Drawing Out The Characteristic Features

Know Your Character's Features

Do you know what characterizes your character's features? Or are you drawing generic eyes, noses, and face shapes? This first part doesn't require drawing skills, only being able to really see them in your mind's eye. It's perfectly okay, in the beginning, to base your characters on people you know. Think of a close friend, someone you can visualize clearly. Can you describe the shape of their nose? Eyes? Mouth? Is their chin strong or weak? Most probably you cannot, because you have a general picture of them in mind, but you cannot think of the details when you try to picturize them.

This is easy to change, as you just need to start paying attention to individual features by themselves. Next time you see that particular friend, look closely, and write down what you see. By describing the identifying features that you see to yourself, you become aware of their uniqueness.

Face

The face is naturally where we look for the most of the details to recognize a person. The eyes, the nose, the lips etc. are distinctive for each person.

Hands

Remember male and female hands don't look alike; there might be smooth or rough hands, long fingers, short fingers, fine hands, coarse hands and so on...

Posture

Have you ever found yourself recognizing someone in the distance by how they stand, or how they walk? Posture is another big clue for identification. We're constantly told we should stand straight, so we may tend to always draw people who stand straight, but in reality there are many degrees of posture. We each have our special posture, like the characters below, who each stand differently.

Dressing style

Note that this is about a person's style, not about a costume. You're not designing one outfit that this person will wear all the time, unless they're in a uniformed profession. While in real life few people wear the same thing day in, day out, most people do have a distinct dress style, and that is something that very much matters in a character. This dress style not only creates consistency, but also conveys much of the character's personality and/or situation.

Know How to Draw Those Features From Various Angles

Once you're fully aware of what is distinctive in your character, it's time to make sure you can draw these traits.

Exercise

Use a willing friend again, or if not possible, gather pictures of a celebrity (as they'll be easy to find) from many different angles. Focus on just one feature at a time, sketching it from different directions. This needn't be a burden, as you'll notice that some angles are a bit repetitive, and that you can get a good grip on a feature if you have it from front, side, three quarters, above and below. Here are some examples of a nose from various angles.

Some face contours:

In this way you build up an understanding of these features as 3D shapes. Feel free to reduce them to simpler geometric shapes if you have trouble at first. And don't forget to compare different features under similar angles. For instance, how do different eyebrows look with different expressions?

How to Draw a Human Figure

In this chapter, we will learn the steps of drawing a full-sized man in pencil. As you might already know, drawing a Human Face might be challenging, as only artists with lots of experience can do so with ease. Our art lessons are intended primarily for kids, so there is no need to put too much detail into the realistic Eyes and other facial features. Just do the best you can! It is important to learn how to draw portrait of a man using #2 pencil.

Some people have a habit of using dotted lines as guidelines, which they later erase. My word of advice is to learn how to draw a line in one motion without being afraid to make a mistake. You have to visualize the final image while you are drawing a human figure, especially of a man in motion. Surprisingly, the most important thing in visual art of any kind is not accurate proportions and outlines of the image, but the mood or character of the person conveyed in a drawing though his or her facial expression and/or body language.