How to Draw an Anime Face: Part One

Hello there, and welcome to my guide to drawing a cartoon/anime style face. This is part one of my series, and contains the following:

Basic Shape
Guidelines
Making The face
Facial Features.

Step One: The Basic Shape.
The human head can be broken down to a very simple shape. The Circle. When drawing a face or head, that is your best place to start.

By starting with the circle, you are giving yourself a good plain to work from. Now its time to add guidelines.

Step Two: Guide Yourself.
Guidelines are placed on the circle, to let you know where things will be placed, and let you judge how even they are. Though for this tutorial, do not worry yourself over that, use them as they are, just guides.

This is the more popular way of doing Guidelines, which you can just call Crossing the face. You add a line going across the circle half way down, and one going down the circle, half way through. Let the line going down go passed the edge of the circle a good amount, you will use that to help you on the next step.

Step Three: The CHIN!
With the chin, in anime, it comes to a point at the bottom. Though most artists rather round it off more, so do it however you like. For this tutorial i will just make it a pointy chin.

The line going down the center helps place the point of the chin very well. Now let us move on to a simple thing, but for some reason gets on artists nerves a lot.

Step Four: THE NOSE KNOWS
I know this seems simple, and shouldn't need its own step, but placing the nose is actually important. It can act as a point of reference to the rest of the features like the eyes, and especially the ears.

The nose generally goes at the bottom of the circle, and is around where the line going down meets. It curves out slightly away from center, but then sharply curves back in. Though many professional artists, such as ones in popular Manga, sometimes put a simple line showing where the holes in your nose are. This is all accepted, and is up to you to decide. NEXT

Step Five: Behind Blue EYES.
Eyes can be very tricky, and can take some years to get really good at, but don't worry, the eyes don't have to be that detailed, they can be as simple as what i am about to do.

First, start off by putting two lines. The top one is slightly longer then the bottom one. They are positioned near the bottom corners of the circle, but don't touch the sides. The bottom line does touch the under part of the circle.

After you have done that to both sides, you then place a small oval in the eye. In some anime the oval touches the top line, but in others, and the way i am doing it, the oval touches the bottom. Repeat that on the other side.

You now have eyes. Now on to our last step.

Step Six: Mouth...
The mouth is not hard at all, and if you have the nose in the right spot, then it is even easier to place the mouth.

The mouth goes just under the nose. There is no real exact position, but place it and take a step back to see if you like it, if not, simply erase and try again. There is no wrong way to do it.

That concludes Part One of this tutorial, stick around for Part Two coming soon. ^__^

Have a wonderful day!