Why your faces look wrong (it's probably the eyes)

If you've ever drawn a face and felt that something was off, without being able to say what, there's a good chance it's this: the eyes are too high.

Where the eyes actually go

Draw an oval for a head. Now draw a line straight across it, exactly halfway between the top of the skull and the bottom of the chin. That's where the eyes sit. Not in the top third. Halfway.

It feels wrong the first time you do it. That's because we think of the face as the part below the hairline, and we forget about the whole dome of the skull above it. Hair makes this worse, because it hides how far up the head really goes.

The rest of the map

Once the eye line is right, the rest falls into place:

• The bottom of the nose sits about halfway between the eye line and the chin.
• The mouth sits about a third of the way down from the nose to the chin.
• The gap between the eyes is about one eye wide.
• The tops of the ears line up with the eyebrows, and the bottoms with the bottom of the nose.

These are averages, not rules. Every real face bends them a little, and those small differences are exactly what makes a likeness. But you need the average first, so you can see how your subject differs from it.

Try it now

Find a photo of someone looking straight at the camera. Hold your pencil against the screen and measure: top of the head to the eyes, then eyes to the chin. You'll find the two are almost always the same.

We spend the first half of Faces on exactly this map, then use it for a full three-quarter portrait. When you send your drawing in afterwards, proportion is the first thing we look at.