How to practice drawing faces…Water Colours, Faces and what not!

There was a time when I was obsessed with faces. I tried making faces in pencils, charcoal and enjoyed it. It’s good to have an approach and know how to practice drawing faces. Let’s discuss what you can do to draw faces applying the right approach.

How to practice drawing faces:

• From my experience, I can say that making a face is easier when we have basic idea of some proportions. For instance, the placement of eyes, nose, lips, the distance between two eyes, everything matters. Knowing these basic rules can save much time for anyone starting to make faces.

• What’s difficult is to get the likeness of the person you are copying. If someone recognizes the face you made, it’s very gratifying. The only solution to this problem is trying and trying again. Perseverance goes a long way.

• My approach for making faces is to make an initial sketch first. I place all the facial features in place, trying to be as correct as possible proportion wise. On my second, third to the final step, I just keep on refining the features, trying to achieve as much similarity to the actual face as possible.

• It can get quite frustrating to keep on working on one feature at a time and not getting the likeness. Therefore, I prefer jumping from eyes to nose to eyes to lips and so on. However, there is no one approach in this case. See what works for you, one feature at a time or jumping from one feature to the other.

• One important tip that I got one time was that if one can make eyes as exactly as the original face, the likeness will increase manifold. As they say, eyes are the windows to the soul, so don’t forget to give them special attention.

A note on making abstract faces:

It’s also fun to make imaginary faces on your own after some basic face drawing practice. Making faces in an abstract manner can have infinite variations. I also made some layouts that had hints of faces in them!

Time to take action:

Now that you have got some answers to how to practice drawing faces; go ahead and try making some faces on your own. Ask someone to sit for you and sketch live or grab hold of a magazine and see if you can find an interesting face picture that you can replicate. You can also open your mobile phone and try sketching your own selfie. If you feel like going down the imaginary route, try making an imaginary face without any reference. Keep practicing and you will get better with time.