Sketching of the human face is an art that is used not only as a hobby but has its use in professional avenues such as police investigations. For those who are experts in sketching faces, it is fairly easy to recreate faces from memory or with the help of others who have seen an offender by asking them to recall the features.

But for those who are not that good with the pencil, computers have made it easy to sketch human faces by allowing drag and drop operation with a variety of facial features.

Let's explore a few such tools. The first one is called Ultimate Flash Face, which is free and runs online in the browser window — nothing to download and no registration is required. Simply visit flashface.ctapt.de and wait for the Flash application to load. Once done, the sketch-making interface comes up with parts of face listed in the centre, such as head, hair, eyebrows, glasses, nose, moustaches, mouth, jaws and beard. Selecting each item results in corresponding templates appearing in the side box on the left. For example, for the hair, there are 67 different types of hair icons appearing.

Drag an icon over to the right pane named 'Face Area'. Similarly, going through different face parts and dragging their templates over to 'Face Area' can create a number of different faces. What makes Flash Face different from other tools is that it's not simply drag and drop-based application — it allows all the dropped props to be manipulated through scale control and opacity control. Scale control allows horizontal and vertical stretching of features. Applying this over a hair type actually results in changing the shape of skull thus allowing a particular hairstyle to be sketched for different head shapes. Applying similar scaling on a set of eyebrows (32 are available!) makes them come closer or go far apart along with changing the thickness without changing the angular curve of the eyebrows too much. This feature allows a lot of flexibility and fine tuning of sketches. These sketches can be saved online and are then made available for everyone to see.

Another Flash-based tool that can be downloaded for offline use as well is called The Art of Crime Detection. A fun way to learn about police sketching as it starts with an introduction of how the brain understands shapes and figures, and then proceeds with different scenarios showing a felon in each. The user has to recreate the felon's face using an imaginary gadget called PDArtist. That's where the actual sketching starts as it has got dropdown menus for selecting facial features that are placed in the drawing area to recreate the face.

Once done, simply press the 'Submit' button. If the sketched face comes close to that of the actual felon's, it will be accepted, otherwise a 'no one recognised this person in neighbourhood' notification appears.

The third tool available is Sketch Studio. Though not free, but the trial version has got an interesting functionality — it records the mouse strokes used to create a sketch and can play them back like a movie. This means, if a particular sketch line is not correct in a sequence, it can be redone by replying the sketching activity and stopping the drawing movie at the required place. Sketch Studio doesn't have templates of human faces but it has got drawing lessons — good for anyone looking to have a very basic level understanding of drawing with programs like MS Paint.

The first lesson is available under 'Help' menu, under the name 'Create your first drawing'.

Then there are specific tutorials that show how to create a clownfish, jellyfish or butterfly. This option can be selected from the first toolbar button named 'Select Lesson'. It results in a pencil icon with 'Play' and 'Stop' buttons. Press the 'Play' button and see the outline of the selected drawing made. After each step, 'Play' and 'Stop' buttons appear again. This allows one to go back and repeat a particular step.

Computer-assisted sketching is great fun and a good pastime. It can in fact assist those trying to hone their paper sketching skills as templates can be made over the computer and printed for practice. Keep learning!