How I Got Over My Fear of Drawing Faces
Noses 👃 Eyes 👀 Ears 👂 … ALL these elements have freaked me out for a long time, so much so that I wondered if I should ever even try to draw faces more realistically.
But, I am soooooo glad I persevered!! I’ve truly overcome the fear & actually really enjoy drawing faces now after completing a “100 Faces” drawing challenge (thanks Gabriela Niko for the suggestion!).
Honestly, with art when we’re intimidated by anything, often the best remedy is to spend more time practicing it. With improving artistic skills, it really is so much about putting in the time behind the paint brush or pencil to actually get better.
The “100 Faces Challenge” is pretty simple: draw / paint 100 faces (as quickly as you can).
The premise is that the more faces you draw, the better you’ll get (and it freaking works!!). I also found that the more faces I drew, the less intimidated I got (which actually may have helped my drawing improve more quickly than anything else).
With trying to bust through this challenge as quickly as you can, you also help yourself get lots of bad work out of your system so you can get to the good work you’ve got inside you.
Another way you can do this is by committing yourself to a “100 days challenge” where you aim to do some specific thing for 100 days in order to improve your skills. This could mean “100 days of daily sketching” in your sketchbook, or “100 days of doodling,” or you can even get really specific and set a goal to draw “100 days of eyes.”
Challenges are one of the very best ways I’ve found to get unblocked creatively, rapidly improve my skills, and build helpful habits.
And just to give you some context of how long my “100 Faces Challenge” took me, I drew the first face on 11/13/23 and the final face on 3/7/24. I tried to draw a face each day, but some days I missed and other days I drew several faces all at once. The best mind trick to get me going when I wasn’t feeling psyched about the challenge (because, that for sure happened along the way) was telling myself I could just set the timer for 15 minutes and see how much of a face I could draw in that time.. and then I could be done if I wanted to.
It worked!
Usually that was enough to get me in the groove and make me feel really excited about drawing faces again.
I also think it really helps to have some great resources to learn the fundamentals of drawing faces and the human body. Here are some of my favorite books on the subject:
