How to Draw Faces: Understanding Face Proportions
Understanding face proportions is one of the most important steps in learning how to draw realistic faces. Whether you’re sketching from reference or starting from a blank page, knowing where each facial feature belongs gives your drawing structure, balance, and life. Many beginners find themselves placing the eyes too high or misjudging the spacing between features—but these common issues can be corrected with just a few basic guidelines.
In this beginner-friendly tutorial, I’ll focus on drawing the front view of the face and break it down into simple, manageable steps. You’ll learn how to divide the face into proportional sections and place the eyes, nose, lips, and ears in the right spots. I’ll keep things as simple as possible so more advanced topics like drawing faces from different angles will be covered in future posts.
If you'd like to go deeper into facial features, be sure to visit my tutorials on how to draw eyes and how to draw lips, both designed with beginners in mind. I’ve also included a YouTube video tutorial at the end of this post if you prefer to draw along step-by-step.
These art lessons are just the beginning—more drawing tutorials are on the way to help you continue building your skills with confidence. Once you understand face proportions, every face you draw will start to feel more accurate, polished, and expressive.
As you learn how to draw faces using basic face proportions as a guide, it’s important to remember that these measurements are general guidelines—not every face fits this exact mold. People’s facial features vary widely: some may have longer noses, eyes set closer together or farther apart, or different hairline and jawline placements. These natural differences are what make every face unique and interesting.
However, learning these common facial structure proportions provides a solid foundation that helps your portraits and sketches look balanced and realistic. By understanding the typical relationships between features—like the distance between the eyes or the alignment of the nose and mouth—you’ll develop a stronger sense of facial symmetry and improve your overall portrait sketching skills.
When practicing, be sure to sketch lightly and build your drawing gradually, especially as you’re learning. This approach gives you the freedom to adjust proportions and refine shapes without feeling stuck. With patience and practice, these basic guidelines will become second nature, making it easier for you to capture the unique qualities of every face you draw.
How to Draw Faces using Face Proportions for Reference
Are you ready? To find the horizontal placement of each facial feature let's split things up into sections. Begin by drawing a light circle for the cranium, and mark a small dot at the center. Sketch a vertical and horizontal line through the circle, crossing at that center dot. Your eyebrows will fall along the horizontal line.
The bottom of the nose will fall somewhere near the bottom of the circle. Use distance between the eyebrow and bottom of the nose to find the chin. Measure the same distance upward from the eyebrows to locate the hairline.
Next, find the eyes and mouth.
Divide the space between the eyebrows and nose into thirds. The eyes will be about 1/3 of the way down from the eyebrows.
Divide the space between the nose and chin into thirds. The mouth opening will be about 1/3 of the way down from the nose.
Use the distance between the eyes and chin to find the top of the head. Essentially, the eyes are mid-way between the chin and top of the head.
Draw in the nose. The width of the nose is around 1/4th the width of the circle. As long as all of the other measurements are followed the width doesn’t have to be exact, so don’t worry too much about perfection, especially if this is your first attempt. Remember to use light strokes so you can adjust as needed.
Now let’s place the eyes and determine the width of the head.
The space between the eyes is one nose width apart. Draw guidelines up from the sides of the nose to find the inner corners of the eyes.
The width of each eye is also one nose width apart.
To find the sides of the face, make a mark ½ a nose width out from the eyes. In total, the face width will amount to 4 nose widths.
Draw a line from the side of the head down at a slight inward angle, then create a curve near the mouth line to add the jaw line and chin. Sketch this in lightly so you can adjust the curve without leaving too much of a mark.
Next, draw the top of the head. Make it rounder than the chin.
Also, add in the neck. Use the outer corner of the eyes to find the approximate width of the neck.
Next, let’s add in the mouth and eyebrows.
To find the width of the mouth simply sketch a line from the pupils down to the mouth line. This makes the mouth approxiately 1.5 nose-widths wide. You can learn how to draw lips from the front in my lip drawing tutorial.
TIP: Use the inner side of the pupils to find the mouth width. It keeps the mouth from looking too wide.
The eyebrows will be slightly closer to each other than the eyes are. They will also extend further out towards the side of the head a bit more than the eye. You can draw a guideline from the side of the nose to the outer corner of the eye to get a general idea of where it will stop.
When drawing in the eyebrows, be sure to give it a nice arch that follows the natural curve of the brow ridge.
The ears typically span from the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose.
Let’s remove all of the guidelines so you can see how things are looking so far.
Finish it off with some hair and play with style if you’d like.
Now that you’ve learned the basics of how to face proportions to draw realistic faces, you’ve already taken a big step toward drawing with more confidence and intention. As you continue practicing, you’ll start to notice how much easier it becomes to place each feature and bring your portraits to life.
To help you improve your face drawing skills, try drawing these face proportions over photos for practice. There are plenty of images to play with on Pinterest, and I’ve added a board with face references that you can use.
Don’t forget to take a peek at my beginner-friendly tutorials that walk you through other facial features such as eyes and lips—two of the most expressive and detailed parts of the face. You can also scroll to the end of each post to find the YouTube video tutorials, in case you prefer drawing along in real time.
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More drawing tutorials to come!