Desenho Do Messi Fácil

How to draw a simple Messi sketch

Most people mess this up because they try to start with the beard or the hair. Neither is right. The face shape comes first, then the hair sits on top of it like a cap, and the beard frames the jawline afterward. Order matters more than detail here.

desenho do messi fácil passo a passo

Grab a pencil and a sheet of paper. Draw a slightly rounded oval for the head. Not a perfect circle, not an egg—something between the two, wider at the bottom. That lower width is where his jaw sits, and it's what gives the face its structure. If you skip that and just draw a circle, the whole thing looks like a cartoon potato no matter how much shading you add. Sketch two dots for eyes, roughly level with each other. Messi's eyes are small and set relatively close together. Don't make them big. Big eyes make him look like an anime character and nobody wants that. Draw a thin straight line for the nose, maybe a slight curve at the bottom for the tip. His nose isn't prominent, it's just a light line and a soft suggestion.

The eyebrows come next and they're important. Messi's are thick, dark, and fairly straight with only a tiny arch. Draw them as heavy lines above the eyes, leaving a small gap between the brow and the eyelid. That gap is what makes the expression look serious, which is basically his default face. For the beard, this is where most tutorials get lazy and just scribble a blob under the mouth. What you actually want is a short, stubbly beard that follows the jawline. Light diagonal strokes going downward from the cheekbones toward the chin. Denser near the jaw edge, lighter in the center. Leave the upper lip area mostly clear—his mustache is subtle, not a handlebar.

Now the hair. Messi's hair is short on the sides and a bit longer on top, usually slicked back or to the side. Draw a rough hairline along the top of the oval head, then fill in with short overlapping curves suggesting texture. Keep the sides tight against the skull. Nothing fluffy. His hair sits close, which is why the head shape you drew earlier matters so much—if the head is wrong, the hair sits in the wrong place. For the ears, just two small half-circles on either side of the head at eyebrow level. Don't overthink them. Nobody notices missing ears in a sketch.

I remember trying this with a student once and spending twenty minutes trying to get the beard to look natural. We kept making it too symmetrical, which made it look painted on. The fix was to go in with a harder pencil and scratch out small random patches where the stubble would be sparser—left side lighter than the right, slightly more density under the left cheek. Asymmetry makes it look real. Perfect symmetry makes it look like a stencil. If you want it faster, skip the shading entirely. A clean line drawing with just the beard strokes and eyebrow weight gets you 80 percent there. Adding tones takes another ten minutes and honestly doesn't change the recognition factor much. People identify Messi by the beard shape and the heavy brows, not by the shading values.

What to avoid

Don't draw him holding a ball unless you actually know how to draw a ball in perspective. A flat circle with some curved lines works, but if you mess up the ellipse it looks like a lemon. Better to just draw the portrait and call it done. Also don't try to copy a specific photo. Pick a general reference and simplify it. The more you copy pixel for pixel, the more stiff it becomes. Sketching from memory after looking at three or four images for a minute produces a more natural result every time.

The whole thing takes about eight to twelve minutes if you're not rushing. More if you keep erasing and starting over, which happens when you obsess over getting the left eye identical to the right. They don't need to be identical. Faces aren't mirrors.