You’ve been there. You spend three hours meticulously shading an iris, perfecting the swoop of a nostril, and making the hair look like actual silk, only to step back and realize the person looks like they’ve been hit with a shrink-ray on just the forehead. It’s frustrating. Honestly, it’s the most common wall beginners hit. You think you’re seeing a face, but your brain is actually lying to you about where things go. If you want to learn how to draw a face in proportion, you have to stop drawing what you think you see and start drawing what is actually there.
Most people draw the eyes way too high up on the skull. It’s a classic mistake. We focus so much on the features—the "expressive" bits—that we ignore the massive amount of skull structure sitting above the eyebrows. In reality, the eyes sit almost exactly in the middle of the head. Yeah, halfway down. If that sounds wrong, go grab a mirror and a ruler. I'll wait.
The Loomis Method vs. Reality
Andrew Loomis is basically the patron saint of figure drawing. His book, Drawing the Head and Hands, written back in the 1940s, is still the gold standard for a reason. He broke the human head down into a simple sphere crossed with a cranium. He chopped off the sides of that sphere to account for the flat bits of our temples. It sounds clinical, but it’s the only way to keep your drawing from looking like a melting potato.
The Loomis Method relies on a few "universal" measurements. Now, obviously, nobody has a perfectly "average" face. Some people have high foreheads; some have narrow jaws. But you need the baseline to understand the deviations.
Start with a circle. Draw a horizontal line right through the center. That’s your brow line, not your eye line. This is where people trip up. Then, you divide the face into thirds: from the hairline to the brow, from the brow to the bottom of the nose, and from the nose to the chin. If those three sections are roughly equal, you’re already ahead of 90% of amateur artists.
Why Your Brain Sabotages Your Sketches
The human brain is a funny thing. It prioritizes the "data" of the face. We look at eyes to see emotion. We look at mouths to hear words. Because these parts are so socially important, our internal map of a face enlarges them. This is why kids draw giant eyes and tiny foreheads. To get how to draw a face in proportion right, you have to fight that instinct.
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Try drawing the head upside down. It sounds crazy, but it works. By flipping your reference photo, you stop seeing "an eye" and start seeing "a dark oval shape at a 30-degree angle." You bypass the symbol-recognition part of your brain and engage the spatial-awareness part.
The Eye-Width Rule You’ll Use Forever
Here is a trick that feels like a cheat code: the head is roughly five eyes wide.
Between your two eyes, there is exactly enough space for a third eye. Between the outer corner of your eye and the edge of your silhouette, there’s about another eye-width on each side. If your eyes are too close together, the person looks pinched. Too far apart? They look like a character from a Pixar movie. Use your pencil as a measuring stick. Hold it at arm's length, mark the width of one eye with your thumb, and then "walk" that measurement across the face.
It’s about relationships.
The corners of the mouth usually line up with the pupils of the eyes when the face is at rest. The tops of the ears generally align with the eyebrows, while the bottoms of the earlobes sit on the same horizontal plane as the base of the nose. If you draw the ears too small, the head looks massive. If they're too big, you’ve accidentally drawn a caricature.
Dealing with Perspective and the "Tilt"
Everything changes the moment the person looks up or down. This is where the sphere-and-cross method saves your life. When the head tilts down, the brow line curves like a frown. The distance between the nose and the chin shrinks visually—this is called foreshortening.
I’ve seen artists spend years perfecting skin texture while their underlying structure is a mess. It's like putting expensive wallpaper on a house with no foundation. The house is going to fall down. If you can’t draw a bald head in proportion from three different angles, you shouldn't be worrying about how to draw eyelashes yet.
Think about the "mask" of the face. The eyes, nose, and mouth sit on a flatter plane than the rest of the curved skull.
Common Proportional Myths
- Myth: The nose is the center of the face. Fact: The eyes are the vertical center.
- Myth: The chin is just a little nub at the bottom. Fact: The jawbone is a massive structural element that defines the lower third of the face.
- Metric: On average, the distance from the nose to the chin is the same as the length of the ear.
Tools of the Trade
You don’t need a $500 set of pencils. Honestly, a cheap Bic pen or a standard #2 pencil is fine for practicing these measurements. What you do need is a long-arm view. Don't get "zoomed in." If you spend forty minutes on a single nostril before you’ve mapped out where the chin goes, you’re setting yourself up for a bad time.
Use light, "searching" lines. Don't commit to a heavy dark line until you’re sure that eye is actually in the right place. Rubbing out dark graphite leaves ghosts on the paper that will haunt your final piece.
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Steps to Take Right Now
Stop reading and grab a piece of paper.
First, draw a simple circle. Don't worry about it being perfect. Draw a vertical line down the middle and a horizontal line through the center. That horizontal line is for your eyes. Now, mark a spot halfway between that center line and the bottom of the circle—that’s where your nose ends. Mark another spot halfway between the nose and the chin—that’s your mouth.
Second, find a photo of a face in a magazine or online. Take a ruler to it. Literally measure the distance from the chin to the nose and compare it to the nose to the brow. Seeing the math in the real world makes it click.
Third, practice drawing "the egg." The head is basically an upside-down egg. Practice drawing that shape from various angles—tilted back, turned to the side, looking down—until you can feel the three-dimensional volume of it.
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Once you master the structure of how to draw a face in proportion, the "artistic" stuff like shading and style becomes much easier. You aren't fighting the anatomy anymore. You're just decorating a well-built room. Keep your pencil moving and stop trusting your brain's symbols. Trust the measurements.