How to Draw a Simple Face (That Actually Looks Good)

Almost everyone who says they can't draw is measuring themselves against a portrait. Correct proportions, shading, individual eyelashes. Against that target you fail, of course — and you fail before the first line goes down.

Except think about the faces you actually like. Emoji. Comic strips. The little face somebody once drew you on a sticky note. None of those are realistic and you don't hold it against them. They're simple faces drawn like the person wasn't worried about it, and that part is learnable — it's mostly just knowing what order to do things in.

So here's the order I use. Nine strokes, one job each, picture at every step.

First, forget likeness

A realistic face succeeds when it looks like one specific person. A simple face succeeds when it communicates something: friendly, grumpy, sleepy. That's a much lower bar, and you clear it with about four decisions instead of a thousand.

Cartoonists spend whole careers taking lines away rather than adding them. Charlie Brown's whole emotional range runs on two dots and a curve. You want the fewest strokes that still land, and honestly nine is on the generous side.

The nine strokes

Draw them slowly, in this order:

• 1. Head. One closed shape. A circle looks friendly, an egg looks calm, a square looks tough — pick before you start, not after.
• 2–3. Eyes. Two dots, not circles. Halfway down the head, about one eye-width apart.
• 4. Nose. A tiny L, a dot, or nothing at all. When you're unsure, nothing.
• 5. Mouth. One line. This one curve does most of the work.
• 6–7. Brows. Two short dashes. Their angle does most of the rest.
• 8. Hair. One connected mass, like a hat. Never individual strands.
• 9. One detail. Glasses, a freckle, an ear, a chipped tooth. Exactly one, and it's the thing that makes the face yours.

Mistake one: the eyes are too high

Nearly everyone does this. You put the eyes in the top third of the head because that's where they feel like they go. They don't go there. Real eyes sit halfway down, and so do cartoon ones.

The annoying part is you can't spot it yourself. The face looks off, so you assume your lines are bad, and you redraw the mouth eleven times while the actual problem sits above it, untouched.

Spacing has a rule too. Leave roughly one eye-width between them. Close together looks intense, far apart looks like a fish. Both are useful on purpose — neither is useful by accident.

Mistake two: overworking the mouth

Draw a mouth as lips, with teeth, and a simple face turns unsettling fast. Use one line.

And if the face still feels flat after all that, leave the mouth alone. Go up to the brows instead.

One more thing about the brows, because it's easy to get wrong without noticing. Brows go above the eyes, not on them, and the gap matters as much as the angle: a dash sitting right on top of an eye reads as a heavy lid rather than an eyebrow, which is a completely different expression and usually not the one you wanted. Leave a clear space roughly the height of the eye itself. If you're not sure, go higher than feels right — high brows look surprised, and surprised is at least something, whereas brows fused to the eyes just look like a mistake.

Practising without grinding

Speed drills don't help here. Draw one face with the recipe, then look at it for ten seconds and try to name what it's feeling. If you can't name it, the face is telling you which stroke to change.

Then do one more and change exactly one thing. Head shape, or how far apart the eyes are, or the mouth curve. Two or three in a sitting is plenty. One is fine too, if you actually look at it afterwards.

Erase what you don't want. But don't sand every line down to nothing either: a hand-drawn face is allowed to look hand-drawn, and past a certain point you're not improving it, you're just wearing it down. The test is whether the expression lands, not whether the lines are clean.

Where the first one should go

Paper's fine. It's just that a face on paper stops existing the second you close the notebook.

Tap an empty face on our open wall instead. Draw, press done, and it hangs there with everyone else's. Tap any face afterwards and it redraws itself stroke by stroke, in the order it was made.

At some point it stops being practice, too. You draw one slowly, for somebody specific, and what they get isn't really the picture.