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Drawing faces is one of the most natural things for us to do, and they're very easy for people to see that they're faces because animals are evolved especially to be able to see faces- people mistakenly think this is just a human thing but it's clearly something that happened much earlier. We're so good at seeing faces we see them where they don't exist (paradolia). So drawing them for comics should be super simple, should it? Well it is and it isn't.
You can always get better at things and drawing faces is something that has a vast range of difficulties. They can be as simple as a circle with minimal features, or more advanced attempts with everything clearly laid out with shading and a perfect expression, and everything in between… How I do it is something in between: Sort of realistic but still pretty cartoony.
The easiest way to do more realistic faces is to understand the rules: The eyes go roughly halfway on the face. The eyebrows go up above and create a shaded line, the mouth and bottom of the nose divide the bottom of the face into thirds. And that's you average face. Drawing different ethnic traits though is very tricky without being racist! So practise those a lot before coming out with anything publicly.
An important thing to know is the myth of symmetry. The myth is that perfectly symmetrical faces are more beautiful, this idea was put forward a few years ago by a plastic surgeon of all people and many ate it up. The reality though that very symmetrical faces can actually give you an “uncanny valley” feel so that the face can start to look unnatural and alien. It's VERY easy to make perfectly symmetrical faces in art, now moreso than ever. You simply draw one side of a face, copy, paste, flip and join them. It's a good technique to use to quickly draw a portrait but a smart move is to rough up either side and remove some of that symmetry subtly. Beauty is about being average (not too far outside norms) and the cultural standards of that particular point in time, symmetry is a small and basic part of that, NOT the prime component: a good clue as to why this is the case is the fact that humans don't all look the same, people from different ethnicities have very different facial traits and beauty standards, and we can very easily see that beauty standards throughout time varied massively and constantly. Saying that beauty is based on symmetry is like saying cars are based on wheels- in one sense yes but in all other senses no.
How are you with drawing faces? What's your secret? Can you draw people of different ethnicities without being racist? What style of faces do you draw?
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Quackcast 701 - Faces come out in the rain...
Ozoneocean at 12:00AM, Aug. 20, 2024
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JohnCelestri at 1:11PM, Aug. 25, 2024
Being a cartoonist, my style evolved using geometric shapes to create my faces. I found that combining that along with using basic percentages of grey tones enables me to create a world were the audience can't be sure what ethnicity a character is.
Ozoneocean at 8:53PM, Aug. 20, 2024
My method for drawing the faces of ethnicities other than your own without being racist: you approach it in a more realistic way and make those differences subtle. Because the reality is that what we think are huge differences aren't really that big. Our brains exaggerate them because that's how they work... We have instinctive mechanisms for grouping people as part of our "tribe" and not part of it. Its likely most animals do that, not just humans.
bravo1102 at 5:07AM, Aug. 20, 2024
It actually bothered me that my first comics lacked diversity. Attack of the Robofemoids I stretched things a little to add Asian characters. I found out after it was done that I could have added black Africans and Cubans. I started to make an effort to add other characters. Now with the stories happening off of earth there are no limits.
PaulEberhardt at 3:38AM, Aug. 20, 2024
I've thought about attacking it from a different angle, too, for instance by making a running gag of drawing Asians in a more manga-like style than the rest, but quickly concluded it would draw away the focus on them way too much, similar to marcorossi's concerns.
PaulEberhardt at 3:37AM, Aug. 20, 2024
In cartoons, drawing different ethnicities without being racist is almost impossible, because different people draw different lines at what is racist. People have to get that you're caricaturing what people look like in general, to send up everyone equally, and that's hard to get across even if all the characters appeared equally often and prominently, which they can't. I think I have some chance of getting away with it in my style, as while it's cartoony I never really go over the top with the exaggerations and I make a point of giving all my characters different facial features anyway. I did get away portraying Santa Claus as Turkish, for instance, using some stereotypes as part of the gag, which tells me it's very much about the way you sell it. But then, I've been reluctant to do that very often and Turkish Santa is pretty much the outer limit of how far I'm prepared to push it.
bravo1102 at 1:45AM, Aug. 20, 2024
I pay much closer attention to my figures than most of you would think. Many are repaints and customized. You'd be surprised just how generic a human face without pigment is, and add pigment and it's suddenly obvious the ethnicity.
bravo1102 at 1:41AM, Aug. 20, 2024
Just remember there is more variation within a population than there is between populations. So facial features are really no determination of skin color except as an average. Not a specific. Several of my ethnic figures have what some would call "Caucasian " features but with variation on skin color and eyebrows they look quite natural for POC. A tiny swipe of paint for the fold can make Western eyes Asian. Conversely making the eyes more round can make as Asian figure look more Western.
marcorossi at 1:15AM, Aug. 20, 2024
Part of the problem of drawing different ethnicities is this: in a cartoonish style, only the "important" traits of a face are represented. So if I draw a standard "manga" face it is impossible to know its ethnicity and this will make it the standard, baseline ethnicity. In some manga westerners are drawn with big noses, and this marks them as "whites" but also "non standard", blacks also are drawn with some african traits and this makes them "non standard". On the other hand if I draw most westerners with standard manga faces and asians with slanted eyes I'm marking asians as "non standard". So the problem isn't that the drawings are racist in strict sense, but that by marking ethnic traits it makes one ethnicity as the "normal one" (the one without markers), and the other ethnicities are subject to othering.
marcorossi at 1:10AM, Aug. 20, 2024
One of the reasons I started drawing digitally is that I tried to draw black people in BW, it sucked and I ended up drawing a blackface, and thus I started drawing digitally so I can use colors and just change the color of the skin. My current comic is a sci-fi thing in the future and so I'm trying to draw people of various ethnicities, while not remarking this in terms of plot (basically people are finally race-blind). I do this by simply using 3 base colors for the skin: pink, pale brown and yellow. On the "yellow" characters I generally try to place some slanted eyes.