(Title taken smh)
Um help?
All the faces I’ve made for my characters so far are almost identical and whenever I try to make something different, it just looks weird!
Like all my faces would be under the category of “baby face.” So any tips on how to make different looking faces? If you need illustrations then I’ll make some.
Sep '20
Sep '20
What I do in these circumstances is give people large noses.
Study people noses when out and about. Really get in there.
When questioned tell them it is for research purposes and not a kink.
They will believe the lie.
Pictures would be helpful, but a general tip would just be to start off with drawing quick sketches of real life photos using different looking faces.
another tip is to experiment with shapes, specifically the head, eyes and nose. basic shapes like squares, circles, triangles etc sre usually good starting points and breaking down the shapes of human faces in photo refs helps
I generally start by changing the jaw line, it's quite easy to do and immediately gives a different look... which I guess is a simpler version of experimenting with shape.
This is a fun one. It's a common problem and honestly I've seen it a lot in even some very professional looking work. One really annoying issue is when you look at tutorials on the subject, they all do like "draw a bunch of shapes, now draw faces on them!" as if you're seriously gonna have a person in your fairly realistic comic whose face is a big tall rectangle and another who's a perfect circle. And worse, they tend to do it like only men and ugly/old women are allowed to have these weird shapes and all attractive characters, especially "sexy/cute girls" must have a standard oval face with the same "attractive" eyes, small thin nose and mouth.
A really good way to get better at drawing more varied faces is to draw portraits of real people. A lot of my early commissions that really helped me become a professional illustrator in the first place were actually manga style portraits, and one of the biggest jobs of my early career was touring the UK drawing manga-style portraits in a big tent to promote Dragon Quest IX (the first Dragon Quest game with a customisable main character appearance) for Nintendo and Square-Enix. I began to really start to notice things like the variety of eye shapes, eyebrow shape and height, nose width and nose bridge height and whether the nose tip points up or down, mouth width, lip fullness, ear shape etc.
I have an unusual face, and going to a uni where there were a lot of exchange students, was often assumed to be an exchange student myself even though I'm completely native british, because my more celtic/viking features were different from the more typically anglo-saxon looking people who made up most of the British students. So when I draw myself, I tend to reflect these very distinctive features. Narrow jaw, extremely narrow pointed nose, thin-lipped mouth, closely-grouped eyes-nose and mouth, almost elfin tall sticky-out ears, large, round blue eyes, very low and flat browline.
So to illustrate, here's a generic face I might draw on a background character I'm not thinking about much, versus how I'd draw my own face so that people would recognise "this is a drawing of Kate Holden":
The impression you get from the "generic lady" might be like... she looks fairly nice, inoffensive, works well as a background character, or maybe she'd be the protagonist's "best friend" in a down to earth Romance or slice of life. The impression of the portrait though is a much more specific character, probably one of those "quirky northern girl" comic relief characters in a British comedy movie or sitcom. The differences are subtle, but there are enough of them to give the face a sense of a distinctive person, even in a simple style and with neither being caricatured to a level where you wouldn't say they look cute.
This is how I approach all my characters. When I think of Subo it's not like "a handsome man with light brown skin", it's more like "a broad-faced Punjabi man with a prominent "roman" nose, gentle, expressive eyes, a wide smile and an unshaven jaw." And Jules and Urien, being siblings, both have the same , drooping, hooded eyes and flat eyebrows that makes them seem aloof and hard to read, and the same elegant, long face that evokes British royalty and milky pale skintone.
A fun little exercise that you could try is the stain art challenge 
it's pretty simple: you create a random blob of color and then try to create a face out of the shape you get. For example, here's mine:
Most of these aren't faces I would have normally drawn if it had been up to me, but having to work within the limits of those shapes forced me to come up with a bunch of different solutions should be noted that the style used here is a lot more cartoony than what I usually do, but that doesn't mean that I can't use these as inspiration for faces with more realistic proportions at some point in the future ^_^
If you don't want to play with face shapes, different looking eyes and eyebrows are an easy way to make different looking characters. Let someone have droopy eyes, while other has smaller pupils and sharper eyes or stuff like that. And when you combine those with thick or thin eyebrows with different shapes you can actually do a quite lot imo. "Weird" face shapes work better with more cartoony faces but if you think of pretty shoujo manga for example, you don't often see square faces etc in the main cast.
Work on gathering a library of different nose, eye, and mouth shapes. Then practice doing different cheek/jaw lines. And keep in mind cheeks can be fuller/thinner/chiseled, jaws can be broader/thinner/curved/angular, chins can be thin/sharp/round/short/long. There are lots of combinations!
Here is an old pic where I've got a number of different male characters. I've omitted their hair so you can really hone in on how their facial features differ from one another.
The way I go about making different faces is changing proportions or creating a variety of distances between facial features. For example, some character's eyes might be bigger or wider apart. You can also research different types of facial features that vary in shape and aesthetics.
If the problem is they all have a baby face--then maybe get inspiration from older faces? I find it really helpful to look up older people as reference for faces because they don't go through the hollywood glam filter. One of the big problems we have with "same face" is that we're not drawing a bad face--we're just drawing the ideal face, over and over again. So...do a search for faces that don't align with that ideal. Asymetry, big nose, big jaw, tired, bags under the eyes, overweight, old, all those things that make us look human and not like a photoshop.
My observations on how the faces of humans might differ:
* Chins can be differently shaped.
* Eyes can be of different size and shape.
* Noses can be of different size and shape.
* Overall proportional aspect of the face can be different, especially the shape and the width of the cheeks.
* differently shaped ears.
* Amount of "detalization" linework. One single additional line can instantly make the face look twenty years older since it will read as a wrinkle or a sharp(ish) edge.
Faces are a combination of many different traits, including eye shape, nose, hairstyle, head shape, facial hair (or the lack of it), lip size, eyebrow shape, ear size, accesories like earrings among other things.
Mathematically speaking, if you currently have one of each, by increasing variety in some of these, the ammount of faces you have will increase exponentially
Ex: 4 eye types, 3 nose types, 3 head shapes and 2 lip types you would get 72 combinations(4x3x3x2=72)
And all this without even considering color.
The size and placement of the eye will affect that age of your character. Smaller eye that are more central will make your character look older, compared to larger eyes, place a bit lower will make them look younger. Next, I would experiment with jaw shapes. Round, long, angular, and etc... there are also some eyebrow, mouth, and eye shape variations you can work with. I think the nuances really help to push a characters' face away from being same-y.
Practice drawing real people of different ethnicities as well! Study faces from stock images. Break down and examine why people look different! Eyes, noses, lips, even eyebrow and ear shapes. Then simplify them! Make a little library of different features in your style like Joanne has above. That’s such a great idea, I might do it myself.
