Guys, I might have discovered why all the faces you draw look bad! Also, I bet only Kasey gets the title. Don't worry, mine still look bad too (just less weird than yours because I have no life and drawing is the only thing I do...I mean I practice). it's difficult for us to draw faces because when we do, we always end up drawing the eyes too far up! This makes the forehead look too small, and overall gives our image a weird almost Neanderthal-like appearance.
Just about everyone is predisposed to draw faces in this way so don't worry my little novice artists!
Psychology researchers have observed that everyone does it. Even people studying in the visual arts have difficulty breaking this habit. That is why your professors will give you a B- in your first semester portrait painting class. That got Claus-Christian Carbon, who studies visual perception, wondering why this is so. After all, we humans are gregarious little monkeys that are highly attuned to reading each other’s faces. Often times drawings of human faces are the easiest thing to find an artistic flaw in because people recognize it so well. That means there is no way of hiding your blatant mistakes, you stupid hipster art-students!
Carbon
conducted an experiment to get to find out why we draw eyes up too high. He
asked some people to draw a face by memory, another group to look at a face for
30 seconds then draw it, and a final group of lucky ducks were able to reference a photograph while
drawing. Everyone, even the group that was copying from a photo, drew the eyes
too high up. Even more interesting was that when Carbon requested researchers
who study face recognition for a living also drew the eyes up to high. What failures! This led Carbon to come up with his hypothesis pasted bellow for your viewing pleasure:
“Head-as-box
hypothesis: People don’t take the convexity (roundness) of the forehead into
account, so the top of the head is assumed to be lower than it really is.”
After
further testing, Carbon found his hypothesis to be valid. People have a really hard time perceiving roundness, especially when drawing!
I found this
very interesting because portraits (of moody and vaguely gothic men) are what I draw the most, and I defiantly
struggle with placement of the eyes. I suppose I know why now. 
Next time I draw a face I’ll make sure to try and place my eyes correctly! Oh, about the face looking like a Neanderthal? That's purely coincidental. OR IS IT! No I'm just yanking your chain, Doc Carbon says it really is a coincidence. Even though Neanderthals are dead (because our distant ancestors the Cro-Magnons murdered them all) they shall live on in our poor artwork forever! Well, hopefully I can squeeze in one more blog before the school year ends. Until then, may you forever be as happy as Morrissey (who I get to see in concert June 4) holding a lovely little typewriter
Article was linked above. If you happened to miss it, I implore you to scroll your way back up to read it!
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