How To Draw Super Simple Faces - Part One (Patreon)

People are hard to draw, so I’m making a short series of step-by-step guides on different aspects of drawing faces, starting with this one! 

Let’s start super simple with how to draw straight, front-on faces with a few basic expressions and some different hair shapes.

I draw faces really simply, so you might like to use a different style for yours that adds a bit more complexity to the face shape and eyes, but personally I find that simple can still work well and it’s a style that I use for faces in my children’s picture books.

First, how to draw a basic, front-on face.

1. Start by drawing an oval that’s wider and flatter at the top than it is at the bottom. In the middle of that shape, lightly draw a crosshair that we’ll use as a guide for the eyes and nose in a moment. Then, just over halfway between the middle horizontal line and the top of the shape, draw another horizontal line - this will be a guide for where the hairline starts.

2. Draw a small ‘C’ shape on either side of the head about halfway up - these will be the ears because the tops of our ears roughly line up with the tops of our eyes. Next you can draw a neck and just the tops of the shoulders coming from the bottom of the face. I always tend to draw quite long necks!

3. Then we can add the facial features. On the middle horizontal line draw an eye about halfway toward the outside of the face on either side - my eyes are very simple ovals, but you might like to experiment with different shapes/styles. The nose can be drawn down the vertical guideline, usually starting just a bit above the eyes, and then a mouth a little way below the bottom of the nose.

4. To draw the hairline it depends on the style of hair you’re drawing, so for this character we’ll start at the top horizontal guideline and draw a curved line down to behind the ears. 

5. We’ve finished using the guidelines now so you can erase them, and then draw the outline of the rest of the hair. Starting just above the head shape (so that their hair isn’t clinging directly to their head) roughly follow the shape of the head around and down to their ears, and then draw a couple of big waves down to the shoulders. Once you’ve done this on both sides you can erase the top of the head where it’s now covered by the hair.

6. And lastly, add some hair details to show the flow and direction of the hair a little. I like to add a few flyaway strands as well so that it doesn’t feel so blocky.

Simple Expressions

These are some of my most commonly used expressions and the different features I use to draw them.

A simple happy face is always a great place to start! Use open eyes and a small smile - you can adjust the size and angle of the smile to change how happy they look.

A very happy face uses smiling eyes (closed eyes pointing upwards) and a ‘D’ shaped smile. You can also use open eyes like the previous expression but the smiling eyes look even happier!

A content face has closed eyes but this time pointing downwards and a light smile. This can also be used for sleeping, and if you use a small ‘o’ shaped mouth instead of a smile they’ll look like they’re snoring.

And for a surprised face you want big open eyes and an ‘o’ shaped mouth. You can try adding little eyebrows above the eyes - the more you angle the outside edges of the eyebrows downwards the more concerned they’ll look.

Of course there are more expressions than this, these are just a few to get you started!

Simple Hair

Hair is so diverse - different lengths, colours, styles and types - so there’s lots to experiment with! Think about the general shape of the hairstyle that you’re giving your character and what the silhouette looks like to avoid it looking too flat and blocky.

I’ve drawn these common hair shapes to give you some ideas for your character, and to show you some different facial expressions in action.

I’ve made a guide about hair before that might be useful to you, and I’ll make an updated version with more examples this year!

Experimenting

If you'd like to experiment with different hair shapes, I've attached below all of the different shapes that I've shown above. They're transparent pngs that you can download, import them into your drawing software and draw over them on a different layer with your new hairstyle. They're 50% opacity but you can reduce the opacity more if you need to!

I'd recommend not sticking exactly to the basic hair shape, just use it as a general guide but give your hair a little bit of movement and some imperfections.

I'll be making another part to this guide about faces soon, would you like to see it next month or something else first? 💖