Two Eyes A Nose And A Mouth

How to Draw a Basic Face Template (Two Eyes A Nose And A Mouth)

Most people approach this the wrong way. They try to draw features directly instead of laying down a structure first. The result is usually lopsided, and you end up spending twenty minutes erasing and redrawing the same eye twice. Here's the actual method that works, the one that took me about three years to stop overcomplicating.

Starting With Two Eyes A Nose And A Mouth

You don't start with an oval and hope for the best. You start with a circle, that's it. A single circle. Draw a vertical center line through it and a horizontal line halfway down. Those are your axes. The horizontal line is where the eyes sit. The vertical line is where the nose and mouth align. Everything else hangs off that skeleton. The circle is the top of the head, not the whole face. That's the first mistake beginners make. The face extends below that circle. Rule of thumb: from the eye line down to the bottom of the chin is roughly the same distance as the top of the circle to the eye line. Maybe a little less. I usually eyeball it at about 85% of the radius. Don't overthink the measurement. Your hand will find it after a few tries.

Now the eyes. Place them on that horizontal axis, spaced roughly one eye-width apart. Yes, the gap between the eyes should equal the width of one eye. That's not a hard rule but it keeps things from looking eccentric. I've seen portfolios ruined by eyes placed too far together or too wide. It's a subtle thing most people can't explain but immediately notice when it's wrong.

The Nose and Mouth Placement

The nose goes between the eye line and the chin line, usually right in the middle vertically. Not exactly middle, slightly above. The mouth sits between the nose bottom and the chin, again slightly above the midpoint. These are guidelines, not constraints. Faces vary. But if you're starting out, these proportions keep everything on the same side of "doesn't look broken." I want to address something nobody tells you about this process. The nose and mouth are deceptively simple. People reduce them to a line and a dot and call it done. But in practice, the nose determines the entire lower-face structure. If you get the nose placement wrong, the mouth ends up floating or buried. I once spent four hours on a character portrait only to realize the nose was sitting two millimeters too low, which threw off the entire lip position and made the subject look like they had a receding chin. Moved the nose up, everything corrected itself instantly. That's the kind of thing you learn through failure, not from any tutorial.

For the mouth, think of it as a line with volume. Even a simple face has an upper lip and lower lip relationship. A flat line looks like a sticker. Add a slight curve — convex for a smile, flat or slightly concave for neutral — and it reads as a face instead of a diagram. I keep it simple: a curved line for the mouth, a pair of soft vertical marks for the nose, nothing more elaborate at this stage.

Common Pitfalls and How to Fix Them

There are a few traps that come up constantly. The first is symmetry obsession. You will not draw perfect symmetry freehand, and you shouldn't try. Slight asymmetry is what makes a face look alive. I deliberately shift one eye two pixels higher sometimes. It reads better than mathematical perfection. Another trap is feature crowding. Beginners shrink the whole face so everything fits on the page, then pack the eyes, nose, and mouth into a small area. It looks cramped and childish unless that's the actual goal. Leave breathing room around the features. The empty space matters as much as the drawn lines.

A third issue is ignoring the jawline. Once you have the circle and the eye line, you need to connect down to a jaw shape. Without it, the face just terminates at the chin point with no structure. Simple V-shape or U-shape depending on the character you're going for. Again, guidelines first, refine later.

When This Approach Doesn't Work

I should be clear about where this method breaks down. It's a foundational exercise, not a complete system for rendering portraits. If you're trying to draw a realistic photograph or a highly detailed digital painting, this template is step one at best. The lighting, skin texture, and anatomical precision required for that level of work demand a completely different study process — value studies, gesture drawing, anatomy references. Two Eyes A Nose And A Mouth is a starting point, not a destination. For stylized work like emojis, iconography, or cartoon characters, this method is actually quite effective and I'd recommend sticking with it. The simplicity is the point there. Trying to apply realistic proportion rules to a 32x32 pixel icon will just give you a muddy mess.

A Practical Workflow

Here's what my actual process looks like now, after all this time. I sketch the circle and axes in light pressure. Then I block in the eye positions with small marks, not full eyes yet. Next I place the nose and mouth lines as simple guides. Only after all four features are positioned do I go back and render them. This order prevents the common problem of finishing the left eye perfectly and then realizing the right eye doesn't belong in the composition you've built. I usually spend about two to three minutes on the initial layout for a standard character face. If it takes longer than five minutes at this stage, I'm overthinking it and should step back. The layout should feel obvious by then. If it doesn't, redraw the circle and start again. There's no shame in it. I've done it dozens of times on professional assignments and it still happens.

The real value here isn't in the final drawing. It's in building the habit of structural thinking before decorative thinking. Most people skip straight to details because it feels more productive. It isn't. Two minutes of proper scaffolding saves twenty minutes of frustration later. That's the only rule that actually matters.