Face tutorial



BASIC FACE TUTORIAL







1 Lets start with something really simple, draw a circle (as best you can, no one is perfect). This circle will be the foundation. It will tell you where the cheek bones go and give the shape of the top of the skull.


2 Next I would like you to draw an arrow/line down what you consider roughly to
be the center of the circle. This line will later tell you where to put the nose and
where the point on your characters chin will be located.


3 Now I would like you to draw another line. This one will be intersecting the first
and be drawn along the bottom of your circle when it starts sloping inwards. This
line will tell you where to place the cheeks (or for when the face slopes down). This is a line that can be played with, the lower the line the younger the character may seem/chibi like the character will appear.




4 Here, (shown in brown) you can see how the chin is easily placed below our orange horizontal line. Just draw a type of rounded off triangle where the point (also rounded) lies on our first vertical line.




5. The four vertical lines were added here to show how to locate the eyes on the face. They can be drawn as long as the first or shorter if you've already got an idea as to where your eyes will be located. Now, these lines should NOT touch the side of the original green circle, try to make this gap equidistant on both sides. My off set pink horizontal lines is to show that these spaces should be equidistant. (That is to say, figure out the spacing of our new arrows on the far left and on the far right from the side of the circle), when you have that just split the area into three equal pieces. Now you'll have two eyes that will be equal width and will also be eye distant apart.




6. Keeping in mind the yellow highlighted arrows from step five, I've added some blue arrows. It's a lot of fun to play with these as these arrows determine the "size" of a character's eyes. It's where you place these arrows as to whether you'll have the cool loner with the small eyes or the innocent school girl who is nothing but eyes!!
Now I went ahead and colored in where the eyes will go in orange. This just shows that this was my preference to size at the time. Note: that I made sure to leave space between the orange squares and the circle and also that the white square between the orange is about the same size as the orange. (It won't be exact cuz I'm not perfect, lol)


Remember your circle? Well, straighten out the sides above the jaw line you drew up to the point where the circle kinda starts curving in (it'll be straightish between jaw and hair line), hence the reason for the gap at the end of the eyes. The straight lines can be seen in the final product :)



7 Now let's bring everything together and add the final touches, shall we? Remember when I said the nose goes along the first vertical line? Well, let's throw it in there. Now the mouth usually looks best when placed along the same vertical line but also "hugging" our circle. Moving onto the ears, most professionals put them exactly eye level with their characters but I never liked the way it looked so put them close to eye level but a little lower and I also make them smaller to give my girl a more feminine look.




I hope you enjoyed my tutorial and I intend to post more in the future. Hope to see you again.