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Welcome to the next installment of this tutorial series where we assemble a drawing of a face piece by piece. Hopefully you’ve been getting lots of tips and tricks to help you design characters or draw portraits and caricatures. Today we're going to talk about the nose.
In this tutorial you will learn step by step how to draw a nose.
When it comes to drawing the nose, the most difficult aspect is probably the simple fact that it protrudes three dimensionally from the face. In order to simplify this aspect, let's first reduce the nose to a geometric shape like the one here in the picture. It is a pyramid with an elongated top half. This shape will enable us to draw the nose from any angle we want.
With a little practice, you may not even need the pyramid to draw a nose in most cases. But, sometimes you might want to draw a face from a rather unusual angle. In these situations, it can be difficult to figure out how the nose should look. The pyramid is going to help you with that.
In order to ensure that the pyramid is properly formed, we start with a cross at the base, and draw the height from its center (dotted line in the picture). This will give us all the vertices, including the top. All we have to do is connect them.
As you can see, the different angles cause the pyramid to take very different shapes. If you are pretty confident, you can also try drawing the pyramid free-hand. But it tends to be safer to start with the cross at the base.
From here on, the base is the human head.
If you want to learn how to draw a nose, it's best to start with the face front on. Here I’ll be using the headshapes from the previous tutorials, of course.
It is very useful to abstract and reduce - especially with the outlines of the nose. If the face you're drawing is only an inch tall, you probably won't get hung up on the nose bone. So, depending on the image, decide how much detail you want to go into. Sometimes maybe just a few lines are enough to show that there is a nose there. But whenever you're not exactly sure how and where the appropriate lines should go, make an effort to construct it carefully so the nose doesn't end up looking weird.
(5) The nostril is quite narrow from this perspective, or even not visible at all. In order to imply the nostril, we need to draw the lower edge of the nosewing. You'll see from the three variations that you can start the line at the tip of the nose, and also at the corner of the pyramid. And, I’ve chosen to draw them independently – that works too.
(6) Noses create very different silhouettes and they can be very distinctive. You will need exactly seven strokes progressing along the ridge of the pyramid.
(7) And again, we can add or remove a few of the construction lines as we go. Two very effective lines are the "nose-tip-edge-wave" (marked from the right in the picture), and a line hinting at the cheekbone (from the left).
(7) The lines for the nose wing start at the pyramid edge as usual. I opted for a sharp-edged nostril here.
(8) The bridge and the underside of the nose can also be made more prominent or jaunty.
(9) The tip of our nose actually consists of two separate sides. Sometimes this separation of the two sides appears in the form of a crease that runs through the middle of the tip of the nose. Let's try that with this nose, and draw a crease down the center.
(10) The transition from the crease at the nasal tip to the bridge is now V-shaped. In practical terms that means replacing the upper side of our nose tip hexagon with a V shape.
(11) This time we let the "nose-tip-edge-wave" run right through the middle of the nose tip instead of passing underneath it. The wave may also be adjusted a bit to match the angular style.
(12) Add a few more thin lines to support the edges of the bridge and pyramid. On our nose, the center crease goes up to the nasal bone.
(13) Don't be too quick to remove all construction lines. Some of them work quite well in the final line drawing. As you can see, I’ve only made some of them a little lighter – the ones I didn't want to emphasize so much. The twisted, curved hexagon of the nose tip is organic enough that it still works in the final drawing.
Viewed from below, noses look very different. Here’s a formula for drawing noses from below.
(7) The nostrils take the shape of elongated, bulbous O’s.
(8) At the outer side, the nosewing line runs parallel to the nostril. At the top, the line meets the tip of the nose, while at the bottom it overlaps the bump.
(9) And it is dark in the nostril of course. Let’s hold off for the moment on going too much into shading. We’ll stick with the lines right now. You can of course still paint the nostrils dark, but don’t do that before all the outlines and construction lines are already in place.
I hope I’ve been able to help you a bit to conquer the fear of the “dreaded nose". Maybe the nose will even become your new favorite body part to draw. The nose can be a really entertaining form that can be a lot of fun, especially when designing cartoon characters or drawing caricatures. It’s a place you can fully indulge your drawing skills. Just give a try!
See you next time!
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