How To Draw A Nose

How does one go about this? It sometimes seems like a insurmountable task. However, if you break down a nose in to it's most basic shapes, you will find that a impossible problem suddenly becomes as easy as one, two, three.

The first problem many people have with noses is that they find that however hard they try, the nose continues to look as if a 5 year old has drawn it.

Fortunately this is easily fixed. All you need to do is look at some real noses. I will help by showing you some noses that I have drawn from images and life.

The first nose is facing us. This is something many people have difficulties with because of there childhood nose drawing style.

As you see, the nose can be broken up into basic shapes, just as anything else can. At the moment it looks kind of like a lolly with a cone on it.

Remember where these basic shapes are then begin shading.

I have erased the majority of the shape outlines, and replaced them with shading on the side away from the light source.

To finish your nose, and really make it pop out of the picture darken the shading in specific areas.

Under the nose and on the right side of the wall of the nose, are the places that have the deepest shadow. Of course this all depends on the light source. We will discus light sources in more depth next in another article.

So now that you have basic knowledge of the face on nose, lets move on to something that you may all find easier. The side on nose.

Here is a basic starting point.

You may find this similar to your childhood drawings, but we have some more detail to add.

Here I have added the nostril and the wing of the nose. The wing cuts into the line of the face slightly, so when you draw it, make sure that your nose is not floating on top of the face, but looks as though it is firmly attached.

The last image I am going to show you is a three quarter nose. This is definitely the hardest and even I sometimes have difficulty drawing it with out reference. So I don't want you to expect to get this one straight away. In fact, you will probably need to draw from reference until you get it.

It helped me to show the angle by drawing a sketchy face around this nose. Often when drawing it, it will initially look to big. But persevere and when you finish the rest of the face it will often fit.

So that's all for now on noses. If you need anymore help, feel free to contact me at either my email address, simpleartlessons@gmail.com or by leaving a comment.

Looking forward to our next article together,
cheers guys,
meg