Draw realistic face tutorial front view
For this portrait study on the Wacom, I restricted myself entirely to standard default Photoshop hard and soft round brushes from sketch to final render.
Artists constantly ask about brush settings, but great rendering isn't hidden in a brush pack. It comes down to solid draftsmanship, clean value control, and understanding facial planes. Learn the core principles first—your tools are secondary.
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Here is another front-view female portrait study, keeping the workflow completely grounded by using only default hard and soft round brushes in Procreate:
Strong art fundamentals are the single most important asset an artist can develop. Once you truly master core principles—structural line drawing, solid shapes, accurate value hierarchy, edge control (hard vs. soft), and how light wraps around form—that knowledge translates across every single medium. Traditional graphite, oil paint, or digital software: the medium is simply an instrument to translate your internal vision and communicate it clearly to your audience.
When you understand how these visual elements interact, you gain complete creative control.
Portrait studies remain the ultimate training ground. Capturing a human likeness never gets old, and there is always room to sharpen your observational eye. Rendering people is inherently challenging—especially when balancing specific lighting setups, emotive moods, and subtle facial expressions.
Below are step by step draw and render portrait tutorial
1) I start of with the somewhat egg shape but a little angular because I want her to have a strong jaw line. I lay out the flat skin color (desaturated pinkish or egg shell color, any skin tone you prefer) as a base. Then I mark spots for where I would put her eyes. I paint the whole eye sockets because they are part of the face that usually case the strongest shadow, other under the nose and under the upperlip.
NOTE* It's a big jump from Step 1 to Step 2 if you are wondering how to structure the facial feature, go to my previous tutorial how to draw face. Very basic stuff, now the puzzle is solved.
2) At this stage, I add some soft shadow all over her face very soft, then some shadow all the way from under her cheek bone on the side to her shin line to indicate three dimensional object and establish light source direction (light's hitting from the front). Then I went in to draw her eyes outline, eyebrows, nose tip, and lips. Thought these lines are not here to stay, they are there to give me some sort of guideline so that I can accurately put my paint on where I want them to be.
3) Paint as if you sculpt, the reason I put some soft shadow over in the previous stage so that I can pull out the light and give it an illusion of a 3D object. I paint the lighter value of color over the area that the light source would hit. At this stage, don't get caught up in detail, just layout the simple shape and flat color. I put lighter value all along her nose bridge to the tip, her cheek, the area above her upper lips, and her shin (These are the area that will get hit directly by the light source I previously established). Notice that I also add some strong shadow on to both sides of her nose bridge and darken the eye socket a bit to accentuate the form that was given by the light source.
4) Now I am working on her nose tip (Usually where it will get the highlight and strongest shadow). When working on nose try not to think like drawing, think of light and shadow. I usually don't draw nostrils, I just shadow it out or dark it out because most of the time you don't really get to see them if you squint for value (the more practice painting from life you will get the better result than using photo ref) . But on this one just for demonstration purpose I will do them just for the hell of it. Notice I painted in only two value under the nose, I can usually get away with one when painted.
5) Then I am looking for place where I can put darker shadow on her face to make her feature more prominent. Dark line in between her lips, more dark paint around her eye sockets and her eyebrows.
6) Now it's time to tighten things up by finding place to put my darkest value onto the image, under her shin, under her eyebrows (sockets), and some on the side to create sharp edge for the painting. I also bring some light out on her eyes a bit.
7) Tweak and refine the feature here and there, no major value or hue change to tighten up or clean up a little more.
8) Now I am lighting up her face a bit more by putting more light value her to her nose tip, above her lips and a bit on her shin.
9) As the face is coming along and look like a face then it's time to bring out some detail and put some highlight on her. At this stage I paint in her irises with highlight, a bit on the tip of her nose and on the edge of her upper lip. These area get hit by the strongest light.
10) Refinement, clean up and finish up...in this case I darken her eye lash (adding shadow underneath) a bit, add some highlight on her lower lips, touching up her nose
11) Adding some hair on her face would be nice, and some highlight to give it dimension.
Also you might be interested in how to draw different looking portraits tips and technique.
If you like drawing comics charcter like X-men, Batman, Superman then you should go see the drawing tutorials from the following links How to draw comics girl Emma Frost,How to draw comics Batgirl, How to draw Fantastic 4 Susan Storm (basic comics style drawing with pose)
Enjoy the tutorial,
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Comments
What custom brushes? Though along the right column of the blog, you can find brush download links. ;-)
Cheers!
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