more
interest. And that’s just the reference I used.
This one’s not too different but I wanted to show with the sketching that I drew the
shape of the hair first and fit the face into that after. I just focus on dominant shapes
and with this one, the hair was the main focus. So yeah I really hope you can see this, I’m
actually back using my old camera, I don’t know if you remember a few videos I was so
excited because I had saved up enough for a new one and you might have noticed a slight
improvement in video quality in my last couple of videos but after only a couple of weeks,
my new Sony a5100 has completely broken down so I’m returning it. Such a bummer. But
I’ve ordered a completely different camera now, before it died the Sony actually overheated
way quicker than my old one anyway which apparently is a common problem in small cameras that
I didn’t know about. But yeah hopefully the canon I’ve ordered will get us back
on track with some more polished visuals. So with this hair, again it’s a solid shape
but then I put in a few darker details to show the roots and some shadows.
Next up, this guy. I feel like you lot more or less know how I go about my drawings now,
the difference with this one is that I gave him small, solid black eyes, which is another
look I like, sometimes it can look a bit scary but a lot of the time it comes across just
fine. I’m gonna let you enjoy the music on this one cos I don’t have a lot else
to say until the next drawing.
Okay now this one I decided to do in just pencil just to show what my drawings look like when I don’t wanna use ink. So obviously
I’m not gonna be able to- why is my finger doing that- ha yeah, obviously I’m not gonna
be able to rely on the texture that a brush pen brings but I still follow the same sort
of process. Starting out with a light, rough sketch and then going in and darkening the
lines on the features that I want to stand out. So the great thing about this was that
I was finally able to get a sharp fine line. I drew in the whole upper lash line with the
sort of curved swoop that you would get with a winged eyeliner and I shaded in the eyelid
in one solid shade, lighter than the outline of the eye but dark enough to still stand
out. I’m still just using shadows around the eye to suggest the eyes shape instead
of drawing the outline of the whole thing. With the nose, I started out with the darkest
points of the nostrils, made them solid black and used the same darkish shade of grey to
create some under-nose shading. The parts of the lips that I do the darkest are the
cupids bow, the corners and just under the bottom lip, the rest is shaded in the grey.
I did the other eye and then just a few sharp lines for the eyebrows. I outlined the face
with a thin dark line, sometimes I might add some varied thickness to the line like I do
with a brush pen but it didn’t seem right for this one. With the hair I didn’t really
have a style in mind so I just started drawing swooping swirly lines which is another way
I like to draw hair. Basically let the curved lines fall into each other, they’re all
going in the same direction but some curve sooner, some curve later, some have steeper
or shallower curves but they’re all taking the same sort of journey and meeting at the
same destination. And then I just shade the hair around the face and add a couple of finishing
touches.
And that’s it. I hope this video was useful for you lot, let me know if you have any go-to
techniques for drawing specific facial features like my wobbly ear line. Thanks for watching
and I’ll see you next time BYE!