Faces are Just Lines
Learning to Illustrate People
Faces are just lines.
It’s pretty amazing isn’t it? If you stop to look at an illustrated face (particularly a stylized one like those above) each of the individual lines are actually pretty simple. It’s the way they’re all arranged that give the faces expression and character.
A few weeks ago I woke up and started writing a children’s book. Just typing lines into my Notes app. We read picture books all the time so perhaps this was inevitable. 😂
I’ve decided to tackle my fear of drawing faces to see if I could perhaps illustrate it too.
The first step was noticing that most children’s characters actually have stylized faces. I started by photographing faces on Davy’s toys and noticing how simple they can be. Just dots for eyes and a little swoop of a mouth.
During my time as an art major I only had two assignments drawing people. They were meant to be super realistic and were the lowest art grades I ever received. I went on to draw some decent humans in costume design class, but the focus was on the garments and their faces were quite stoic.
I realized I’ve never properly attempted stylized faces, or considered how they are different than a hyper realistic style.
Next, I pulled down a stack of children’s books off our shelf and copying faces in lots of different styles. (See above.) I wouldn’t copy these in my own work, but I did this to study the lines used and see if I “could” draw stylized faces. For a first go I think I’ve done pretty well so now it’s down to practicing and developing my own style.
I’ll walk you through how it’s been going.
I wanted direction so I started two courses for drawing people by Bardot Brush (it’s free!) and Lila Rogers (which I caught on half price.) They are both great at breaking the face down and make it all feel do-able.
According to the time stamp I started drawing faces on September 7 so it’s been a couple of weeks.
Lilla’s first lesson is tracing photographs. This assignment is focused on observing proportions in real life faces. This is really important, because the “rules” traditionally taught for drawing faces are based on average white males.
Looking at real faces you’ll see how sizes and shapes of features vary.
After tracing she has a fun homework assignment for illustrating faces based on different sizes and shapes (ex. small eyes, big nose, average ears, bushy eyebrows).
It really helps to have a playful approach.
After this exercise I decided to draw a bunch of faces on a character.
I traced John Tenniel’s card from Alice in Wonderland and drew lots of different faces. This one is simple, but does the job.
Then I had another go using a minimalist approach with dots for eyes and simple mouths.
Then I added skin tones and white to the eyes. (This wasn’t an assignment, just me playing. I noticed a lot of Davy’s books illustrated the white of eyes in this way, which is very different than outlining.
Below are the rest of the faces I drew on Tenniel’s card man. I’m noticing how much difference line thickness and scale makes.
I am drawing a lot of bad faces to learn how to draw good ones. Occasionally I will land on a line or shape I really like and try to focus on that (like the lips on the bottom middle face.)
I’ve also played around a bit with stylizing photographs.
I’m still not sure if I will end up illustrating this book, but it’s fun to learn something new. (It’s also awkward and cringe and I want to delete half of these images, but I’m challenging myself to share.)
It’s hard to let yourself be a beginner sometimes, but we always have the capacity to learn something new if we can keep our ego out of the way.
In the spirit of messy middles (and messy beginnings) I’ve revived @messymiddleclub as a secondary IG feed where I document my process without curating it. You can tag your messy middle posts and I’ll do features in stories.
(It’s making me wait two weeks to add my name because I changed my mind about it.)
Ok, that’s where I’m at (besides sore bandaged fingers from sewing my soft sculpture).
How about you?
Cheers,
Sarah
P.S. I’ve just remembered October is Inktober and there are dozens of daily drawing prompts. It’s a fun time to be focused on drawing. The official prompt list is below, but you can find lots of alternatives searching the hashtag #inktober2022prompts. (Or make your own.) I joined in when Davy was a newborn and it was a lot of fun. I did a lot of iPad drawings while he slept in my lap.
