How to Draw Faces and Expressions: 9 Free Tutorials

Learn essential drawing techniques to create unique, complex, and richly detailed characters

An art form with endless creative possibilities, drawing can be a powerful way of capturing a person's emotions. And when it comes to human emotion, there's nothing as powerful as a facial expression to convey profound messages and tell compelling stories.

When learning how to draw the face and its many expressions, by knowing the right techniques, you can transform simple strokes into works of art.

In these free drawing tutorials, you'll learn techniques for developing facial expressions, how to draw manga characters' facial features, the skills to illustrate a stylized portrait in Photoshop, and much more.

For more information on each tutorial, click on the red header.

Tutorials for realistic portraiture

Illustration Tutorial: Basic Proportions of a Face

Making a portrait is no easy task. A person's face can help define their age, background, and personality, so we need to pay special attention when drawing.

As all good work requires a solid foundation, editorial illustrator Carlos Rodríguez Casado (@carlosrodriguezcasado) explains how to make a basic guide for composing a face in this tutorial. You'll learn a series of characteristics and features common to almost all faces that will help accurately build up your portraits.

Drawing Tutorial: 3 Different Ways to Start a Portrait

Illustrator and sketchbook artist Gabriela Niko (@gabrielaniko) loves the challenge of drawing the human face, crafting sketches that are full of life, personality, and character.

She understands that one of the hardest parts of portrait drawing is knowing where to start. From identifying very general shapes to starting with one feature, Gabriela shares some simple (but very useful!) tips and techniques to make it easier for you to get over that first hurdle of beginning your portrait.

Illustration Tutorial: How to Draw Facial Details

Realistic portraiture is revisited time and again throughout art history. It may be intimidating at first, but you can learn how to do it by starting with some basic concepts that will help your drawing style to evolve.

José Rosero (@rosero), a visual artist and teacher, is an expert in portraiture with techniques ranging from pencil to quill to Indian ink. He knows better than most how to draw all the accents of a face. In the following video tutorial, he reviews some of the most common facial features, so you can learn how to draw them from scratch.

Tutorials for character design

Painting Tutorial: How to Draw a Stylized Portrait in Photoshop

Jean Fraisse (@jbfraisse) is an experienced art director and animation production designer who has worked on major projects for clients, including Mexican broadcaster Televisa. He knows any great project starts with the right character.

In this tutorial, he teaches you how to draw a character using an image to create stylized features that will help produce your own style.

Character Design Tutorial: How to Draw Facial Expressions

The face is one of the most expressive parts of the body, so understanding how to illustrate believable facial expressions can be the difference between creating a good character and a great one.

Laura Ewing (@le_lauraewing) is a storyboard artist and character designer whose job is to capture the essence of a story quickly and efficiently for films, documentaries, and publishing houses. In this tutorial, she shares a few top tips for drawing facial expressions that your audience will be able to interpret instantly.

Anime Tutorial: Face Proportions for Beginners

They may look simple, but every anime character has a unique, expressive look. Thankfully, to draw your own expressive anime characters, all you need to do is follow a few basic rules.

Watercolor artist Geoff Pascual (@geoff_pascual) is known for his beautiful, Japanese-inspired compositions. Heavily influenced by the anime and manga that inspired him as a child, Geoff makes artwork from his Californian art studio, Pascual Productions, and sells it around the globe.

Before adding the expressive details that help his anime characters pop from the page, Geoff follows a set of simple rules to ensure that their proportions are correct—which he shares in this tutorial.

Manga Tutorial: Give Eyes Color and Sparkle

Eyes are one of the most recognizable features in manga; they're the most expressive feature of the face and can be used to clearly reflect the personality of each character. But, to achieve this, you need to learn how to play with color, blend shades, and create shadows and highlights.

Artist Tania Oksentiuk (@taniidraw) is an expert in creating Japanese-style illustrations, taking inspiration from anime and other traditional Japanese genres that she references in her work. In this tutorial, she gives you a series of tips on how to color and add sparkle to anime eyes with marker pens.

Character Design Tutorial: How to Draw Manga Eyes

Traditionally, manga characters didn't always have the oversized, glistening eyes that have become characteristic of the genre today. This shift happened in modern manga—which started in the 1940s, pioneered by artist Osamu Tezuka. However, expressive eyes have always been (and still are) very important when it comes to strengthening the features and emotions of this style.

EUDETENIS (@eudetenis) is a duo formed by illustrator and designer Giovana Serafim and writer and editor Paulo. Specializing in manga comic books, the artists have worked together for almost ten years and are now published internationally. In this tutorial, Giovana shares tips on how to draw a few different manga eye styles to give your characters more personality and greater expressivity.

Photoshop Tutorial: Learn How to Add Texture and Gloss to Your Characters

Using just a few Photoshop tools, you can add volume, texture, and movement to your illustrations—details that make a huge difference to the narrative of seemingly static images. Digital artist Joana Neves (@joananeves) loves using illustrations to build stories. As an illustrator and concept artist at Media Monks, she works with clients including Netflix, Disney, Google, and Amazon.

In this tutorial, Joana teaches you her step-by-step method for bringing illustrations to life with Photoshop tools that add gloss and texture to skin and hair.

Are you ready to hone your drawing skills? Check out Domestika's online drawing courses and learn how to create portraits and characters packed with personality.

Plus, if you want to continue unlocking your creativity in all types of disciplines, discover loads more free tutorials on our blog.

English version by @acesarato.

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- 4 Kawaii Artists and Influences to Inspire Your Illustrations
- 15 Examples of Amazing Comic Strips to Inspire You
- Character Creation from Observational Drawings, a course by Sarah van Dongen
- Portrait Sketchbooking: Explore the Human Face, a course by Gabriela Niko