welcome to angelthesis ... ... an ever growing fansite on the manga art style. Here, you will find clear and easy to follow drawing tutorials along with a reference library to help you with difficult poses, expressions, costumes, and more.
The face is usually the first thing most people look at (unless you specifically make the focus somewhere else), so it's really important to get it right. Just like for the body, guidelines are also essential for drawing faces, since they need to be as symmetrical as possible to look normal.
Although it's true that the manga style exaggerates many features (eg. eyes, nose, mouth), the overal structure is actually the same or else it won't look like much of a face to begin with, so the same guidelines can be used for a normal and a manga face.
The first step is to delineate the area the face will take up on your paper with a circle.
Then, mark the level of the eyes with a curved horizontal line (curved because the surface of the face is curved) and the middle of the face with a vertical line that I will refer to as the "central line" from now on. The central line can be curved or straight depending on the orientation of the face, just like how a line drawn on a ball will look straight if seen straight on, and curved if the ball is rotated to a side.
Add another line above the horizontal line by a reasonable distance. The space between the two lines will be the height of the eyes. People often draw one eye bigger than the other by mistake, so these two lines will help you keep them around the same size.
To make sure you distance the eyes properly, draw two short vertical lines to box the region for each eye. If you just draw the eyes directly, they will often have different widths or be crooked, and you won't realize until you've finished everything.
The spacing between the eyes is a hard one to estimate and comes with lots of practice. If you put them too far apart, the face will look bloated. Eyes that are too close together make the face look like it's dented inwards. For most humans, the distance between the eyes is exactly the length of his or her own eye, and the distance between the outer edge of the eye and the edge of the face is also the same length. Of course, these proportions change if the face is turned.
Then, along the central line, draw a short line to mark the bottom of the nose. The distance between the top of your eyes and the bottom of your nose is the length of your thumb. A short distance below, draw a line for the mouth.
The ears are about two eyes tall and the top lines up with the top of the eyes.
