how to draw beards with a drawing style that's not realistic? Any tips etc. would be super appreciated

Hello, there and I agree that beards can be very hard to make fitting into a character’s looks, especially if you aren’t used to drawing them! For this, I have three major pieces of advice for figuring out beards with one’s personal style.

 1.) If you are wanting to make the beard stick out as a key feature:

For this, I recommend making the beard do one of the following things.

• Give it more detail than the rest of the character. By giving it more details to a character’s face compared to other parts of the body, it will call attention towards the beard overall compared to anything else because of the number of details to it as everything else is not as heavily worked on. Most people do this when drawing hair by placing a lot of lines, colors, texture in it to make the character’s hair pop as a noticeable trait.
• Give a slight style change from the character using on the beard. With both having a similar style between the overall piece and beard, you must alter the beard in a way that it becomes more pronounced (this can be done with line thickness changed, perhaps making the color of the beard/opposite of images tone. So say if the image had a cool tone around the beard, you could try making it a warmer tone to help pop it or make a color bolder/duller than others around it.)
• Make the beard noticeable compared to other features. By having the beard as a dominant feature, other features will get lost thus making it a key feature to a person. (A good example of this is Travis McElroy. In fanart and fan animations we are always able to tell which one he is because his beard is a key feature to his face and if you look at the art, you can see how a lot of artists will actually make the beard taking up almost all of his face.)

A good example of these is looking at these images from ‘Cartooning The Head & Figure’ by Jack Hamm. You can see how they use simple style and alter the beards to look slightly different, use more details, to making the beard a noticeable trait on the character’s face.

2.) If you are wanting the beard to be of the same style and blend in more without being such a key feature:

• For this one, it will come down to your own style choice. When you get to the beard, continue drawing it as you would with the rest of the face without hyper-focusing on it as you do so. By focusing on how drawing a beard you might accidentally focus too much on making it look like a beard and completely changing your style.

Another good thing to remember is an implication of a beard is just as good as a fully drawn one!

*A few lines, texture, and even color are useful to draw a beard without drawing the beard. These images (‘Cartooning The Head & Figure’ by Jack Hamm) below show similar styled beards and ones implied but not fully drawn. 

3.) The one advice we all know and hate to hear at times. Just practice drawing beards on the character you want one on! Try your style, try other styles, try colors only, try texture without lines, explore your media at your disposal!

For digital, take a layer and duplicate a headshot everywhere, then take another layer and begin trying to draw on it. Go wild!

For traditional, draw your character over and over onto a sheet (or create a premade one digitally very light then print it out, once satisfied with drawing on it, ink it properly up to see the image) then draw beards on them. A tip for those not wanting to waste time redrawing a character’s face is to use tracing paper or a clear sheet of plastic. Overlay it onto the image and go about filling the tracing paper/plastic with beards using a pencil/pen (I highly recommend using a thin dry erase marker on the plastic or a marker you will be able to clean off once you’re done. That way you can refuse the plastic again for another time!)

Don’t be afraid to look around and get inspired by books, magazines, comics and more!

-Mod RyR

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