How to Draw a Boy's Face Step by Step (Easy Pencil Portrait)

Drawing a face is one of the most rewarding things a beginner can learn — and one of the most intimidating. This lesson breaks a boy’s pencil portrait into 12 small steps, so you only ever focus on a few lines at a time. You’ll start with simple construction shapes, place the features using easy proportion guides, then build up hair and soft shading. No experience needed: if you can draw an oval and a straight line, you can finish this portrait in about 12 minutes.

Understanding a child’s face

The biggest difference between a child’s face and an adult’s is where the features sit. On an adult, the eyes sit about halfway down the head. On a boy this age the skull is still large compared with the face, so the eyes sit at or slightly below the halfway mark and the whole face is lower and more compact. The chin is small and rounded, the jaw has almost no corner, and the cheeks stay full right down to the jawline.

Every feature is small except the eyes. The nose is short with a rounded tip, and the nostrils barely show. The irises look large because the eye openings haven’t finished growing, so leave a crisp white highlight in each one to keep them bright.

The smile changes the whole face. The cheeks push up, the lower eyelids lift and slightly narrow the eyes, and the corners of the mouth tuck into soft dimples. Because the head is turned slightly, the far eye looks narrower and the near ear is fully visible, level with the space between the brow and the tip of the nose.

Shading is where most boy portraits start to look older. Young skin is smooth, so model the face with soft, broad tone and very few hard lines. Dark creases from the nose to the mouth corners add decades, so show the raised cheeks with a soft patch of shadow instead. Save the darker, defined strokes for the hair, which falls forward over the forehead in loose clumps.