Basic Face Tutorial

Step One: Draw the outline of the face. I use a circle as a base, then draw the lines of the face around it. This time I'm working with a rounder face, which will imply that the subject is younger or female. Note: I use a lighter color, like blue when sketching, especially when I'm working with openCanvas or photoshop.

Step Two: Draw place lines. This helps center the mouth, eyes and nose.

Step Three: Loosely draw the eyes, mouth and nose to make sure you have them where you want them.

Step Four: Make another layer and using a darker color, like brown or black, go over the blue sketch with a bit more detail.

Step Five: One you have step 4 done, you can either hide or delete the sketch layer, you no longer need it unless you make a mistake. By doing this, you can clean up the dark lineart so it isn't messy.

Step Six: Now that you have the basic face drawn, you can add more details, like hair, throat and shadows. As you can see with the nose and throat, I shadded the area where less light is going to reach. This can be removed later if you want to, or you can skip it entirely. It just helps me remember what angle the light is coming from.

Step Seven: Choose the base color for the hair and face, a slightly darker version of each for light shading, and a much darker one for the darkest places. As you can see, I chose a pale tan/yellow for the base of the skin, and a light teal for the hair. I chose not to use a medium shadow in the hair.

Using the watercolor tool, I blotted out the face with the base color, then using a smaller size brush I used the medium skin color to darken the places areound the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and throat, keeping in mind of the direction of the light source. WIth the darkest color, I used an even smaller brush and only shadded the places that would be darkest. Depending on what you want, you can use more or less shadow. Note: You can use gray tones to shade too, but I use tans and reds mostly to keep the picture from looking muddy. Test everything out, try making the person green even!

I did the same with the hair. In a more in depth tutorial, I'll explain shading and blending with openCanvas. When I finished with the skin and hair, I chose a light color for the eyes, and using a darker version of it around the outside and inside of the iris, near the pupil. When you shade around the pupil and outermost line of the iris, leaving some of the light color showing through, it makes the eyes brighter.

One I finished with that I used white to add some sketchy hightlights to the nose, mouth, eyes and hair.

That finishes the basic face tutorial. Depending on what you choose to do, this can be either a boy or girl. The lines of the face are fairly generic, though in particular I made this a boy by adding the lines of the adams' apple.

Hair plays a huge role in a picture, so be sure to play around with it. Drawing hair with curls can be really fun and a great way to learn about highlights and shadows.