NY one thing I draw all the time with my characters are their faces who would have thought and it's what I enjoy the most and so in today's episode of YouTube art school I'm going to show you my simple method to draw anime faces which has kind of become my choice of style over the years oh and also how to draw them from any angles because uh it wouldn't be a good method otherwise so grab your pencil and follow along pretty sure you should be able to do this even if you don't have much experience and I'm going to be covering all the steps so like with all faces I think it's always easier to start with the head shape and then draw on the facial features next and all heads start with a circle so let's draw the face from the front first so that I can show you the correct proportions and then we'll look at different angles and by the way the circle can be kind of crappy it doesn't have to be perfect We'll erase most of it along the way anyways so let's split that down the middle and on the left I'll have the male version and the female version over here the main difference at this point will just be the shape of the jaw for females I personally tend to extend the jaw but just slightly so that the overall head shape is still very much roundish but for males I'll stretch down their jaws quite a bit more in comparison we could also have stronger built female jaws and more feminine male Jaws I guess whatever you prefer just make sure that both sides are symmetrical and that's why we have that vertical line in there to help if you're new to drawing faces I'd practice this a lot before trying different angles The Next Step will be to add the eyebrows because that's going to help us Place everything else much easier so regardless of how you drew your jaw the eyebrows will just go right below the center of that Circle that we started with you can pretty much ignore the entire top half nothing goes there except the hair but I have a different class for that link in the description if you're interested anyways like with everything there are many ways to draw eyebrows but most anime eyebrows just two lines so one slightly tilted this way and another tilted down instead and the part towards the center of the face will just have more thickness to it how much thickness you decide so to complete the head shape let's add the ears just above the corner of the jawline there with the tip of the ear just below the eyebrow level it's kind of this rounded parallelogram shape now quality anime tend to draw all the details of the ear so let's do the same real quick starting with the Helix the tragus going into the notch here and then curving back up to the anti- Helix that kind of forks in half as it slides under the Helix this looks scary at first I get it but honestly it's super easy to do after a couple of tries there are very few lines to remember and it always looks the same regardless of the character you learn this one and you're set for life unlike the rest of the facial features that we're going to do right now the eyes are next and the base of it will look like this kind of the opposite of an eyebrow at a short line first and then a relatively leveled curve then we come back with a stronger curve that just fades halfway to the corner of the eye the height of the eye can vary a lot depending if it's a character meant to be cuter or more serious and personally I prefer a thinner eye for males and a rounder one for females now next there are many ways to draw the eyelashes again but what I start with for females will usually look like a simple duplicate of the line that we started with for the eye and then you can dress this up with more if you want like adding bottom eyelashes or maybe having that line in the corner of the eye here continue a little longer also for longer eyelashes you'll just want to start from like the center of the eye and extend them past the initial shape that we drew for it otherwise it won't look quite right it kind of has to radiate in all directions so something like this males can of course also have thicker eyelashes but usually personally I'll leave them the way they are anyways moving on next we can add the upper eyelid fold and that's just going to be the same line as the top half of the eye but slightly more accentuated you just want to make sure that it's not longer than the eye and if you're fancy you can make that curve down more at the end here the same way that the eyebrow curves down see that it just looks more anatomically correct another important thing to keep in mind and I almost forget to mention it's always to have roughly one eyes width of space between your two eyes if you don't have enough space the character will look Mega Derpy and if it's too much it'll look like some alien yikes so yeah probably avoid that and this applies even if you have huge eyes you still want a nice width in between them and as proof now for the iris again the shape will have a big impact on how we perceive the character with bigger more cat-like irises best for cuter characters and smaller ones for more mature more intimidating characters maybe again I just use smaller ones for males and bigger ones for females easy the pupil if any can also be big or small doesn't really matter it's so small anyways but sometimes you'll see the specular highlights drawn with lines to make the eye look more sparkly I usually color my character so I skip that step but you can draw a circle or two in the same spot for both eyes and then fill the pupil and darken the top of the iris to make it pop a little bit something like that that's like the anime starter pack and now we're not missing much so as a rough guideline I'll place the tip of the nose right down the middle of the space that we have left between the eyes and the chin and this is the shape that I'll always have in mind when drawing it it's not going to stay like that we're just using this to construct it but this shape is perfect to draw the nose from the front and especially from different angles where it usually gets a lot more difficult to do it right we'll see that in a second for now we'll just have this triangle thing which is just the bottom part of that shape that we're able to see from our point of view and then depending on the character we could erase most of it to the point that there's really not much left maybe also split the shape in half and erase the rest for a simpler style or leave more of the original shape to define the nose better you'll see from different angles the shape helps a lot but it's always always like the foundation of any stylized nose you draw even the more simple ones and with this it should always be in the right spot and then we're just left with the mouth to draw again placing it right in the middle of that space that we have left and for anime characters it's often just going to be a simple curve like that with a little triangle below to help like give some thickness to the lower lip could be just a line too but that's it how's yours looking so far now if you're also interested to draw the body to go along with it and if you want to learn you know the skills to create awesome looking characters learn all about Anatomy color composition design how to paint digitally and just much much much more you should check out my art program that just happens to be on sale for a couple more days until the end of the month to celebrate reaching 27,000 registered students you'll find a link to it in the video description with a ton more details if you're interested it's the project that I'm most proud of in my life so far a ton of work and time went into this and by the time you complete the progam I can guarantee that you'll have all the skills to draw or paint literally anything your mind can imagine you should check it out all right now let's draw the neck for our floating heads there's a little trick where you can just imagine an invisible line continuing from the circle that we drew for the head like that and then make it more or less wide depending on how strong you want the character to be in holy crap we're done kind of easy no if you nodded you should be up to what comes next different angles now this is going to be a lot harder but there are couple of guidelines that I think will help to know the first one is the relationship between all the facial features when the head is tilted up or down when the head points down the whole face will seem to drop within the head shape and at the same time the ears will seem to rise in comparison and it's obviously the opposite when the face looks up and that's probably the most important thing to keep in mind but there's more because the face has a curve to it right it's not flat everything will follow that curve when the head is pointed up or down kind of like this it's something that we don't notice just seen from the front in a neutral position the eyes just seem kind of straight in that position but they curve to follow that angle of the head as it tilts everything else will just follow that logic so the eyebrows will look like they're curving in the same direction the mouth as well and the nose shape along with it will either be able to see more of the underside where the nostrils are or more of the top of the nose depending on that angle and one once we're happy with the angle we can then erase the outline and we should be left with a more abstract representation of it but still an accurate one which often doesn't look right when you don't use this kind of guideline for it and I think it goes without saying but the more extreme the angle the more pronounced this effect will be so I'd save the more extreme angles for when you have a lot of experience because these are pretty hard all right now real quick when seen from the site there's actually one more guideline that we should also keep in mind and that would be the perspective of the the facial features so it's more straightforward for the head in a neutral position actually it doesn't really apply we just got to make sure to gradually Slide the features towards the direction of the head and here it really helps at first to draw a symmetry line for the face to have an idea of where the nose should be to help center the mouth and make sure that the eyes are where they should as the head rotates the nose will start to partially and then completely hide the farthest eye and the eye that remains visible will also appear to get a little narrower with the perspective and we can also see that ear slowly creep into the silhouette of the ear as the head rotates now when the head is seen from above or below on top of that on top of looking sideways then we'll have to tilt everything accordingly too those are the hardest examples so let's look at one here we see less of the forehead because the head is tilted back and we see more of the chin all the facial features appear higher within the head shape and they now all follow this tilt angle all lined up this same the opposite example would be this where everything's shifted down instead allowing us to see more of the forehead more of the top of the nose less of the chin and an inverted tilt to all the facial features in general now hopefully keeping those guidelines in mind should make it easier to troubleshoot when things don't look quite right but don't hesitate to look at yourself in the mirror or look at a 3D model from different angles as a reference you know if it helps it should help now let's give these guys some hair and slap on some colors real quick for the video thumbnail and then for the rest I'll just let this play and I'll see you next week for another epic art class roll the music [Music] [Music] [Music]