Understanding Facial Proportions for Better Portraits

Start with the head, not the eyelashes

It is a familiar experience. You sit down to draw a portrait, spend a happy forty minutes on the eyes, then step back and realise the face is too long, one ear has drifted up the skull and the mouth sits somewhere near the chin. The features themselves are rarely the problem. The structure underneath them is.

Proportions are simply the measurements that relate one part of the face to another. Get them roughly right and a drawing will read as a person even if the shading is clumsy. Get them wrong and no amount of careful eyelash work will rescue it. That is encouraging news, because proportions can be learned and repeated, whereas capturing a likeness by instinct alone takes years of looking.

The landmarks that do the heavy lifting

Rather than memorising a hundred measurements, learn the handful of landmarks that most faces share. They are averages, not laws, but they will serve you well in the great majority of portraits.

• The eye line falls halfway down the head, measured from the crown to the chin — not from the hairline. This surprises almost every beginner.
• The hairline, the eyebrows and the base of the nose divide the lower face into three roughly equal bands.
• The base of the nose sits about halfway between the eye line and the chin.
• The mouth line sits roughly a third of the way down from the nose to the chin. Most beginners place it too high.
• The eyes are one eye-width apart, and the head is about five eye-widths across at its widest point.
• The ears stretch from eyebrow level down to the base of the nose, and sit halfway back on the skull.

Draw these as faint construction lines and you already have a scaffold strong enough to hang a face on.

Proportions survive tilting and turning

Landmarks do not vanish when a head tilts; they curve. If someone tips their head to one side, the eye line becomes an arc rather than a horizontal line, and the centre line running down the face bends with it. The distances between the landmarks stay much the same.

The same applies in three-quarter view. The far eye narrows, the far cheek compresses, and the nose crosses the centre line — but the eye line is still halfway down, and the ear is still level with the eyebrows and the base of the nose. Draw the centre line and the eye line first, curving them to match the tilt, and the rest of the face will settle onto them comfortably.

Blocking in: a workable order

Working from large shapes to small ones stops you committing to detail too early. A sequence that works well:

• Draw the overall head shape as a simple oval or egg, checking its height against its width.
• Mark the halfway point for the eye line, then the chin and the hairline.
• Add the centre line, curving it if the head is turned or tilted.
• Place the base of the nose, then the mouth line, then the brow line.
• Block in the eyes as two almond shapes, the nose as a wedge, the mouth as a shallow bowl. Ignore lashes, nostrils and lip creases.
• Step back and check the whole thing before adding a single detail. Squint at it. Anything that looks wrong now will still look wrong later.

Common slips and quick fixes

A few errors turn up again and again, and each one has a simple remedy.

• Eyes too high. If you have drawn them above the middle of the head, lower them. This single change improves more portraits than any other.
• Eyes too far apart, or too close together. Check that you could fit a third eye in the gap between them.
• Mouth too close to the nose. There should be a decent gap, with a full third of the nose-to-chin distance left below the mouth.
• Ears like handles. Keep them within the eyebrow-to-nose band and resist making them stick out.
• Nose too long. The base of the nose belongs at the halfway mark between the eyes and the chin, not lower.

Measuring with the top of your pencil — thumb marking one end, tip the other — is a quick way to compare distances without reaching for a ruler.

Practice drills that take ten minutes

Short, repeated practice beats occasional marathon sessions. Try these during a coffee break.

• Draw five ovals and place just the eye line, the nose base and the mouth line in each. No features at all.
• Sketch the same head shape at three different tilts, curving the eye line and centre line each time.
• Copy a photograph of a face, drawing only the landmarks, then lay a sheet of tracing paper over your sketch and the original to compare.
• Fill a page with pairs of eyes spaced one eye-width apart, checking the gap by eye rather than by ruler.

Do this for a fortnight and the landmarks will begin to place themselves. From there, detail becomes a pleasure rather than a gamble — you will be decorating a solid structure instead of propping up a shaky one.