How to Draw Fantastic Faces From Anywhere

When I drove my daughter and her friend to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, mainly so they could have fun on the rides, and I could “relax.” I instead spent an hour hunched over a sketchbook like a gargoyle with a Kuretake brush pen.

You saw the urban sketch I completed while looking at the boardwalk and the Haunted Castle in a previous post. Well, here’s how I created a page of faces during that same trip and how you can do it, too.

My back hurts a little. I have a weird tan line on one hand. I regret nothing.

If you’re new here, what I was doing (between squinting at strangers and eating sand) was something I call Cartoon Journaling: filling a sketchbook with either pages of scribbled comics inspired by true life stories, urban sketches, caricatures, or a page stuffed with as many imagined faces as possible, packing them together like a very chaotic yearbook photo.

No planning. No pencil underdrawing. Just ink, instinct, and the vague memory of every face I’ve ever seen. Oh, and doing my best to ignore the fact that all the people around can walk by and look at what I’m drawing.

Here’s the good news: you already have everything you need to do this. Here are the three principles I keep coming back to every time I open that sketchbook.

I like the nose. Even though my middle school students always say they’re difficult to draw. Think of it as a combination of shapes.

A nose is a triangle with a circle on each side for nostrils. Eyes are almonds, teardrops, or two dots having an argument. When I’m inventing a face from scratch, I pick one dominant feature first; it doesn’t have to be a nose. Starting with a jaw, a mouth, a face shape, and then letting everything else respond to it while you’re thinking about contrast and visual interest.

A massive chin demands small, squinting eyes. A giant forehead wants tiny features clustered at the bottom. The face starts solving itself.

The biggest mistake beginners make is just drawing “a smile” or “a frown.”

Plenty of people were all around me at the beach, but I didn’t draw those exact people. Seeing them helped inspire my imagination and reminded me of how different everyone can look, but also of all the possible emotions.

A guy was laughing after missing a frisbee catch; another was squinting, irritated by the bright sunlight; and a child was upset they couldn’t get ice cream.

When I created a kid’s face in the close-up above, those raised brows, the pursed little lips, the wide-open eyes, I wasn’t thinking about anatomy. I was thinking: what does skeptical-but-curious look like on a seven-year-old? Emotion first, lines second.

One face on a page is a portrait. Fifteen faces on a page is a cartoon journal.

The magic of packing faces together is that contrast does the work for you: a round face next to an angular one, a laughing mouth beside a scowling one, big hair crowding out a bald head. Also, think about which way the head is facing. One is looking at you, and another is looking to the side.

You don’t need every face to be great. You need the collection to be interesting.

That’s also my personal excuse for the faces that look slightly unhinged. They’re not mistakes, they’re contrast.

The Santa Cruz page took about an hour: two different beach locations, a lot of glancing at beachgoers, and plenty of sand in my pockets.

The result is a “finished” cartoon journal page in ink pen.

Is it perfect? Nope.

But I filled it up, put in the time, and did the best I could.

You don’t need to be at the beach. You don’t need perfect faces. You just need a pen, a page, and permission to let your brain make stuff up.

Open the sketchbook. Draw one face. Then draw a weirder one next to it.

If you missed the previous urban sketching post, you can catch up right here: