I don’t do a lot of drawing tutorials, but something about Halloween approaching always takes me back to 5th grade.
I have fond memories of making Halloween pictures and poems in class while anticipating a wonderful night of trick-or-treating.
So, I have been feeling rather child-like lately and wanted to share with you my process for drawing cute whimsical animal faces.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to easily get your proportions right before you even start drawing your features, because nothing is more frustrating than drawing a perfect eye or nose and then finding out it doesn’t work with the rest of the proportions.
Step 1: Start with the face shape
Draw a circle or oval, depending on the face shape you like. This technique will work no matter how long or how squat your circle is.
Just make a rough sketch for now as evenly as possible, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Step 2: Draw a vertical line down the middle
You can use a ruler for this part if you need to, but you can just estimate the rough middle here. Keep the line light because we will be erasing it at the end.
Step 3: Draw a horizontal line across the middle
Now your circle or oval will be in roughly 4 equal parts. This will actually be where you place your eyes!
Most people underestimate how much space the forehead takes up.
Of course you can place the eyes higher if that’s your style, but since we are striving for a “cuteness” factor, a large forehead is universally cute. (Think of babies and Tweety Bird.)
Remember to keep the line light.
Step 4: Split the difference between this line and bottom of the circle
This is where the bottom of the nose will be. You will notice that I misjudged this at first and had to erase my original line.
It’s important to get the spacing correct at this stage before you draw your features. Erase if you need to.
Step 5: Now split this half in half
This is where you will draw the mouth. Make this line wide or narrow, depending on what kind of animal you are drawing.
I’m going to draw a cat so I will keep this line rather small on this particular face.
Now that we have our basic guidelines put in, we can start having some fun with proportions and the personality of our character.
Let me show you how to block in the eyes and get them where you want them first before putting it the details.
Step 6: Decide where you want the eyes to be
If you want the features to look as natural as possible, the space in-between the eyes should be the same width as each eye.
Here is an example of what I mean:
For my cat face though, I want a more exaggerated look: large eyes that are somewhat far apart.
To gauge this, I created two vertical dotted lines that bisect each vertical half in half. This dotted line indicates where a “normal” pupil would go.
Since I want to exaggerate my features, I will make the center of each eye slightly off center in each direction, like this:
I will now draw the shape of each eye around this dot. These will just be roundish shapes for now. The point is to make sure they are the same on both sides.
You can tell it took me a few tries to get it right.
Now make the irises. I want my eyes looking straight ahead, but you can have yours looking off to the side if you like. The only important thing is to make them even with each other.
At this point, you can start the nose and mouth before finishing the eyes if you find that helpful. For this tutorial, I’m going to finish eyes before moving on.
After drawing the outside contour of the eyes, I realized I needed to make the irises bigger:
I drew the pupils, added a highlight, and made little lines in the irises for personality. We will do the other features before doing our fine-tuning.
(I got carried away and started the nose!)
Step 7: Make the nose and mouth
Place the nose so the bottom of it touches your next line. Just draw a circle for now so you can decide how large or small to make it.
For my kitty, I’m going to make this a triangle shape. Thanks to the guidelines you drew, you know that the nose will be centered.
I’m going to add nostrils and draw the part that “connects” the nose to the eyes:
Cats have a unique mouth. I’m going to draw the cheeks and chin as 3 circles first so I can first gauge my sizes and placement.
The circle for the chin went a little below the line I indicated for the mouth, but that’s OK, its just a guideline.
Now I get to do the fun part of designing his cute little mouth! I think I will give him a happy expression. (My circles were a little too dark for me, so I mostly erased them so I could see what I was doing.)
Step 8: Placement of the Ears
Depending on your animal, you next need to decide where to place the ears. If you are doing a human-like face, the ears would be on the side of the head slightly above the eyes.
To make sure my cat’s ears are evenly spaced and sized, I’m going to add some more guidelines to my oval shape. Then I will draw my ears around the lines.
I decide I don’t like these ears. They are looking too mouse-like and they are too close together. Also, I think the face shape needs to be a little more broad.
These are easy fixes, since I don’t have to do anything to the cat’s facial features.
I’m much happier with this version:
Step 9: Fur, Feathers, Fins, and Other Finishing Touches
I’m going to erase all my guidelines before adding my final bits. Then my cat will get whiskers, some tufts of fur, and I will decide what to do about eyebrows.
(Another tip: make sure you are using a pencil that will erase well. I should have used a better one!)
And here is the final drawing!
The best part about this technique is it can be applied to all kinds of faces. You can play around with different proportions and shapes to put your own unique style into your creations.
I hope you enjoyed this drawing tutorial! As always, I am eager to find out what you would like to learn from this site. Please feel free to take my survey or leave your questions and comments below.
I would also love to see the cute animal faces you come up with!
Thanks and happy drawing!
