The many ways to draw a face 👦🏿👧🏽🧒🏻
Studying kids books to learn about illustrating faces
Hi everyone!
I’m starting with a little a bit of housekeeping today. Between illoguild Lives and Art Gyms, there has been a lot of new and exciting content coming your way! But I also feel like I’m spamming you. I usually try to keep it to one email a week so I’m not flooding your inbox. It’s been tricky with all the new stuff, so here’s the updated schedule for the newsletters:
First of the month: Monthly newsletter with updates on the shop and projects
1st Wednesday: Monthly Question
2nd Wednesday: Children’s Book Study (on the Art Gym topic)
3rd Wednesday: Children’s Book Illustration Tips
4th Wednesday: Surface Pattern Insights
Bonus posts: illoguild Live Replay + Art Gym Replay
And you know what, maybe no one thinks about this schedule besides me, but now you have it in case you want to know what to expect. Also, I’m excited to now be dedicating a week to talking about surface pattern design.
Ok, now let’s get into the good stuff…
Illustrating Faces for Children’s Books
If you’re here, you’ve likely illustrated many, many faces. Adult faces, kid faces, animal faces, and even faces on objects! In this post, we’ll mostly be looking at human faces, but I have included a couple bonus animals, because animal features are really fun to draw.
No matter your own style, there is a lot to learn by studying the work of various illustrators. I’ve more or less organized the faces below from simplified to more naturalistic, but there are so many books and so many faces that it was really hard to choose just a few for this post. There are likely infinite ways to draw a face!
I was curious to explore this wide variety of faces that exist in the children’s market, so let’s take a look at some some illustrations…