How to Draw a Male Eyebrow
Tools I Used
I’m going to use a cheap 2B dollar store pencil, but you can use an HB pencil if you prefer, I’m also using a kneaded eraser, which you can learn how to make here and I’ll use a regular, soft facial tissue for blending.
- 0.5mm 2B Lead Dollarstore Mechanical Pencil (Studio brand)
- Facial Tissue by Scotties
- Prismacolor Kneadable Eraser
Okay, let’s get started!
Decide on Eyebrow Height
Outline the Eyebrow
Once you’ve decided on the eyebrow height, let’s create a few rough guidelines to help us construct the eyebrow outline. These don’t need to be exact.
Navigate a small distance outside the left of the eye, move your pencil straight up and draw a very light tick to mark the spot. This is roughly where your eyebrow will begin.
Navigate to the right corner of the eye, go straight up, add a light tick mark. That will be the point where the eyebrow arches.
Angle outward from the right corner of the eye for the tail of your eyebrow.
Okay, now that we have some guidelines in place, we can outline the shape of our eyebrow:
Use small, light strokes. Don’t worry too much about how they look, we mainly want to focus on the eyebrow shape that we’re making.
Tweak the shape however you’d like before moving on to the next step.
Understanding Eyebrow Hair Direction
Zone 2 is simple, they mostly point down toward the tail of the eyebrow.
In the middle section (between the two zones), they’ll point toward the tail of the eyebrow while following the same path as the boundary line.
Let’s keep that in mind as we draw.
ZONE 1: Draw the Bottom Half of the Eyebrow
Here are some tips before we start actually drawing the eyebrow.
To make the eyebrow look as natural as possible, make sure not to draw the hair in a perfectly straight path and instead stagger them, creating a more random pattern.
The last thing to remember is to keep your pencil sharp at all times to make sure each hair is thin. Flick your pencil up at the end of each stroke to feather it out.
Draw more or less hair depending on how full or sparse you want your eyebrow to appear. Fill any areas that look too bare.
Try to avoid drawing stray hair unruly hair for now because we’re going to blend our drawing slightly later on.
ZONE 2: Draw the Top Half of the Eyebrow
Now that you have some experience drawing the bottom hairs, it’ll be easier to do the ones up top.
I can do that by tapering some of the top and bottom hairs together like in example G. You can also draw them like example H where they cross over each other, but I think too much of that can create a very unnatural-looking crisscross pattern as shown in example I. So it’s up to you and your creative decision and how you want to go about it.
Experiment with tapering or crisscrossing hair to see what you prefer.
If your eyebrow is looking too patterned or stiff, make sure your strokes are slightly curved and relaxed instead of straight and stiff, and remember to flick your pencil up at the end of each stroke.
Blend Your Eyebrow
Next, I’m going to slightly blend the eyebrow to make it look more full and give it some shadow.
If you’re unsure about this step, you can test it on a separate sheet of paper before applying it to your drawing and do it as lightly as you can.
If you’re still unsure, you can instead just lightly shade over your eyebrow, making sure the edges are the lightest and make sure the smoothness of your shading matches the rest of your drawing.
The lighter you press, the less you’ll smudge and vice versa, so do what feels comfortable to you. If you need to do it a few times to blend the entire eyebrow, use a clean spot on the tissue each time.
It doesn’t look pretty right now and it’s not supposed to because we’re going to work the drawing even more. The smudges act as cast shadows and it makes the eyebrow look bushier without having to draw an overwhelming amount of hair.
Let’s take a break from the main body of our eyebrow for now and finally draw some stray hair. The reason I’m drawing the stray hair now is that I want these pencil strokes to appear as sharp/clean as possible.
Draw Stray Eyebrow Hair
You can skip this section if you want your eyebrow to look well-groomed and plucked.
Try to spread them out, so they’re not too close to each other.
Along the top of your eyebrow, draw your pencil strokes especially thin.
Add more stray hair if you want your eyebrow drawing to appear bushy.
By now, you can probably tell that I’ve expanded my eyebrow past the original outline that I made, and that’s completely fine. Because it was meant to be a rough outline – something to help us during the initial drawing phase. So don’t feel like you need to strictly stick to that original shape!
Darken and Sharpen Your Eyebrow Drawing
If you think your eyebrow lacks that 3D feeling, you can darken hairs that face away from the light.
Here’s an example of what I mean using a diagram of the eyebrow from the profile view:
So simply darkening the hair along the shadowy side of your eyebrow, can make it look more 3D.
Okay, so earlier we used a tissue to smudge our eyebrow in order to give it cast shadows and make it look more filled in.
This process made it a little blurry.
We want to give it back some definition. In other words, I’m redrawing some of the hair so that they are more apparent and appear sharper.
Try to keep your pencil very sharp throughout the process.
If you like the hair color/shade of your eyebrow currently, just focus on making the hair look sharper, but if you’re like me and want to darken your eyebrow more to make the drawing POP, you can go ahead and darken them at the same time by pressing harder with your pencil as you draw each stroke.
As I’m doing this, I find myself doing some touch-ups like elongating some hair or even adding some new ones where there appears to be an odd gap. Just do what you think looks good for your specific drawing.
As you go along, step back from your drawing every so often to make sure you like how it’s coming along.
If you need to remove some hair, pinch your kneaded eraser to a fine tip and dab the hair away gently instead of rubbing out an entire area of your drawing.
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And that’s how I draw a bushy, male eyebrow from scratch!
Note: If you’re stuck on any of the steps, you can refer to the video version of this tutorial which contains more detail on each step.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Happy drawing :)

Darlene created RFA In 2013 with the goal of sharing simple yet detailed drawing tutorials with other artists on the world wide web. She is a self taught pencil portrait artist and Youtuber.
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