Pen tablets
Sketch, draw and edit images with a responsive pad, a precise pen and see your creations appear on screen.
Welcome to a new Wacom sketch lesson. Today we will learn how to draw a woman’s face. This - as we all know - can be a beautiful sight and is also one of my own favorites. Of course, all faces look slightly different, depending on their origin, age, number of ears, etc., not to mention the style of each artist. Sometimes even the same face looks completely different in the morning than it does in the evening.
In this step-by-step guide we will learn some basic guidelines that portrait, caricature, comic and anime artists all over the world have been using for many years when painting realistic faces. Of course, these are not mandatory rules and every artist can adapt and reinterpret them to their own style. With a task as challenging as the female face, it can be tremendously helpful to practice and keep this guide in mind.
In this course we will draw a female face from our imagination and learn some essential tricks and techniques to make it look realistic. We will start by constructing the head shape, then add the features, and finally give the face some fine-tuning and color. I hope you find the course inspiring, and that you will be able to use this approach for yourself in the future.
This course is mainly aimed at beginners, but an experienced artist may discover something new too. I'm also going to talk about the workflow on the computer with a graphic tablet and the advantages of digital devices. However, you can follow the course with pen and paper as well.
I wish you a lot of fun while drawing and great results.
Table of contents
How good that we have constructed so bravely. Because now we know exactly where everything should be located:
• At the top quarter line is the hairline.
• The circle-middle line - well, maybe we could have left that out. But experienced artists know: to make a quarter, you have to make a half first
• The next line is for the eyes. Yes, they are really that low. They sit halfway down the face.
• The nose ends exactly at the lower edge of our first circle.
• And the mouth sits at the center of the small circle.
In the next chapter we will take care of the details for our face.
For the eyebrow, sketch an area which to fill with hair afterwards. This area is rather pointed towards the outside. Female eyebrows tend to be a little narrower than those of men and can have a steeper arch. But be careful - this can appear severe.
The hair of the eyebrows starts inside at a 45-degree angle and becomes flatter towards the outside. It’s best to draw the hair with lots of fast strokes. Start on the inside, and draw each hair at a slightly offset angle.
In this digital age, hair that protrudes too much can be easily erased using a pen tablet.
One of the great advantages of the female face is that there is usually a lot of hair covering the ears, so we may not even have to draw them. The ear is a rather complicated structure with many angles, wrinkles and shadows and should probably be described in more detail in a separate course.
I have therefore indicated in the picture how to draw a somewhat abstracted ear in three simple steps. The two boxes help us to do this.
In the next chapter our face will get hair and final touches, including color.
Hopefully you haven't erased the little hairline guide. If you have, don’t worry, we can position the hair by observing the rest of the face.
Hair, like ears, is a science in itself and basically needs its own tutorial. But I will limit myself to a few lines to describe it.
We start with a rough sketch of the vertex and outer edges of the hairstyle. It's best to draw this on a separate layer, so that we can easily hide the preliminary drawing of the hair later. The line for the parting runs from the hairline auxiliary line - here a little to the right of the center - in an upward sweep that is as elegant as possible. From the vertex, the hair falls towards the ears on both sides. Depending on how loose the hairstyle should look, several lines running side by side can also limit the hairstyle.
I hope you had fun and found some helpful tips for your future drawings. Of course, you can't cover all aspects of a creative topic in a single tutorial.
We will go into more details and variations in future courses, such as: How to draw a face from different perspectives, Faces of different ages, Hair - nose - ears in detail, Coloring of faces, Other parts of the body, Hands - feet - body, and The male face, etc.
This tutorial is designed to provide a solid foundation on which any aspiring artist can build. As in any art form, the results depend on regular practice. Don't be frustrated if you don't like your first drawings. You will get better with every painting. Stay tuned, get inspired and have fun with it.
Sketch, draw and edit images with a responsive pad, a precise pen and see your creations appear on screen.
Draw, design and create directly on a high resolution screen with a precise pen.
Wacom’s vision is to bring people and technology closer together through natural interface technologies. This has made it the world’s leading manufacturer of interactive pen tablets and displays as well as of digital styli and solutions for saving and processing digital signatures. The advanced technology of Wacom’s intuitive input devices has been used to create some of the most exciting digital art, films, special effects, fashion and designs around the world and provides business and home users with their leading interface technology to express their personality. Founded in 1983, Wacom is a global company based in Japan (Tokyo Stock Exchange 6727) with subsidiaries and affiliate offices around the world to support marketing and distribution in over 150 countries.