5

Drawing

Realistic Facial Features

Now that you’ve mastered facial proportions and drawing techniques, you’ll work on drawing the features of the face. It can be a big challenge to accurately represent the shapes of the individual features. We’ll work on overcoming drawing what we think we see compared to drawing what is actually present.

In this chapter, you’ll learn some rules of thumb for drawing facial features such as eyes, nose, ears, hair, lips and smiles. Take the lessons you learned here to draw the subtle shapes of a friend or relative.

Drawing Eyes

So much has been written about the eye. Henry Theodore Tuckerman wrote, “The eye speaks with an eloquence and truthfulness surpassing speech. It is the window out of which the winged thoughts often fly unwittingly. It is the tiny magic mirror on whose crystal surface the moods of feeling fitfully play, like the sunlight and shadow on a quiet stream.” Given that the eye is indeed the window of the soul, artists need to get the window right.

Eyes as Shapes

Eyes are shapes, so you will use the shape and shading techniques to help draw them better. This section is the practical, step-by-step application of the various techniques presented in the preceding three chapters. You will isolate the feature of the eyes, simplify the shape and rename the parts of the eye as shapes.

What Color Are Your Eyes?

In addition to placing the pupil in the right spot and at the right size, the pupil must be black. I don’t mean a soft, whispery grayish black. I mean black. Can’t-push-on-the-pencil-any-harder black. It has to be one of the blackest blacks on your paper because contrast is important. Initially we’ll be concerned with the contrast between the pupil and the iris, because it’s that contrast that tells the viewer the eye color. So, when we see a black-and-white photo, we subconsciously compare the black of the pupil to the value (lightness or darkness) of the iris. Dark-brown eyes make it difficult, or even impossible, to see a separate pupil.

The Parts of the Eye

Eye Color

You can determine eye color by how light or dark the iris is in comparison to the pupil.