How to Draw a Face: Beginner Proportions Guide

Start with a circle for the cranium - that's the top part of the skull that holds your brain. From the front, the cranium reads as a round egg shape, so a circle is close enough to get going.

Now run a vertical center line straight down through it. The center line is your anchor for everything that follows. If you ever tilt the head later, the center line tilts with it, so every feature stays glued to the right spot on the face.

Find the horizontal midpoint of your circle. From the outermost left and right points of the cranium, drop two lines that angle inward and meet at a point below the circle. That point is the chin.

The jaw lines aren't straight - they curve slightly inward as they head down toward the chin. Sam keeps the chin coming to a soft point on the center line, unless your character has a deliberately uneven or stylized face.

Three horizontal lines do most of the heavy lifting on a face. The hairline is where hair meets the forehead. The brow line connects the two eyebrows. The nose line marks where the bottom of the nose ends.

Here's the trick most beginners miss: on a proportional face, the distances between these three lines are all roughly equal. Hairline to brow, brow to nose, and nose to chin should each cover about a third of the face. Person to person you'll see variation (Sam jokes that his chin is longer than average), but equal thirds is the rule of thumb that keeps faces looking right.

The eye line runs horizontally through the inner corners of the eyes. On a typical adult face it sits right at the midpoint of the head - halfway between the top of the cranium and the chin. Beginners almost always place eyes too high. Drop them lower than feels right.

The mouth line goes between the nose line and the chin, but not dead center. It sits a little above the halfway point - closer to the nose than to the chin. That gives you the right space for the lower lip and the soft area under the mouth.

On the eye line, mark four vertical points: the outer corner of the left eye, the inner corner of the left eye, the inner corner of the right eye, and the outer corner of the right eye. The space between the two inner corners should be roughly the width of one eye.

So you end up with three equal spaces along the eye line: left eye, gap, right eye. If the gap is too wide, the face looks awkward. Too narrow and it looks cramped. Three equal spaces is the safe default.

For the outer edges of the nose, drop vertical lines from the inner corners of the eyes down to the nose line. Most of the time the nose is exactly that wide. It's one of the easiest relationships to use because you've already plotted the eye corners.

For the corners of the mouth, drop verticals from somewhere between the inner and outer edges of each eye - usually about the center of each pupil. That gives you the natural width of the mouth without it looking too pinched or too wide.

Now replace the guidelines with actual feature shapes. Draw the eyes inside the eye-corner marks. Sketch in the eyebrows just above the brow line. Carve out the hairline. Drop in the nose ending at the nose line. Replace the mouth line with a basic lip shape.

For the ears: the top of each ear lines up with the brow line (where the eyes start), and the bottom of each ear lines up with the nose line. That's it. Once the basic shapes are down, erase the guidelines, refine the outline of the head, and add small details like pupils, eye folds, lip definition, and any hair you want.