Tune your drawing setup, then finish the face you've been putting off.
Your mission
Draw A Face You Like
Set up your workspace, then draw a character bust from a reference in timed stages: a five-minute thumbnail, a rough sketch, clean lines, flat colors, and two shading passes. Finish it and give your character a name.
Bonus challenge: Save the file as your template with a ridiculous name, then redraw the same face next week and see how much faster it goes.
Pick a face you'd love to draw, then spend an afternoon giving yourself the setup that makes drawing it feel easy. You'll keep only the brushes you love, put undo and the eraser under your spare hand, and finish with a shaded character portrait that's yours.
There's a particular kind of fun in drawing a face: the moment the eyes line up, the moment flat color turns into a cheekbone. Digital tools can get in the way of that, so this afternoon you tune them until they don't. You'll build a roomy canvas, cut your brush list down to the eight or ten you actually like, and park your favorite tools on buttons you can hit without looking. Then you draw a character bust from a photo in timed stages. Wobbly beginner lines are welcome; the layers let you redo anything.
Drawing a face is the good part. Digging through two hundred brushes and redrawing lines you accidentally wiped out is not. Once your setup knows what you like, the fuss disappears and you get to stay in the part where a portrait slowly turns into a person. That feeling is why you'll want to draw again tomorrow.
Top gear to make this quest great.
Pull it off
Pressing harder gives you a thicker line, so your strokes look drawn instead of traced by a mouse.
Lights your desk and reference photo without bouncing glare back off your screen.
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Pick your face first, because that's the fun you're building toward: a photo, a film still, a character you've always wanted to try. Then pick your software. Krita is free and genuinely good, so start there unless you already pay for Photoshop. Essentials: a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet with a stylus, a free brush pack, and your reference image. Handy extras: a clip-on monitor light bar so your desk is lit without glare on the screen, a second device to hold the reference at eye level, and a reference app like PureRef to keep several photos on screen at once.
Start with the face. Put your reference photo up at eye level, on a second device or in a window beside your canvas, and look at it properly: the jaw, the hair, what you want to exaggerate. Then open your software and make a new square canvas, 3000 by 3000 pixels, at print quality, in the standard screen color mode. Light the desk without hitting the screen.
Here's the part that feels weirdly great: deleting things. Load a brush pack, then keep only the eight to ten brushes you'd actually reach for. A sketch pencil, a clean liner, a soft airbrush, a texture brush, maybe a blender. Sort them into folders named for what they do, and park your top three on your tablet's shortcut keys.
Now your non-drawing hand gets a job. Put the color picker, eraser, transform and undo on keyboard keys sitting close together, so your fingers learn them without looking. Use the tablet's own buttons for moving up and down layers and spinning the canvas. Press each one five times. When you stop thinking about them, you're done.
Quick dress rehearsal on something easy: an apple, a mug, anything. Build five named layers in order: rough sketch faded to a ghostly 20 percent, clean linework, base colors, shadows, highlights. Set the shadow layer to clip onto the base colors so your shading can't bleed outside the shape. Mess it up on purpose, undo, do it again.
The part you came for. Work your face in timed stages: five minutes on a thumbnail the size of a stamp to place the head and shoulders, then a rough sketch, then clean lines over the top, then flat colors, then two shading passes, shadows first and highlights last. When the highlights land, the face stops being lines and becomes someone.
Sit back and look at your character. Give them a name out loud, then make a copy of the file, delete the drawing from it and keep the empty named layers, the clipping setup and your color swatches. That's your template, ready for the next face. Drop your shortcut map into the file notes so future-you remembers.
You drew a face you chose, shaded it, and named the person looking back at you. Post the portrait beside your reference and let people guess which brush did the eyes.
You bring the curiosity. We've found the tools.
Pull it off
Pressing harder gives you a thicker line, so your strokes look drawn instead of traced by a mouse.
Your canvas, layers, brushes and shortcuts all live here, and Krita does the whole job free.
Professional illustration software with layer support and custom brushes (Krita is free and open-source, Photoshop is $10-20/month)
what to look for & our pick →You need a starting set of brushes to trim down to your eight or ten keepers.
Lights your desk and reference photo without bouncing glare back off your screen.
Asymmetric monitor lamp that lights your workspace without screen glare
Get on Amazon · $26.49 — Clip-On Monitor Light Barwhat to look for & our pick →RELATED GEAR GUIDE
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