How to draw a nose from the front: length, wings and bridge

From the front, the nose points straight at you, so you can't see its length the way you can from the side. You have to place it with a few marks: how far down the base sits, how high the wings reach and where the two light lines of the bridge run. This guide measures those marks on ten drawn heads.

The heads come from the free head rotation reference. On each pencil plate at 0 degrees we took four things:

• The eye line, through the inner corners of the eyes, the points of the openings next to the nose. We read them on gridded crops at five times zoom and checked each against the dark rows of the lid lines.
• The base of the nose, the line under the tip at the middle of the nose, from our nostril measurements.
• The width, wing to wing, from our face width measurements.
• The outline of each wing, traced by a script from its widest point upward, row by row, along strokes darker than a light grey.

Every pick was drawn back on its plate and checked by eye. To make the numbers work at any size, we give them as shares of the nose's width or of its length from the eye line to the base. All ten heads are bald and drawn in one style, so the ranges describe these drawings, not people's noses.

The nose is about as long as it is wide, or a little longer

From the eye line to the base, the nose ranges from about seven eighths as long as it is wide to a quarter longer than wide, and the heads fall into two groups with a gap between them:

• Six heads are about a sixth to a quarter longer than wide: gaunt-planes, minimal, deep-folds, soft-planes, square-jaw and heavy-brow. The minimal head, at about a sixth longer, is the closest to the other group once the read error is counted.
• Four are about square or wider: hard-plane, heavy-jaw and full-lips all close to square, and high-cheekbones about seven eighths as long as wide. Three of these four have the widest noses of the ten.

So hang a box from the eye line, as wide as the nose, and put the base of the nose at its bottom edge. Make it about a sixth to a quarter taller than wide for a nose of ordinary width, and about square for a broad one. We use the nose's width as the unit because it is the first thing you set; the length against the gap between the eyes, a little over one to almost one and a half gaps, spreads about as much.

The wings take the lower two fifths

Traced up from its widest point, the outline of each wing runs up and curves in toward the nose before it fades out. On all twenty wings it reaches about a third to a little under half the nose's length above the base, about two fifths on a typical wing. That top is where a light line fades. The darker part of the stroke stops lower, about a quarter of the length up on a typical wing, and the light line carries on to about two fifths. Counting even fainter strokes, sixteen wings move up by 4 percent of the length or less and four reach about half the length.

Each wing reaches its full width a little above the nostrils and keeps it down to about their middle; the hard-plane head is the exception, widest just below them. Below that the wing outline turns in under the nostril.

So start the wing a little under halfway up the nose with a light line, darken it from about a quarter of the way up, swell it out to the full width by the nostrils, and turn it in at the base.

The bridge is two light lines

Both lines run down from between the eyes, faint and often broken. A fifth of the way down the nose, both lines can be read on seven heads, a little under a third to two fifths of the nose's width apart, about a third on a typical head. On the other three, one side fades out at that height.

Lower down they spread. Six tenths of the way down, on the eight heads where both can be told apart from the wings, the two strokes beside the ball of the tip are about two fifths to half the width apart. On some heads these are the bridge lines bending out; on others they are separate short strokes. We read them as the sides of the ball of the tip, which sits between the wings and is narrower than them.

On eight heads both bridge lines are light and broken. The square-jaw head is the clear exception: the line on the right of the plate is one long dark stroke. On the minimal and heavy-brow heads the right line is a little darker near the top. The nose guide follows these lines as the head turns.

How to draw a nose from the front, step by step

1. Draw the eye line through the inner corners of the eyes.
2. Set the width. Drop a light line from each inner corner; the wings go on those lines or a little outside them, so the nose is 2 to 22 percent wider than the gap between the eyes.
3. Hang a box from the eye line, as wide as the nose and a sixth to a quarter taller, or about square for a broad nose, and draw the base of the nose along its bottom.
4. Start each wing lightly about four tenths of the way up from the base, darken it from about a quarter of the way up and swell it to its full width by the nostrils.
5. Draw the bridge as two light lines about a third of the width apart, spreading to about two fifths to half the width beside the ball of the tip.
6. Put the nostrils in inside the bottom of the box: their middle sits above the base line by about a seventh of the nose's width, because the tip hangs below them. How to draw nostrils sizes and spaces them.

These are the ranges of ten drawings, so check each mark against your own reference.

Common mistakes

• A nose that stops short. On these heads the base sits about one nose width below the eye line, usually a little more.
• Wings that start at the nostrils. Their outlines reach about two fifths of the way up the nose.
• A bridge as wide as the base. The two lines start about a third of the width apart.
• Two dark bridge lines. Most of these heads keep both light, and none darkens both.

Related guides

How to draw a nose from the side measures the same noses in profile, and how to draw a nose in three-quarter view follows them halfway round. How to draw the head from the front places the nose on the rest of the face, and face proportions checks the brow to the base of the nose on four heads.

A short exercise

Draw the deep-folds head and the high-cheekbones head from the front, with the same distance between the eyes. Before any detail, draw the eye line and the box for each nose: about a quarter taller than wide for the deep-folds head, a little wider than tall for the high-cheekbones head. Then add the wings, the bridge and the nostrils, and lay each drawing beside its plate.

The deep-folds head is Study Pack 05 and the high-cheekbones head is Study Pack 09, both in Volume 2.

This guide is one step in how to draw the head at any angle, which puts all the head guides in order.