For this community drawing challenge, I followed Episode 8: How to Place Light & Shadow on the Face.

Although I have visual references of light cast on the human face, I realized that, in those references, the light was only coming from the right side and from above. I didn’t have a reference where the light was coming from all sides. So I decided to create my own visual reference.

Just like in the tutorial, I segmented the parts of the face and duplicated them onto a 5x5 grid. I simplified the process to better suit my style of drawing heads. I applied a base color to all the faces and linked a gray fill layer, create a clipping mask and using the transparent color to represent the light.

Although it may seem difficult to know where to place shadows and lights on the human face due to the eye sockets and the “undulations” of the cheeks, segmenting each part makes it all easier to understand.

(I only created a reference for the head from the front, since I think the side and back views are “easier”).

I think my reference could be better, but from now on I’ll use it as a guide for my future drawings, and if you’d like, you can save it so it’ll be useful to you too :)