Drawing the face from below, at an angle

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In this series, we’re looking at some tricky angles that are much more challenging to draw than simple front-facing or profile faces. Today we’ll be studying a low angle – more specifically, a low, diagonal angle. We’ll be showing you some great tips for drawing the face at this difficult angle!

Two of the key reasons artists make mistakes when drawing a face is that they don’t have a strong enough grasp of the 3D shape of the face, or they haven’t drawn their guidelines correctly. So let’s look at some techniques to iron out those problems, and help expand your repertoire of poses and angles!

The face dips in here, at the eye socket. The line of the face dips in from the browbone towards the blue centre line of the eyes.

Then the face swells back out, following the line of the cheeks, and then down to the chin.

The forehead and mouth come on the centre line of the face, which is drawn from the top of the head down to the chin. The eye area curves inwards, as we saw earlier – this is to accommodate for the eye sockets. We also get an area of shadow on the underside of the chin.

We can find the top of the ear by extending this blue eyeline round to the side of the head.

The top of the back of the head follows a circular shape, and the lower half curves in sharply towards the neck.

The pupils of the eye come in the middle of that dent we made in the face earlier. We use the pupils as a guide to draw in the top and bottom eyelash lines – the top and bottom lines should come at equal distances from the centre of the pupils.

We use the guidelines to place our eyebrows and mouth on the face. The nose can be the trickiest part of drawing a face at an angle, so it’s good to leave the nose until last, so you can find the right balance for it.

Then we draw in the hair and ears to complete our illustration!

We hope this has helped you better understand how to accurately draw a face from this high angle. Make sure to practice these guidelines lots of times, so you can get the 3D shape clear in your mind. After enough practice, it will get much easier to draw faces from all different angles!

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